Rising above her Olympic highs and lows helped FOX61 anchor Margaux Farrell forge a successful path after her swimming career

Margaux Farrell was getting on the bus to go back to Olympic Village in London in 2012 when the alarm from the metal detector sounded.

“The guard said, ‘Do you have a medal in your bag?’” the FOX61 morning anchor remembered. “I said, ‘Yes.’ He asked what sport, I said, ‘Swimming’ and he said, ‘Can I see it?’ That was my first real vision, ‘Oh, my gosh, I have an Olympic medal in my back pack.’”

Farrell, who broke state records at Amity High School, swam for Indiana University and made the 2012 Olympics to swim in the 4x200 relay for France as a dual citizen, taking home the bronze.

Her memories are complicated. She swam her winning leg in excruciating pain, the extent of which she largely kept to herself, and sometimes laments that she didn’t reach her full potential. But pushing through the pain and pressure of the Olympics tempered her for the post-athletic life she’s chosen.

“It made me very driven,” Farrell said. “My parents raised me that way, I was always goal-oriented and structured, which is the life of a high-level athlete. Now, as I get older I realize that I’m more capable of things than I thought. There’s a similar nature in television, it’s a competitive business, get it first, go for it, move up the ratings. It’s put me in a position where I know that life, I don’t necessarily want it as much, ‘oh, my gosh, this is exactly what I used to do,’ but at other times I realize that’s why I do well in it.”

Farrell dreamed of going to the Olympics to represent France because her mother, Sylvie, missed out in 1976 by one hundredth of a second. “And she was significantly better than I was,” Farrell said.

During her time at Amity High, she won State Open titles in the 50- and 100-yard freestyle as a junior and senior and had a record-setting State Open time in the 100 in 2006 as a senior. At Indiana, where she set four school records, the possibility of competing for France became real by her sophomore year. It was then that she began feeling pain in her back that moved down her leg.

“When I was training (for the Olympics) with my college team, it was always being questioned,” she said. “People always thought I was faking something. I would try to explain, ‘Why would I fake something for the Olympics?’ Of all the meets in my life, that’s not going to be the one I would fake something for.”

Her back and leg pain worsened as she competed in international competitions and Olympic trials for France in 2012. She made the team as an alternate, one of six French swimmers to compete in the 4x200 relay. After graduating from Indiana with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism, she traveled to London for the Olympics where she spent much of her time seeing doctors, getting massages, electrical stimulation. An MRI revealed a cyst on her spine, but that did not seem to be the source of her pain.

“You name the kind of treatment, I got it,” she said. “Five days prior [to swimming], I got nine little injections in my spine. … From where I came from, Indiana, it was a culture of not being sick, not being hurt, noting was ever wrong. I knew I was in a ton of pain, which scared me, but I didn’t want to get taken off the relay.”

When she stepped up on the block the morning of Aug. 1, 2012, Farrell pushed the pain and any anxiety out of her mind.

“I remember feeling more nervous leading up to my race than the day of it,” she said. “My high school club coach [Jen Lyman] said she thought I looked nervous behind the blocks. I don’t remember being nervous, I’d kind of blacked it out as an athlete at that level for that type of competition. But sometimes people can pick up on your body language.”

Nevertheless, she swam her second leg of the relay within 0.9 seconds of her best time. Her time in the preliminary heat positioned France to win the bronze, finishing behind the U.S. and Australia. Because she swam only in prelims, she did not get to take the podium but was given her medal afterward.

“I always had this guilt and pressure on me, and I still feel it from time to time, where I would think to myself, ‘What if I could’ve been so much faster?’ I never reached my full potential,” Farrell said. “Or I would say, ‘I didn’t deserve this medal because I only swam in the morning.’ I would make up all these excuses, so it was a lot physically, a lot mentally. Will I swim? Do my coaches believe me? Swimming a relay is far more stressful in the Olympics, my only fear was I can’t let the country of France down. It took a toll on my mentally for a while.”

After the London Games, Farrell was referred to the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, where the source of pain was identified as a torn labrum in her hip. Corrected with surgery, Farrell resumed swimming with the Trojan Swim Club in California while working toward her master’s degree in journalism at USC In January 2015, Farrell retiring from swimming on her own terms. She said she felt pangs watching some of her former college and Olympic teammates swimming at the Rio Games in 2016 but “the comeback ship has sailed.”.

Nine years later, Farrell, 30, itravels around the state with FOX61 doing “bucket list” stories with Keith McGilvery, but she’ll be known for life as an Olympic medalist.

Her bronze medal sat for a time with random items on her parents dining room table. Then it sat in its box atop a stack of books in her apartment with a snow globe on top of it. More recently, Farrell said, her boyfriend wanted to see it and she found him wearing it around his neck as she took the medal out for a story she’s working on this week.

“Now, I realize how few people have gone to the Olympics,” Farrell said. “How few people have experienced that, reached that level, and I’m a part of this very small percentage of people in the world. I appreciate that more now than I did then when I was younger. I didn’t know the world without swimming. I only knew swimming. Now that I’m out of the bubble, I realize I need to give myself more credit, believe in myself more in certain things because I was capable of doing something that’s kind of a needle in a haystack.”

Dom Amore can be reached at damore@courant.com.