Madeline Groves was born in
Brisbane,
Queensland, on 25 May 1995. She has two brothers. She attended Wilston State Primary School and
St Peters Lutheran College. In 2014, she was an inaugural recipient of the
Georgina Hope Rinehart Swimming Excellence Scholarship to study for a
Bachelor of Social Science degree at
Bond University on Queensland's
Gold Coast. Groves learned to swim when she was a baby, As a junior, she won the 100 m and 200 m
butterfly and 4 × 100 m
medley events, and silver in the 50 m butterfly, at the
2010 Oceania Swimming Championships in
Samoa. At the Junior Pan Pacific championships in
Hawaii that year she came second in the 200 m butterfly and fifth in the 100 m butterfly events. where she was second in the 100 m butterfly. At the
2015 World Aquatics Championships in
Kazan, Russia, she was 9th in the
200m butterfly and 11th in the
100 m butterfly events. in which the Australian team went on to win. In April 2016, Groves was selected to represent Australia in the 100 m and 200 m butterfly, and 4 × 200 m freestyle relay events at the
2016 Summer Olympics in
Rio de Janeiro. This was her first Olympics. but qualified fastest for the final of the
200 m butterfly. She won silver, finishing just three-hundredths of a second behind Spain's
Mireia Belmonte. In June 2021, she announced she was withdrawing from the Australian trials for the
2020 Summer Olympics in protest over "misogynistic perverts in sport and their bootlickers," stating that her decision was "the culmination of years of witnessing and 'benefitting' from a culture that relies on people ignoring bad behaviour to thrive." In December 2020, she had made a post on social media revealing that she had made a complaint to Swimming Australia after a coach made an inappropriate comment towards her. ==See also==