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The ability to swim fast - she was, for a time, the fastest woman ever over all the freestyle distances - was a gift Shane Gould couldn't cope with. A year after winning five medals at the Munich Olympics, the Sydney-born schoolgirl was lost. For Gould the joy of swimming was the sensation of gliding through water and the process of trying to do it better; but most people seemed fixated on results. Feeling depersonalized by celebrity and curious about life beyond the pool, she lacked the will to churn out laps.

So it was that, aged 16, one of the most talented swimmers of all time walked away from the sport, rarely to be seen by the public for 25 years. Comebacks seldom work. Typically, the retired athlete, deprived of the thrills of his prime, returns full of hope, only to be promptly reminded why he left: his body doesn't work like it used to. What Gould is doing amounts to a comeback: on April 1, aged 47, she'll crouch on the blocks beside teen-agers to contest the 50-m butterfly at the Australian Olympic Team Swimming Trials in Sydney. But it's a comeback of a type not known in Australian sport. "It's a test," she says - of what she's learnt lately about her mind and body. "A test - and a demonstration."

There's little glory on offer, probably none. As the 64th fastest of 69 qualifiers, Gould will need to outdo herself to progress past the heats. And no matter how well she swims she won't be going to Athens - the 50-m 'fly isn't an Olympic event. Australians will watch her, admire her perhaps, and she may inspire some over-40s to get active again. But the future of Australian swimming rests with rivals like Melbourne-based Danni Miatke, whose best time for the 50-m 'fly is 3 sec. faster than Gould's, and who's racing in five other events. Miatke is 16, Gould's age when she quit. She might lack a smidgin of the older woman's talent, but is confident, far-sighted (and looked after) in ways Gould never was. Their stories highlight how swimming has changed since Gould's salad days.

The view, prevalent in Australia until the '90s, that female swimmers were past it by their late teens has sunk like a brick. "I don't care how good a kid is or what traumas she's faced," says Don Talbot, Australia's former head coach and now a consultant to Australian Swimming, "keep her in the water until she's 21 and she'll excel." By that age, Talbot argues, most women have overcome issues of body image and social awkwardness, and are ready to hit a peak that can last five years or more. But Gould was long gone by 21. She may have appeared happy in Munich; in fact, she felt crushed by expectation. "Anyone with any imagination ... might have seen that a 15-year-old girl from whom so much was expected could have used (some) help," she wrote in her 1999 autobiography, Tumble Turns - a massage perhaps, tips on diet, the occasional joke. Alas, well-meaning but unskilled Australian officials couldn't read the signs. Meanwhile, Gould's parents bore the financial costs of raising a champion.

The promising Miatke has it so much better. "I'm overwhelmed by the amount of support I receive," says the Darwin-raised redhead, who moved to Melbourne at 14 to link with a new coach, Rohan Taylor. Miatke's on a scholarship at Carey Baptist Grammar School, lives with 17 other children at a nearby boarding house and looks adults she's just met square in the eye. Funded by the Victorian Institute of Sport, she has free, year-round access to masseurs, physiotherapists and psychologists. Though separated by distance from her family, she seldom wants for reassurance. Sometimes this comes from coach Taylor, who's determined not to rush her. "The plan is to prepare her for a career in the sport," he says. Still, the first six months in Melbourne were hard: she longed for home and the training felt like drudgery. But an ultimatum from Taylor and her mother - Give it everything or give it up - awakened her to her love for swimming and racing. Had Gould come through such a system, who knows what she might have achieved? Stripped to her costume at Sydney's Cronulla Beach recently, she revealed a taut and tanned body that has changed little since she was 15.

But her lined face tells of toil and distress. Three years after Munich she married an older man, Neil Innes, a fundamentalist Christian contemptuous of competitive sport. They drove across the continent to Western Australia, where they bought land and practiced subsistence farming while raising four children.

For two decades she barely swam - just the odd dip with her kids in a lake or public pool - while her Olympic medals were consigned to a box in her wardrobe. Racked by bouts of restlessness and depression, she came to believe that swimming was part of who she was and denying it was dimming her spirit. She received, she says, no sympathy from her husband - "He never understood my motivations, my essence." After their marriage ended in 1997, it wasn't long before the pool lured her back. And by clocking a personal-best 30.32 sec. for the 50-m 'fly at last year's U.S. Masters championships in New Jersey, she qualified for the Olympic trials.

She's 19 years older than the next oldest racer (event favorite Petria Thomas), but there's nothing old-fashioned about her training. "For months now," she says, "I've been learning as much as I can about swimming and swimming fast." No matter the evidence to the contrary, her old ways of stroking were flawed, she says.

They hurt her body and trapped her swimming in a "speed zone, a groove. I was like a singer stuck in one octave." She wants people to understand that the alterations she's made are more than technical: "It's a whole mindset, a whole paradigm that's changed."

Guiding Gould's re-education is her new partner, 55-year-old American coach Milt Nelms. "She's a physical genius in the water," Nelms says. He's seen many of the greats close up, but no one's impressed him more than she has for beauty of movement and speed of learning. Though her freestyle times are about 6% slower than they were in the '70s, she is "without question" a more efficient swimmer, Nelms says, with improvement still in her.

Though he chooses his words carefully - and advises Gould to do the same - Nelms seems to regard a lot of what passes for state-of-the art training as outmoded, with an overemphasis on quantity. His own views on this topic aren't easy to grasp. (Both he and Gould use terms - "functional equilibrium," "sensory integration," "chemical energy system" - that don't cast much light.) But for simplicity's sake they might be boiled down to the idea that gifted swimmers know instinctively how to move in water and a lot of instruction only interferes with the process. "You've heard of horse whisperers? Milt is like a swimming whisperer," says Tracey Menzies, coach of Ian Thorpe. "He observes and manipulates, and the results come quickly."

Listening to Nelms and Gould, you begin to wonder if they see no limits. Nelms laughs: of course there are limits, and yes, they're imposed by age. But is Gould finally content? She is distant, then suddenly alert, almost defiant. "People like happy endings," she says. "I have periods of incredible frustration and confusion, and periods of great satisfaction. This is not a linear journey where I've arrived."

While Gould explores Nelms' insights, Miatke trusts in more conventional training - 10 pool sessions a week, between 80 and 120 laps per session, plus gym and abdominal workouts. She's an independent soul: she grew up without idols and, though she loves to read, eschews autobiographies "because I want to be myself, not mirroring others." Perhaps, she says, she'll qualify for Athens; more likely her first Games will be in Beijing and her best in 2012. "I want to go as far as I can," she says, but the slog is an end in itself: "It makes you tough ... it will make me a better person than I would have been otherwise." For all the change that's occurred in swimming in the three decades that separate these two very different women, they're linked by a common quest - a search for identity - to which the water is merely a backdrop.

• Daniel Williams
• Two very different journeys lead two passionate Australian swimmers to Sydney's Olympic Pool