Shane Gould in Sydney on Wednesday

Sydney: Australia’s Shane Gould will contest the 50 m butterfly at the Australian national championships Thursday, 32 years after winning three individual gold medals at the Munich Olympics.

“It’s not really a comeback,” Gould, 47, said Wednesday in an interview at Caringbah pool in Sydney’s southern suburbs. “It’s more of a journey, an adventure for me, a personal challenge to explore swimming again,” added the mother of four.

“I just love it. It’s just a very interesting thing to learn about brain development, about retraining the brain because that’s what I’ve had to do, to over-ride old muscle memory and retrain my brain. “So just like Christopher Reeve, ‘Superman’ is having to train his brain and access other parts of his brain to get his muscles to work, I’m doing a very similar thing in learning to swim in a different way.”

Actor Reeve, who played the super hero in three films, was paralysed in a horse riding accident in 1995. Gould qualified for the 50 m butterfly after winning gold at last year’s US Masters in 30.32 seconds.

While the national championships are also selection trials for the Athens Games in August, the women’s 50m butterfly is not an Olympic event.

Gould became a national heroine by winning five medals, including three individual golds, at the 1972 Munich Games.

The 15-year-old won the 200 m and 400 m freestyle and 200 m individual medley in world record times. Two years later she had quit swimming and taken comfort in God, surfing and an alternative lifestyle on a farm near the coastal Western Australian town of Margaret River.

Gould said she was inspired to return to swimming by Masters athletes. “Just seeing other people my own age and older, in their seventies and eighties, just daily going to do their workout, enjoying the water, enjoying being outdoors with their friends,” Gould said.

“I’m a very curious person, and very interested in new ideas and I’ve come across some new ideas in swimming and not only swimming at the elite level but teaching swimming or remedial swimming or fitness swimming,” Gould said.

“I like to try things before I teach them and before I share them in some ways I’m a human guinea pig and so I’m testing it out at a fairly high level.”