Hazel Ouwehand, the butterfly princess. Hazel the Commonwealth bronze medallist. Hazel the number cruncher. Hazel the social media sensation. Hazel the Weet-Bix card trailblazer.
She may have many labels, some of them newly earned. But the New Zealand sprint swimmer swears she won’t be changing who she is or what she does in and out of the pool – even after winning her first major international medal in Glasgow, and becoming one of the first athletes beyond rugby to have their face on a collectible card inside a cereal box.
“I’m still the same old me. I’d like to think I’m a humble person … others might disagree,” laughs Ouwehand, who at 26 has established a bit of a cult following.
She insists she’ll “keep posting random stuff” on Instagram, where her reels on the life of an elite swimmer have now drawn about 80,000 followers.
She’ll continue turning up to work as a senior accountant for Auckland firm Baker Tilly Staples Rodway; after arriving home this week from more than two months overseas – and two major swim meets – she’s already back at her desk.
After a well-earned break from the pool, she’ll carry on training with her focus moving to her second Olympic campaign, the 2028 Games in Los Angeles. “And I’ll keep hanging out with the same friends I had before,” she adds.
Of course, there are some things that should change for Ouwehand. Funding, for one.
Without high-performance funding, she’s relied on the income from her corporate job to get herself onto the starting blocks. A $30,000 Yvette Williams Scholarship helped her train at altitude in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, where she won bronze in the 50m butterfly.
If that medal and two top 10 placings at last week’s Pan Pacific championships are enough to earn her a Swimming New Zealand grant, to be decided in October, Ouwehand will stay in her day job.
“If I were funded, and receiving enough to live off, which you know is every athlete’s dream, I would still work,” says the girl from Te Pahū in the Waikato. “I’m not the type of person who can wake up early in the morning to train, go home and sit around all day on their phone. I’d get horrendously bored.”
She’s been working at Baker Tilly Staples Rodway since 2021, and it has supported her dreams in the pool and in accountancy.
“I love my job. I love what I do. I love numbers – it’s very odd,” she says. “When people find out what I do for work, they’re like, ‘But you’re a swimmer, wouldn’t you do a job in sport?’ And I’m like, ‘No, I absolutely have enough sport in my life’. Swimming is where I exercise my body, work is where I exercise my mind.”
Ouwehand doesn’t hide the challenges of her daily grind. Most days, she wakes at 5am, heads to the pool at 5.30am, and won’t return home until after 7pm. “But it’s doable. Working is part of achieving my dreams and my goals,” she says.
Throughout her swimming career, Ouwehand has also dealt with debilitating endometriosis, undergoing surgery in 2021. For now, she says, the pain is at a level she can live and compete with.
Many top swimmers end their competitive careers in their mid-to-late 20s, but she won’t consider retirement yet.
“In terms of my sport, I’m not young any more. The vast majority of female swimmers get to their late 20s and tend to drop off. But I’m still here and as long as I’m still enjoying swimming, I’ll keep going,” she says.
“I’ve still got my inner child, of course, and she comes out to shine every day.”
The first New Zealand woman to break 26s in the 50m butterfly, Ouwehand wants the chance to compete in her favoured event at an Olympics. Los Angeles will be the first time the sprints in butterfly, backstroke and breaststroke will feature on the Olympic programme.
She swam the 100m butterfly at the 2024 Paris Games but didn’t make it past her heat on the first day of competition. She wants to race both distances in LA – and automatically secure places with top six finishes at next year’s World Cup events.
Winning bronze in Glasgow was validation not only for a focused year’s work with her coach, David Lyles, but also the last two decades of effort for Ouwehand.
“It made everything more real, more tangible,” she says. “This was my first big international medal – I’ve won medals at Australian champs but it’s not the same.
“It wasn’t the colour I wanted – obviously everyone wants gold, right? But to stand on that podium and have a year’s worth of focused work realised was like no other feeling. And I’ll never have that feeling again in the sense there’s nothing like the first time.”
Finding her family in a sea of faces in the Tollcross International Swimming Centre was “indescribable”.
“I was doing such a good job at holding it together on the podium,” Ouwehand says. “I saw my dad, who was sitting apart from my mum and two sisters, and waved to him. But by the time I got down to my mum and sisters, I just lost it. Having a hug and being able to share that moment with them was so special. I just wish it could have lasted longer, but nothing good lasts forever.”
There was little time to bask in the accomplishment before Ouwehand was back in the pool the following morning for the 100m butterfly heats. She made the final, where she finished eighth.
She hung the bronze by her bedside: “It wasn’t until I was done competing that I sat on my bed and wore it again.”
It was a hugely successful Games for the Aquablacks, with all 13 swimmers making a final. Erika Fairweather became the first New Zealand woman to win five medals (three silvers, two bronzes), with Lewis Clareburt winning two golds and a silver.
As soon as the Games wrapped up, the team flew across the Atlantic for the Pan Pacific championships in Los Angeles. But Ouwehand admits she struggled with the mental side of getting herself up again for a major meet a fortnight later.
“For several days in the pool I physically felt like crap. But the hardest part was the mentality,” she says.
“You focus an entire year for something and when it’s done, your body just goes ‘ahhhh’. But then you have to tell it, ‘No, no, no, no – we’ve still got a bit more to go’. So it’s just finding that extra level and locking in that high performance mindset again.
“I was away from New Zealand longer than anyone else on the team – eight-and-a-half weeks – and I’d never been away from home for that long, and I missed it so much.”
Ouwehand found the competition a lot tougher in California, with swimmers from America and Asia on the starting blocks. She was “fairly pleased” with her results: eighth in the 100m butterfly final, and first in the B final of the 50m butterfly in 26.13s (her time in the final in Glasgow was 25.76s). “I’ll take that,” she says.
Her public profile has been boosted in the past month – she’s gaining around 10 new followers a day on her personal Instagram account, despite a “social media slump” while she was competing as well as accidentally leaving her phone in Glasgow when she flew to California.
And now she’s experiencing a new kind of fame, with Kiwi kids collecting her face in the latest Weet-Bix Stat Attack card deck.
For the first time in almost 20 years, athletes other than All Blacks or Black Ferns appear on the cards. Fourteen of the 26 athletes featured are women – Dame Lisa Carrington, Dame Valerie Adams, Melie Kerr, Karin Burger and Anna Grimaldi among them.
“I’m really excited to be on a card, and be a collectible,” Ouwehand says. “I already eat a lot of Weet-Bix anyway, but I might have to up my daily intake for the next few months.
“It’s a privilege to be involved in this campaign. I remember collecting the cards as a kid, but they were always rugby players. So it’s really cool to show kids that if you’re not into playing rugby, maybe you’ll be good at another sport – like athletics or swimming. There are so many different sports out there now that Kiwi kids can try and have fun.”
Although she’s back at the office, Ouwehand is on an enforced break from the pool – her first since January 2025.
“Back then I took three weeks off, and as soon as I popped back in the pool, I knew I wasn’t ready to come back. I still carried on training and burnt out again in less than a month,” she says. “So I’m going to take a minimum of three weeks off. But whether it stretches from three weeks to three months, that doesn’t bother me, frankly.”
Hazel the multitasker has earned a rest.
