Swimming is an individual sport: It's just you standing on the block. No one can swim the race for you. But outside the pool, swimmers are everything but alone. They have their teammates all around them and their families cheering them on from the sidelines. Even for the best swimmers in the world, it’s hard to be successful without support. Three-time Olympic Champion Ranomi Kromowidjojo, for example, shows how a loving and supporting family can lead to greatness.

“Swimmers have a need for speed”, Bronte Campbell tells us, while we are talking to the Olympic and World Champion about what motivates a swimmer. “You always want to be faster, it’s never enough. You want to push the boundaries to the next level”, she says. This inner “need for speed” keeps her striving for more. The medals and titles that sometimes come with it are secondary for the 23-year-old Australian. “Definitely getting faster is more important to me.”

Benjamin Bilski is a busy man. His life consists of 17 to 18 hours of work per day, business meetings all around the world and the responsibility of having a company with more than 150 employees. Normally, interviews with him have a five-to-ten-minute slot in his schedule, but today he takes his time. We want to talk to him about something that formed his character like nothing else: swimming.

Chad le Clos is back where he belongs: on top of the podium. The South African star swimmer is collecting medals again at the Commonwealth Games in Australia. Something he doesn’t take for granted since his bitter defeat at the 2016 Olympic Games. The key moment in overcoming his demons from Rio happened less than one year ago.

It's this magical lane in the middle of the pool, reserved only for the fastest. It's where stars are born, medals are won and tears are shed, when some outsider on another lane hits the wall first. But what's it like to live your life in the fast lane? And how do you get there?