Madeline Groves (born 25 May 1995) is an Australian competitive swimmer. She was the Australian national champion in the 200 m butterfly event in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016. At the 2014 Commonwealth Games she was a bronze medallist in the 200 m butterfly event, and swam in the heats for the gold medal-winning Australian freestyle relay team. She 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.
Groves learned to swim when she was a baby,[2] and started competitive swimming when she was twelve years old.[5] 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.[2] She took 2011 off, but returned to competitive swimming after she finished high school.[3] She is coached by Michael Bohl at St Peter's Western, where Mitch Larkin, Bronte Barratt, Madison Wilson and Grant Irvine also train.[3] She has known Bohl since 2008,[5] and he has been her coach since 2012. She has been nicknamed "Mad Dog" and "Machine Gun".[3]
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.[10] This was her first Olympics.[3] She did not qualify for the semi-final in the 100 m butterfly,[11] 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.[12]
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."[13] 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.[14]