Beneath the Surface
Page 3
Luke’s had a hard time over the years trying to get me to be financially responsible. The first time he suggested I think about reining in my spending, almost a decade ago, I was outraged. We had a very long, very spirited conversation about it while driving from Brisbane to the Gold Coast to watch the Indy 500. He’s happy to wear threadbare T-shirts, I like buying nice things. I felt like I’d earned the money, so it was my right to spend it how I wanted. He was pointing out that it might be in my best interests to think a bit more long term. I have come around over the years, and not just because it’s a smart thing to do. Luke and I are a team, which means I can’t just run my own game. I have to respect his feelings too.
With my income drying up, it feels like we have less and less oxygen to live on. Luke knows what I have coming in, and can see the balance between our income and our outgoings flipping the wrong way. When he asks me to cut $300 out of the weekly expenses, I do it. When we have to cut another $100 a week, I do it. I trust him and I know he knows what he’s doing, but nothing about this is fun. We’re doing our best to live on a budget and make our savings stretch as far as possible. We never go out, we never buy anything, we’re just trying to stay on top of the bills. But it slowly becomes clear that even a strict budget won’t save us. Luke is looking into the near future and things are dark. We’ve come to the point where something has got to give.
We’re sitting at the dining room table one night, in the home we’d built from scratch just eighteen months earlier, when Luke tells me we can’t afford the mortgage repayments anymore. He doesn’t want to alarm me, because we are asset-rich, but our cashflow is a serious problem. He takes a breath, sighs heavily. ‘We have two options,’ he says. We have a large chunk of money invested in the equities fund that Luke manages. We can sell out of the fund and clear our mortgage, which will take the financial pressure off, but if we do this we’ll destabilise the business that Luke has been building up for years—the business we’ve been building, really, because as Luke says, my support has allowed him to pursue it. It’s just not a great look for the manager of a fund to sell their shares, no matter what the circumstances, let alone for a fund that has been built on alignment with its clients. The other option we have is to sell the house.
My first instinct is to sell out of the fund. It’s heartbreaking to have to think about selling our home, and the solid bricks and mortar around us feels so much more substantial than the abstract value of an equities fund. But the decision is about more than what I want. It’s about supporting Luke the way he has always supported me. We’ve been together since we were kids. He was integral to my success as a swimmer, and I feel like it’s my duty to back him now and give his business the opportunity to grow. I know that Luke feels like he’s in a tough position, because we have been relying on my income for so long, and he’s asking me to do something I don’t want to do. It costs more to run the equity fund than we make from it—paying lawyers and accountants and covering admin costs is a drain on our finances right now—but Luke is committed to the long-term plan he’s developed for the business, and I’m committed to him. It feels utterly surreal to be so cornered financially that we have to give up our home, but that’s just how it is. We have to keep our heads above water.
Our decision to sell comes just as my run on Dancing with the Stars is about to start—my bargain-basement television debut in sequins and flesh-coloured tights. It’s a bit surreal with everything that’s going on at home, but the TV show still seems like the best option for me career-wise, because right now it’s the only option. It might not pay well but I hope it will lead to something that does.
I’m trying to reinvent myself, figure out exactly what I’m going to, but I feel great pressure to earn money because I’ve always been the primary breadwinner. I’m excited about the show, but it’s also a life raft, something to cling to while the pressure at home begins to spiral. We’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, living week to week with all this uncertainty, trying to stay positive, but I feel like I’m letting us both down. I decide to try to control what I can control, which right now is ballroom dancing.
I have roughly six weeks of training in Brisbane before the show starts broadcasting, and, being my usual competitive self, I throw everything I’ve got at it. I spend six to ten hours a day in a studio with my partner, Dannial Gosper, trying to master the basics of ballroom. Dancing with the Stars is my job and I’m determined to take it seriously. I know I have some serious opponents, too, a few type-A personalities and at least one fellow Olympian, who are all training just as hard as me.
Once shooting begins, I fly down to Melbourne every Sunday evening and I’m there until Tuesday, which leaves Luke pretty much by himself to get the house ready for sale. He’s juggling the bills and trying to keep the wolves at bay while I’m learning the paso doble. It’s ridiculous but it’s an income, however small, so he’s not complaining. He’s just not having much fun right now. We’ve had to borrow money from his brother and his parents to tide us over until the house is sold, and the pressure is wearing us both pretty thin. At home, there is anger, frustration and an uneasy kind of resignation, but at least I get to escape several days a week and disappear into a world of tassels and fan kicks.
Swimming has given me a keen awareness of my body, so I can feel when I’m not doing something right and I can take feedback and transform it into the right moves. But I’m not used to doing so much physical activity on my feet, and the impact of working on the ground instead of in the water is exhausting. I have to guard my wrist, which is still not right and twinges when I’m pulled in certain directions. Some of the lifts are really challenging because I have to support my full weight in my arms and wrists, but I push through the pain.
I’m nervous about injuring myself again, but actually I’m fine. It’s my dance partner who is injured, about four weeks into shooting, in a fairly devastating way. I land awkwardly on Danny’s leg after a lift and his knee cops the full weight, tearing with the impact. He ends up having to have a full knee reconstruction, which is heartbreaking for a professional dancer. Meanwhile, they pair me up with another dancer, Carmelo Pizzino, because the television audience is waiting. It’s pretty awful just to move on from Danny but I’m on task—I have a job to do. The show must go on and so must I.
The experience of being on television as a minor celebrity is bizarre, and I suddenly find myself uncomfortable in front of the camera, in a way that I never was when I was an Olympic swimmer. In week one I’m struck by horrible cottonmouth during my post-dance interview. I get better at the banter as the show goes on, but I never stop feeling uncomfortable. For me, the talking is a lot worse than the dancing; I’m good when my whole body is working.
Physically, I like my chances in this televised dance-off. I suspect a few of the bigger celebs in the competition are guaranteed to make the finals: they’re the biggest names, they’re undoubtedly getting paid the most money, and they’re the people the audience most wants to see. But it turns out I’m actually a pretty good dancer, for an amateur, so I reckon I’ll do okay. Eliminations start in the second week of shooting and people start dropping like flies, but I hang in there with a smile on my face, twirling through the cha-cha-cha, the tango, the samba and the jive, a fairly inglorious Lindy hop and a killer rumba. I make it all the way to the end of the regular competition, to week ten of the broadcast, before I am finally eliminated.
I’m disappointed that I don’t get to compete in the Grand Finale, but I feel like week ten is still pretty impressive. The top three—Tina Arena, Rhiannon Fish from Home and Away and ‘grand illusionist’ Cosentino—are all professional performers who have been singing and dancing their whole lives. I came fourth, so technically I’m the best of the ‘normal’ people, the non-professional performers. Forever a competitor.
The day of the auction comes up in the middle of all this. Luke and I sit on the kerb outside, staring at our beautiful home and feeling utterly miserable. I suddenly register
how much weight he has lost. He must have dropped 8 kilograms in three months, and he was pretty lean to begin with. It really hits me then how large a burden he’s been carrying while I’ve been off dancing, and I feel angry with myself for letting us fall into this hole. I wish I had been more cautious with the money I made when I was swimming. Maybe we shouldn’t have built a house at all. Maybe we shouldn’t have built such a nice one. There are just so many things we could have done differently to avoid this shitty day. Then I remember that at least we have an asset to sell—it could be far worse. And at least the pressure will be off and we can start over. We’re still in our twenties, after all.
We sit inside listening while the auctioneer runs the bidding, and the number climbs up and up, over our expectations. It’s bittersweet because we really love this place, a beautiful, airy, modernist house built over a sloping yard in Seven Hills. He calls for final bids and then it’s done, and we make our peace with moving on. But then, in the weeks following the auction, the weirdest thing happens—something our real-estate agent has never seen before. The guy who bought our house gets cold feet and pulls out of the sale, forfeiting his deposit, so we end up still owning our house and having some money in the bank, like it just dropped out of the sky. It’s not a huge amount but it’s enough to repay Luke’s family and buy us some time to get back on our feet.
In addition to carrying me and Luke financially, being on Dancing with the Stars keeps me ‘relevant’, as my manager likes to say. It’s awful but it’s true. This is why celebrities go to red-carpet events and launches—to stay in the public eye. It increases your value as a media personality. I hate those high-fashion events. Some people love getting glammed up and going to parties, but it’s just not my personality, and networking makes me uncomfortable. Dancing with the Stars is a great physical challenge and I can focus fully on that, but in the back of my mind I know that there’s another purpose to this project, which is to get offered more work in the media.
I don’t actually want to be a professional media personality, but I have no qualifications. What else am I supposed to do? I start working on my social media profile, trying to build up an audience, but I actually don’t have much of a clue what I’m doing. My manager has all these rules for what and when I should post, but to me it feels inauthentic. I’m just trying to be myself, on TV and online, and hoping like hell it works out for the best.
I am in limbo about who I am and what I want to achieve in the next phase of my life and career—that’s the real problem. I have no sense of direction; I’m just waiting to see what happens. This is difficult for anyone, but my entire adult life to this point has followed a very organised path, which was perfect for me. Right now I’m staring out into the fog, feeling uneasy.
2002
‘Do or do not. There is no try.’
—Yoda
I knew that I wanted to swim and I wanted to win, and that made all the difference. I qualified for my age group in the National Championships when I was fifteen, and the following year, 2001, I qualified for two finals at the Open Nationals. A teammate at the club expressed genuine surprise at that. ‘I didn’t even know you were that good at swimming,’ she said, which really got under my skin. It was my own fault for coasting under the radar for so long, but boy, was I going to show her. I was going to show everybody.
Every time I saw results, it made me want to train harder. Between fifteen and seventeen, I added a couple of extra training sessions a week to my program, and immediately I saw improvements in my swim times and race finishes. My reputation as a ‘rock lobster’ would linger for quite a while yet. People didn’t see me finishing all my laps and doing the work, because I now just blended in with the other teenagers who had been doing the work all along. I felt like they still saw me as someone who just turned up to meets as a social thing, who would never really amount to anything. There was definitely a lag between when my attitude changed and when people began to look at me differently.
I placed fifth in both my finals at the 2002 Open Nationals, and was selected for the junior national team as a result. I was going to represent Australia at the Oceania Championships in New Caledonia! It was an incredible moment, and a huge privilege. It was my first overseas meet as part of a team, not to mention the first time I had travelled overseas without my mum. She dropped me off at Brisbane airport—I was dressed in the junior national team uniform I’d been issued—and I set off for an adventure. Putting my toe in the water of international competition in this way was the starting point for the next decade of my life.
In the international departure lounge at Sydney airport, I met the rest of team, who had come from everywhere—Western Australia, Tasmania, South Australia. I felt an immediate sense of camaraderie, like being at the club but slightly more intense, slightly more thrilling. I was thrilled to be part of this group of kids who were absolutely at the top of their game. They loved swimming as much as I did. They had a talent for it, like I did. But we were young enough to be pretty lighthearted as we went into the competition. Swimming is a social sport, and I had always felt a kinship with the people I met who were into it, but there was definitely an extra edge of fun when we were all in it together, flying to another country to compete for our country. That’s not to say I wasn’t very focused on winning. I was there to race, first and foremost, but I still wanted people to like me.
There are always ‘naughty’ people on every team, and the New Caledonia crew was no exception. The thrill-seekers tend to drop off later in life as competition intensifies, but amongst the teenagers on that trip there was a fair number who were determined to stay up past curfew or get their hands on some alcohol. There was even a smoker in our ranks, though he didn’t end up being all that good at elite level swimming. I didn’t really get involved in any of those antics, but that’s not to say I didn’t have my own very teenage distractions.
I was now seventeen, and it wasn’t lost on me that the boys on the team were all pretty handsome—and there was one boy in particular who caught my eye when I saw him at Sydney airport. His collar was turned inside out so I adjusted it for him, which he later described as the moment he fell in love with me. His name was Luke, and I thought he was sweet, even though he spoke painfully quietly and slowly. I found myself, with my manic energy, constantly wanting to finish his sentences. He came from Sydney, he had a brother, he was studying economics at the University of New South Wales and he loved swimming as much as I did. He was smart. He agreed with me that the vanilla ice-cream with black flecks of real vanilla bean that they served us for dessert one night was probably the greatest thing ever, but he may just have been trying to impress me. He was smitten, or so he told me later. But it struck me that we had the same sense of humour—goofy and immature—and that was really nice. I also noticed that he was ultra-intense when it came to swimming, far more so than me. I thought I was hungry to win, but he left me far behind.
Luke was named ‘Swimmer of the Meet’; he did exceptionally well. He broke a couple of Oceania records and won a couple of races, and his relay team beat the other Australian relay team, even though they were meant to be the underdogs. That was a very big deal. I had a fantastic meet as well, pulling in a handful of medals and hitting a number of personal best times, but it was a steady kind of success, about what I expected. Luke was the superstar.
When I got home, I found that something had shifted inside of me. For the first time, I genuinely felt like I had a future in swimming, and that that was a serious and worthy thing. I had no concept of what that future might be, honestly. Even at seventeen, I would never have articulated the idea that I might one day be an Olympic gold medallist—that was still a total fantasy. But all of a sudden I had purpose, a drive to be better, to aim higher, and a sense that there was something truly great that I could do with my body in the water.
At that time I was training with John Carew (or Mr Carew, as he liked to be called) and his assistant, Glenda Radley, at the Carew Swim School in Bri
sbane, the team that had coached Kieran Perkins to his 1500-metre freestyle gold at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. They were coaching Hayley Lewis as well, so they had some serious talent on the books. It was clear to me that they didn’t see any huge potential in me, despite a strong showing in New Caledonia; perhaps they thought I’d only come this far because of my innate talent. I didn’t understand this yet, but you needed far more than that to win at the highest level.
I didn’t speak to Mr Carew or Glenda about my newfound determination because I was far too shy about it. Outside of my own head, I had no confidence at all, and there was no chance I was going to put my hand up and tell them the rock lobster had retired. The other pretty significant problem was that Mr Carew’s was really a distance club—they trained swimmers for endurance competition. I was and always had been a sprinter, a fast-twitch-fibre athlete, which required a completely different type of coaching. We didn’t do nearly enough sprint work at training, and my body didn’t cope well with the long, hard stretches of kilometres on kilometres that we would do instead. Even at seventeen, I knew I should be doing heavier weights in the gym, fewer repetitions but with higher weights, whereas the distance training was all about lower weights and more repetitions. Anyway, for these and other reasons, I started looking for a new coach. And I found just the guy I needed, training at my school’s pool.
My father, to his credit, took care of us financially. He paid significant child support, which meant that my sister and I could go to private school, which changed the trajectory of my life. It was at Somerville House, as a student on the swim team, that I first met Stephan Widmer. Stephan started coaching at Somerville House swimming pool early in 2002, just as my focus started to sharpen. Although I was still training with Mr Carew and Glenda, I swam at school meets and had the opportunity to watch Stephan working with other swimmers. He was a Swiss migrant and a man of few words, and a bit of an unknown in the Australian swimming community. He was previously a swimmer—he had made the Swiss national team in his day—but he had never trained an Olympic-level swimmer. He got his start as a coach in Australia when he turned up at Scott Volkers’ pool and asked Scott if he could watch Susie O’Neill train for the Sydney Olympics. For some reason Volkers said yes, and he became Stephan’s mentor. So Stephan had pedigree, but no major runs on the board.