Beneath the Surface

by Libby Trickett

  It’s a significant commitment—I have to fly down to Sydney every Wednesday night to be ready to film on Thursday, and then fly home again straight after the segment—but I’m happy with the constant travel because it feels at least like I’m moving, like I’m doing something useful with my time. It’s actually kind of ridiculous, though—I mean, just the travel costs alone are crazy, given how much time I’m on screen. These networks must have money to burn. I’m supposed to be an expert on everything, too, or at least have a strong opinion, from childcare to tax cuts to the rising cost of bread. I’m somewhere between a celebrity and an ordinary person on the street, I guess, and the segment is just a regular conversation happening on public television.

  It’s not particularly hard. I don’t feel completely natural in front of the camera, but I do have opinions that I’m willing to share, and most of the conversations are so lightweight it’s like talking to my mum. I just get on with it, for the most part, and try not to think about the fact that this isn’t really what I want to be doing. I still don’t know what that is, so this will do in the meantime.

  There’s one conversation on ‘The Grill’ that really means something to me—around legalising marijuana. I can feel myself getting geared up for a very passionate chat that day, because I’m very strongly opposed to the idea. Medicinal marijuana may truly help people and should be accessible with support from proper medical professionals, but legalising it across the board is a terrible idea, in my opinion. I really believe it’s a gateway drug to other substances that can cause massive harm. I’ve seen it firsthand in my own family.

  My brother Stewart has suffered severe, ongoing physical and emotional damage from both alcohol and drug addiction; he’s been through rehab several times and has ongoing mental-health issues that have only been compounded by drugs and alcohol. His experience has had a profound impact on my point of view. I remember lying in bed as a teenager smothering my head with a pillow while pounding techno floated up from my brother’s bedroom all night long, wondering why he didn’t seem to care that I had to get up at 5 a.m. for training. It was a constant struggle to ask him to be quiet, or to respect other people in the house, because he was always high and just didn’t seem to care. It might seem like a minor thing in the grand scheme of things, but it caused me so much stress, and it was even worse for Mum. Also, Stewart seemed to hurt himself all the time, either falling down or getting sick because he was taking so many drugs or drinking too much. He fell over in the park once and knocked out his four front teeth. On another occasion he was beaten with a fence paling, which broke his collarbone. We found the paling the next day and there was a rusty nail attached to one end, so all we could think was: Thank god it wasn’t worse.

  Mum wanted to take care of Stewy and make sure he was safe, but the only way she could keep him there was by letting some really dodgy friends of his hang around as well, so when I was fifteen I was surrounded by a bunch of older guys who were often under the influence of drugs. I didn’t know how heavily affected they were, but I knew they weren’t right and it made me uneasy.

  I could see how easy it would have been for me to follow my brother down that path, but something inside me really recoiled. The reality is that Stewy was struggling with a lot of deep personal trauma, and that was the real driver for his addictions, but drugs and alcohol gave him a means to express that pain in the most destructive way possible. I know Mum would have done things differently had she had her time over again, however I also know that she was doing the best she could under the circumstances.

  There is not a lot of lightness to my brother’s story, so it’s really hard for me to be blasé about legalising recreational drugs, let alone taking them. This, I’m sure, is part of the reason why I don’t spin off into partying when my swimming career ends, although I understand why other people do. I feel as lost and disoriented as any other elite athlete when the all-consuming training schedule stops. I know the feeling of having all this twitchy energy to burn and suddenly having all this time on your hands, not to mention the fact that you’re no longer getting that daily bump of serotonin that comes from pushing your body to its limits. That’s an actual physical high that athletes experience when they’re training at an elite level, on top of which you get these occasional screaming rushes of dopamine when you win an Olympic medal. And the adrenaline coursing through your body—how do you replace that feeling? Some former athletes feel like drugs will fill that hole, give them an echo of that intense natural high, but I just can’t go down that path. I don’t think it leads anywhere good. Not for me, at least. I don’t even drink.

  I get a bit of blowback on social media for expressing my opinion about legalising drugs on ‘The Grill’, but it’s surprising to me how little effect this has on me. I understand that everyone has a different opinion, because everyone has had different life experiences. And as much as I’m getting paid to take a position, I’m not actually that militant about any of the things we discuss week to week. I don’t have any formal qualifications, I’m not an academic or a politician, there’s no real reason why anyone should listen to me on most of these subjects, but I’ve been given a megaphone. I’m very conscious that it’s a great opportunity for me professionally, but it also feels kind of lame. It’s not like I can even do much research on each topic, because they give me the articles we’re going to discuss when I’m in the make-up chair. Half an hour of frantic Google searches is usually the most I can do.

  Every time I get my make-up done, I feel like I’m under a microscope. ‘What’s that?’ a make-up artist will ask me, pointing at a minor imperfection. ‘Oh, that’s just a scar,’ I’ll respond. They’ll raise their eyes, looking dubious. Almost every week when the concealer goes on, I get the same advice. ‘You might want to consider a bit of Botox—you’re starting to get wrinkles around your eyes.’ Every week I feel like climbing up on a soapbox and shouting at them about how growing old is a privilege, and how Botox-pushing people like them are making things very difficult for older women everywhere. But I’m a people pleaser and I have to work with these people, so I don’t get on my soapbox; I grin and laugh awkwardly and try not to feel too self-conscious.

  This is one of the many reasons I start to think that television is not my passion. My particular role is easy, sure. There’s no real preparation, I don’t have to investigate stories or file reports, or do any of the hard work that journalists do, but I can feel myself sinking into this lightweight celebrity role and that’s not necessarily what I’m looking for. Easy is not what I’m looking for. I need a serious challenge.

  2003

  ‘Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.’

  —J.K. Rowling

  I was plagued by respiratory issues my entire swimming career. The first time I competed at the World Championships, in Barcelona in mid-2003, I had severe bronchitis, triggering asthma that was aggravated by the swampy air of the indoor pool. My asthma had been diagnosed late in life, when I was fifteen, but I’d always had bad lungs. I was prone to bronchial coughs and colds, and I caught pneumonia when I was ten, which almost put me in hospital. When my swimming career started to gear up, the recurrent nose and lung issues got worse, and I ended up on a raft of preventive medications just to manage them from day to day, let alone when I pushed myself with hard training sets.

  Barcelona was my debut on the world stage, so while bronchitis wasn’t unfamiliar to me, it was the worst time for it to appear. It was terrifying knowing that I needed my body to perform at its peak and yet I was struggling to draw a decent breath. My mind was cluttered with negative thoughts: I can’t do this, I’m sick, I’m not worthy, I can’t breathe, I will fail. What I realised, ultimately, is that this was just something I had to deal with. There was no point trying to wish it away. There was no point looking at other swimmers and feeling frustrated that they didn’t have to confront the same challenge.

  Stephan caught me walking to the marshalling area for the h
eats for the 100-metre butterfly, coughing and spluttering and wheezing. We stopped in the hallway for our pre-race chat, the last word from the coach that every swimmer has before they go out on the pool deck. Usually a coach will tell you what to focus on in your race process—power off the blocks, driving through the first 25 metres, accelerating from 35 to 50 metres and so on. But there in the hallway, Steph said, ‘There’s only one thing I need you to think about, okay?’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re strong, you’re fit, you’re healthy and therefore you are fast,’ he said. ‘This is your power phrase. You focus on this and nothing else, until you race.’

  I’m strong, I’m fit, I’m healthy, therefore I’m fast. This line became a mantra for me, and I would use it for the rest of my career, repeating it on a loop from warm-up until I climbed onto the blocks. I felt like a bit of a dag using it at first, but I couldn’t deny that it worked. It silenced the doubts in my head, blew all the negative thoughts away, sharpened my mind like a knife. I’m strong, I’m fit, I’m healthy, therefore I’m fast.

  I hadn’t spoken to my father in months—he hadn’t even called to say congratulations for making my first Australian team—so I was stunned to arrive at the pool in Barcelona one day and find him standing outside with his partner, Nilsen, the woman he left my mother for all those years ago. Through my shock I managed to comprehend that they had come to Barcelona to watch me swim. My father hadn’t told me he was coming. I doubt my mother knew, or she would have told me.

  Standing there outside the venue, I had a very brief exchange with my dad and his wife. As usual, our conversation was about swimming because we had nothing else to talk about. My father always told me I had to go into ‘the cave of pain’ when I was racing, which I think he lifted from a book. He meant that I should work hard and push my body to its limits, push the boundaries of what I thought was possible. I think it was well-intentioned and it wasn’t completely off the mark, but he said the same thing to me every time I saw him and it got very repetitive, very quickly.

  I didn’t want to ask what my dad was doing in Barcelona. I didn’t really want to hear it. I was polite and amicable in our brief exchange, but inside I was burning with frustration. My mum was there, of course, but she deserved to be. She had supported me and believed in me since day one. She had taken me to every training session and swim meet since primary school, always putting herself second so that I could follow my dreams. My father had barely been part of my life to this point. Yes, he had supported us financially, but that was it. From my perspective, it felt like he couldn’t be bothered to be an actual parent to me, and yet somehow he felt it was okay to show up in Barcelona and ride the wave of momentum that was building around my swimming.

  I didn’t see or speak to my father again during that meet. I had to push my frustration away and focus on the competition—lock my mind into the race and swim. Battling bronchitis, with my newly minted power phrase on loop in my mind, I took home two bronze medals from the competition that year, one in the 50-metre freestyle and one in the 4x100-metre freestyle relay. It was a solid debut on the international stage, but there was so much further I wanted to go.

  Stephan had a fierce belief in my ability, and I felt that. I felt the weight of expectation coming from him, but that expectation allowed me to grow and thrive, both as an athlete and as a person. He saw the athlete in me, the physical talent. But he also saw that I had the psychological make-up of a champion. His belief in me made me want to try harder, to be better, to become the person he thought I could be. He reminded me of Luke in some ways, with his analytical style and emotional dryness. He said exactly what was on his mind and didn’t bother to sugar-coat it, but he didn’t waste words. This meant he was very direct in correcting me and trying to improve my performance, but he was also quick to say positive things. His generous compliments gave me a lot of confidence, but I also responded well to the constructive feedback. He pushed me, and I tried to take it to another level each time I swam.

  We didn’t talk in any weighty, meaningful way about the Olympics. It was the next major international meet, and so the next obvious step, but I think Stephan was careful in how he approached the subject. There was no additional pressure—at least not at first. We just moved on to the next goal, and that was the team for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games.

  For me, the Olympics wasn’t strictly the goal. All I wanted was to do better than I had done before, so at the end of 2003 I wrote down a time for the 100-metre freestyle that I wanted to achieve: 53.6 seconds, which was a full second faster than my personal best at the time. It also happened to be 0.1 second faster than the then world record. I wrote the number on a scrap of paper in fluoro pink pen, and scribbled a quote beneath it.

  I’ve always loved inspirational quotes. I kept a notebook full of my favourite quotes and carried it around with me—it was filled with things that made me feel powerful or inspired or motivated. Some of them just made me laugh, like ‘Don’t get your knickers in a knot. Nothing is solved, it just makes you walk funny.’ And my all-time favourite was ‘They never said it would be easy, they just said it would be worth it,’ which resonated with me because it seemed so universal. Life is hard, and there are always challenges, but there are always moments that make those challenges worthwhile. My whole swimming career was building up around that idea—that after the pain came the pay-off.

  On the scrap on paper, beneath the number 53.6, I wrote: ‘Whatever happens, happens for a reason and will be for the best in the long run.’ I stuck the note next to my bed so it was the first thing I saw every morning when I woke up and the last thing I saw before I went to sleep.

  After Barcelona, I started doing ten training sessions a week. Under the influence of Luke, who’d become my boyfriend, I’d also started doing some heavy core and cardio sessions every day. He and I had started a long-distance relationship after the 2002 World Cup; during the run-up to Barcelona and during my training for Athens, I was down in Sydney every second weekend visiting him. He was obsessive about his exercise regime, extremely demanding of himself, and I found myself trying to mirror him when I was not in the pool. I added two 30-minute sessions on an exercise bike to my routine, increasing the resistance every five minutes. This made my legs stronger, as well as increasing my cardiovascular fitness. I also added a 20-minute ab and core workout to my routine four days a week, in addition to the weights training prescribed by Stephan and my gym coach Stewart Briggs, which involved long sessions of plank holds and at least 500 crunches in every session. The extra training load gave me an edge, physically and mentally. I knew I was doing more than was required of me, maybe more than my competitors, and that gave me an extra layer of confidence.

  I didn’t have hard boundaries around what I wanted to achieve. The race time I wrote down was a goal which kept me on track, but I’d set no deadline for when I had to achieve it. I just knew that if I worked systematically towards being stronger and faster, and I eventually made that time, I would make it very bloody hard for anyone else to beat me.

  When the National Championships came around in March 2004, which served as the Olympic trials, I was the leanest I’d ever been. I weighed a couple of kilos more at nineteen than I had when I went to the Oceania Championships a couple of years earlier, but my skinfold measurement was completely different—I was skin wrapped around muscle. Instead of sitting heavy, my body aquaplaned in the water, gliding over the surface with every powerful stroke, my legs stronger than they had ever been. I was a far more efficient machine.

  Form aside, I wasn’t looking my best. I had developed a horrible rash just before the trials, pityriasis rosea. It wasn’t itchy but gave me welts from head to toe, which made me feel incredibly self-conscious when I was walking around in bathers. Stephan had a knack for reframing things that got me out of my own head. ‘It’s just your speed rash,’ he joked. ‘It’s going to make you go fast.’ He honestly made me feel better.

  We spoke just before the semi-
final of the 100-metre freestyle, our standard pre-race pep talk, but he took a slightly different approach. There was no advice to hold back and keep something in reserve for the final. ‘Just go after it,’ Stephan said, casually. ‘Go out there, have fun and see what you can do.’ I think Stephan had an inkling that I was on the verge of something special, though he wouldn’t have said explicitly what that was. He wanted to open a door in my mind and let me look through it. He was incredibly crafty that way, a bit of a puppetmaster. If he had actually told me what he thought might happen, the pressure would have been unbearable. Instead of pointing directly at the goal, he just cleared the path and told me to run.

  All of my work—the sweat, the grit, the focus—paid off in that semi-final. I hit my number three months after I wrote it down. I swam the 100-metre freestyle in 53.66 seconds, breaking the world record. In the stands, Stephan turned to Luke in his usual understated way and pointed at the scoreboard. ‘Look at what she’s done,’ he said.

  It was an extraordinary achievement, no doubt about it. It was the crowning glory of my career so far, and it gave me the greatest rush I had ever experienced as an athlete, a feeling of immense power, but the moment was precarious and short-lived. I broke the world record in the semi-final, but I didn’t win the event. Jodie Henry took the gold medal in the final. She swam in under the radar, only a millisecond slower than my record-breaking time, but faster than me in the race that counted. Somehow, the media totally missed this part of the story. In my head, I was just relieved and grateful to have qualified for an individual event at the Olympics. I was aware that there was really nothing between Jodie and me. But in the media I was the golden girl, and Jodie barely rated a mention. I was the world record holder in the 100-metre freestyle, and that quickly became a millstone around my neck.