Beneath the Surface

by Libby Trickett

  The problem with being the world record holder in any particular race is that you’re the implicit favourite any time you swim. While I’d had a perfect race at the trials, I was going into the world’s toughest, highest-profile swimming event with no experience at that level, and a massive weight of expectation on my shoulders. I was only nineteen, and it felt like I hadn’t really done anything of note at that stage, and suddenly I was under a microscope. I tried not to read the newspapers or watch television reports, but it was hard to shut that stuff out completely, and every time the media mentioned my name the words ‘world record holder’ followed. I thought I was bulletproof and that the pressure wasn’t getting to me, but that was a product of youth and arrogance more than anything else.

  The Australian team flew into the town of Sindelfingen, Germany, for a two-week-long staging camp ahead of the Games. I imagined that I was dealing with the intensity of what was about to happen, but in retrospect it was in Germany that the cracks first started to show. I was missing Luke horribly and I was highly emotional. I felt overwhelmed and teary, completely volatile in my emotions, and if I couldn’t speak to Luke every night—if training ran late or I missed the window between our two time zones—I’d be distraught. It wasn’t until later that I appreciated how hard this was for Luke. He had swum at trials but failed to make the team, and desperately wanted the opportunity I had at that moment, but he was doing his best as a young boyfriend to support me. To his credit, I never sensed any bitterness or resentment from him at all. In fact, I was deeply paranoid that he would leave me, for reasons I couldn’t rationally explain.

  I didn’t have the maturity to process what I was going through, and it only escalated when we arrived at the Olympic Village. Even without the added pressure I was feeling, the Olympics are a beast of a thing. The intensity of your reaction—the intensity of the opportunity—is crippling. But at the same time, it was the most alive I had ever felt. The energy, the hype, the excitement of being in that moment, which comes around just once every four years, which everyone around you has been working towards for most of their lives, was absolutely electrifying. Everything was so extreme, I felt like I was on a roller-coaster.

  We arrived in our Australian Dolphins uniforms and joined a flood of athletes from around the world, and from that moment everything started to feel slightly surreal. The enormous village precinct included miles of apartments and residential buildings for the athletes, an international food hall the size of two football fields, a games area, a gymnasium. The layout in Athens felt like a hodge-podge, and the landscaping was unfinished, so the buildings looked like they’d been erected in fields of dirt. When we arrived at our apartment, the plumber was still installing the toilet and the shower had no lip or screen, so water ran out under the bathroom door.

  I shared the apartment with six or seven girls from the Australian swimming team, and each of us had our own weird habits. Some hid in their rooms in isolation, while the rest of us hung together in the lounge room and watched TV. Some were single, others had partners. Some were constantly buried in books, and some—like me—were a bundle of nerves. But we all had the same hairless skin and chlorine-bleached hair at the nape of our necks. We were all incredible athletes. We were all ready to compete at the pinnacle of our sport.

  It was amazing to walk into the food hall and see so many different types of bodies, each shaped by their sport. There were seven-foot-tall volleyball players and tiny, muscular gymnasts. The weightlifters always hulked over two stacked plates of food, and the distance runners were all lean and wiry. The shooters just looked like regular people, with regular untrained bodies. I saw plenty of famous athletes who I only knew from TV, and felt that little rush you get from breathing the same air as a celebrity. It was fascinating, bizarre and a tiny bit terrifying. These were the best of the best—and my competitors were out there somewhere too. I enjoyed people-watching but before the competition I was very aloof. I stuck with my housemates—unless I saw a bunch of athletes wearing the Australian uniform, and then I would walk right up and say hello. I was totally comfortable sitting down to eat with strangers if I knew they were on my team.

  The excitement helped my nerves a little, but there was no denying the mounting gravity of the situation, which was triggered just a little more by the general disorganisation in the village. Our Greek hosts were incredibly lax with the schedules for the buses that would ferry us to the competition sites. I liked things to be a certain way when it came to competition. I liked to control everything I possibly could until the moment I stepped onto the block, so I struggled with that lack of control, of not being where I was supposed to be when I wanted to be there. And some days everything ran on time, which only made things worse, adding to my stress. I had no way of knowing which way the dice would fall on the days I was going to compete.

  Our team qualified for the final of the 4x100-metre freestyle relay on the first day of competition. On paper, we weren’t the best team—the Americans were without a doubt the favourites—so the noise in my head, the expectations, had quietened down a little. As I walked to the marshalling area for the final, I was listening to Gloria Estefan’s ‘Reach’, the closing ceremony song from the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. I tested my goggles, pulling at the straps, and felt them snap in half in my hands. I was carrying a second pair with me, something I’d never done before, so I felt like luck was on my side.

  I really loved my team. Jodie Henry, Petria Thomas and Alice Mills were so energetic, warm and positive that it was a joy to swim with them, and I think it was quite disarming for our competitors to see the lightness we brought to the meet. This helped me keep my anxiety in check because it was about the team, not me. The load was spread, which made it easier to bear.

  On the first day of my first Olympic Games, we broke the world record in the 4x100-metre freestyle relay and won a gold medal—the first time an Australian team had won the race since 1956. Alice led us off and I swam the second leg, before Petria and then Jodie smashed it home. She had an epic back-end speed. We looked up as she hit the wall and saw the result sky high on the scoreboard. Australia, 3 minutes 35.94 seconds, in the number-one spot. The achievement made my heart burst. It felt like all of that punishing work—the crunches, the bike sessions, the hours and hours in the pool, the exhaustion, the sacrifice—was worth it. I had stepped up onto the world stage and done something truly extraordinary, and I was beaming as I took to the podium beside my teammates with my first Olympic gold medal hanging around my neck. When the Australian anthem started to play, all four of us wept with joy.

  The only thing is, in the back of my mind, I knew I hadn’t swum my best race. I put us in the lead in my leg but something felt a bit off, like it just wasn’t my day, and I wondered retrospectively if we had mistimed my taper. Throughout training, you work at a break-neck pace, punishing your body, day in, day out. But three weeks before competition you begin to back off, reducing your workload to allow your body to freshen up for peak performance in competition. If you mistime your taper, you either peak too early and start feeling shabby during the competition, or you don’t quite have time to get to your peak. I think I fell slightly short of my peak, and I just felt like I could have done better.

  Something was brewing, I just couldn’t see it. It was an unease, just out sight. Maybe it was the bad taper, maybe it was the pressure, but it was about to make itself known.

  Everything had happened so quickly. I hadn’t thought, in the lead-up, that it was my time to win a gold medal in an individual event at the Olympics. I hadn’t even won a gold medal at a national level, but that world record-breaking swim had sped everything up—in my mind and in the eyes of the world. I felt like I was locked on to a path, moving too quickly, but unable to do anything but push forward. I wasn’t in control.

  In retrospect, so many things were off. Athens was only my second major international meet with Stephan, so he and my gym coach were still learning how my body responded to things. A
nd I was learning what it meant to compete at that highest level, working in an extremely intense environment that was pushing me to the limit. I assumed my taper was off during the relay, but I also thought it would get better the next day. I was running on blind faith.

  The heats for the 100-metre freestyle were on day five of competition. The buses that afternoon were off schedule again, running at least 40 minutes behind, and I was frantic as a result. I wanted to get to the pool at least two hours before my race so I could spend the first half-hour stretching and listening to music, just chilling out. I wanted to get into the warm-up pool an hour and a half before my race and do my laps, drills and exploding starts to activate the lactic acid in my body and get my fast-twitch muscle fibres firing. I needed time to have a long, hot shower afterwards and stretch out my muscles, before getting into my race suit and heading to the marshalling area. I needed time to walk through my routine, my preparation and my process. And most importantly, I needed time to acclimatise to the atmosphere at the pool. I hated feeling rushed.

  But the bus was late, so my routine was off and I failed to adapt to the change and roll with the punches. Jodie was waiting beside me, calm and collected. She was watching me closely; I learned years later that my agitation actually made her confidence soar. The warm-up was important, but it wasn’t the be all and end all—Jodie knew that. Our bodies were so finely honed and trained, over years and months, that the twenty minutes of exercise directly before a race would not determine who won. It was far more important to be mentally focused and adaptable—to let your body do what it had prepared for.

  I got to the pool an hour and fifteen minutes before the first race, so I had no time to acclimatise—I had to jump straight in the warm-up pool and go. And for the rest of that evening I felt like I was out of sync, and unable to control my emotions. I didn’t have the capacity to calm myself. What I really needed was to take three minutes to stop and breathe, but I just couldn’t do it. I felt like I was racing against the clock and falling behind every step of the way. In reality, I was trying to hold on to something that I didn’t actually have. I thought I had the gold medal in my hands and it was somehow slipping out of my grasp, but that was an illusion.

  The heats for the 100-metre freestyle were unremarkable. Heats were a muscle work-out, a kind of low-intensity warm-up, and relatively little effort was required. I didn’t notice anything grossly out of whack because I wasn’t searching for my top gear, but I’d been feeling nervous and agitated all day, far more nervous than I should have been.

  When I dove into the water in my semi-final, I knew something was wrong. I just didn’t seem to have any power—in my legs, in my arms. I was reaching for something in my body that wasn’t there. I felt uncoordinated and lacking drive, like a crucial gear I needed just wouldn’t engage. The emotion I was feeling, more than anything else, was confusion. When I touched the wall and turned to the leaderboard, my confusion turned to devastation. I had placed fifth, too far down the ranks to secure a position in the final. It was like a punch to the gut and I felt absolute shock, like the floor had just dropped out from underneath me.

  Ultimately, I missed a place in the final by just 0.09 seconds. I was the world record holder and I couldn’t even make the final—the embarrassment was crippling. I made my way out of the pool towards the media scrum, where Kieren Perkins was waiting, then the swimming correspondent for Channel 7. ‘You must be disappointed,’ he said, and I felt my face flush. The second semi-final race had started as I was walking away from the pool, and it finished as I stood beside him fumbling for words. And what happened, as I was standing there in front of the camera drowning in self-pity and shame, was that Jodie Henry broke the world record. She broke the record that I had made just months before, by 0.14 seconds. Records are made to be broken—that’s just the way things go. But in that moment it was like a left jab followed by a right hook. I hadn’t made the Olympic final and my best achievement had been eclipsed by my biggest rival.

  I was sitting in the stands the following night when Jodie won the gold medal for the 100-metre freestyle. I was an absolute mess, but I forced myself to switch gears. I had to reset, because I had another race to swim—the 50-metre freestyle. Stephan wanted me to watch Jodie’s race because he knew it would be an important learning experience for me. He wanted me to be inspired to be in that final four years into the future.

  I also wanted to support Jodie in her golden hour. She may have been my rival but she was also my teammate—she deserved to have my backing. When she won the gold, I desperately wanted to be happy for her, but I was so gutted that I struggled to get there. I cheered for her from the stands, but my heart was hard. What it did was fuel my hunger to win.

  When I swam the 50-metre freestyle two days later, I was out to prove that I deserved to be there. The gold medal win in the relay hadn’t been a fluke—my teammates weren’t carrying me. I had come up short in the 100-metre freestyle, but on this night I won a bronze medal in my own right. I was one of the top three swimmers in this event in the world. In the face of failure and embarrassment, I had locked down, stepped through my process as an athlete and come through, and for the second time at the 2004 Olympic Games I stood on the podium with a medal around my neck.

  I felt I had proved in that moment that I could come back. Next time, I would come back even stronger.

  Chapter Four

  2014

  ‘Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.’

  —Albert Einstein

  My name is Libby Trickett and I’m a talking head on Australian breakfast television, a one-time celebrity dancer on Dancing with the Stars and, as of early 2014, the National Channel and Partner Manager for Megaport, an Australian internet technology company. I have the Megaport company sales pitch down cold: ‘Megaport is a layer 2 point-to-point connection service connecting data centres. We maintain ports in all data centres, enabling virtual cross connections for our clients over dark fibre …’ I’ve been in the job a couple of months now, and the words just roll off my tongue. Unfortunately, I have no idea what they mean.

  I have a meeting with a client in a remote business park in the northern suburbs of Sydney, and the ride out there takes forever. For a solid half an hour, I huddle in the back seat of a taxi and mull over how completely and utterly out of my depth I am. This is the first sales meeting I’ve had without a Megaport engineer by my side, and I’m genuinely terrified. I’ve done this just enough to know exactly how much I don’t know, which is worse than going in completely cold. Ignorance is bliss, right? I have zero bliss right now.

  The plan is that I’ll write down any tech questions the client might have and get back to them with answers at a later date. Meanwhile, I’ll tell the client everything I know: ‘Megaport is a layer 2 point-to-point connection service connecting data centres. We maintain ports in all data centres, enabling virtual cross connections for our clients over dark fibre …’ I’m not even sure what dark fibre is, to be honest. The only fibre I’m familiar with is dietary.

  At reception, I am met by a senior manager, who tells me other team members are on the way to join us. ‘Debra is so excited to meet you!’ he says.

  ‘Oh, great!’ I smile broadly, dying a little inside.

  ‘She’s such a big fan!’

  ‘Oh, is she? That’s so nice!’ Debra is in for a disappointment, I reckon.

  They usher me into a sterile boardroom—white walls, white table, in an office park in the middle of nowhere—and three representatives from their company sit down to listen to my spiel. Debra isn’t one of them; it turns out that she works for HR. The three men in front of me know who I am, but I’m not sure they care. They’re perfectly pleasant, warm even, but they’re here for business. And I’m here to win their business with my trusty sales pitch. Ports! Data centres! Dietary fibre! Only the anxiety has clamped on my chest like a vice and I feel like I’m having a p
anic attack.

  One of the men in the room is the client’s digital technology manager, and he has some questions. If he’s going to buy virtual cross connections from Megaport, he’ll need to know the system capabilities. It’s a new product and he’s not familiar with the specifications, though, as it quickly becomes apparent, he’s not alone. He asks me a question, I say I’m sorry I don’t know the answer, and I write it down for our engineers. He asks me a question, I say I’m sorry I don’t know the answer, and I write it down. This goes on for about half an hour, the most uncomfortable 30 minutes of my life. He is a highly competent technology manager and knows exactly what he needs to know, whereas I am an incompetent fraud who is wasting his time. It’s clear I don’t know anything about the product I’m trying to sell them. I barely understand the questions he is asking, and the best I can do is smile, apologise and write his questions down. Someone at Megaport understands this stuff, just not me, which begs the question—what am I doing here?

  Bevan Slattery is a serial entrepreneur who has a string of successful start-ups to his name. I know him from the swimming world—his kids swim at St Peters, where Luke used to swim, so we’re part of the same family. Bevan is a patron of the club and has donated quite a lot over the years to support its Olympic hopefuls, but I don’t meet him until my career is over. We’re introduced at a welcome home party for the swimmers who went to the London Olympics, and Bevan takes a shine to me. He says he likes my energy. A year later, when I have announced my second and final retirement from swimming, Bevan and I reconnect. He sees me on Dancing with the Stars and has decided he wants to give me a job at his new tech company. Qualifications are clearly not high on the agenda, because I’m not qualified to do anything except swim and, at a stretch, dance on television. ‘It’s about getting the right personalities in the right business,’ Bevan explains. I can only assume he knows what he’s talking about.