Beneath the Surface

by Libby Trickett

  The rest of the year was a slog, and no one did particularly well at the World Championship trials in December. Four major meets in one year was a grind. By the end of 2006 I was utterly exhausted, and suddenly we had a wedding to organise. Luke and I told Stephan we wanted to get married in 2007, and asked him when he could build a break into my training schedule. He looked at the calendar and pointed to a single free weekend immediately following the 2007 Duel in the Pool. ‘Here,’ he said, so that was the date.

  I’m not someone who cares at all about weddings, and I had enough on my plate with training, so we hired a wedding planner and Luke managed the rest. I made sure my wedding dress was nice but I didn’t care how the cutlery was set or what flower arrangements were on the table. I don’t really even like flowers—I’m hypersensitive to the smell. I’ll take chocolates over flowers any day. My major contribution to the wedding was planning the honeymoon, which I did practically before we did anything else.

  Luke had assumed we would invite my father to the wedding, so he was mildly shocked when I told him that I didn’t want him to come. I didn’t want the complication, and I didn’t see why I should feel obliged to invite my dad when we didn’t really know each other. I almost never saw him, and I never spoke to him on the phone. He hadn’t been there to give me advice through any of the challenging times, and it’s not like I would turn to him for advice now. There was a huge part of me that wanted him to be there, of course, the same part of me that wanted a relationship with my father that was simple and uncomplicated. But that’s not the relationship we had. There was too much history, too many bad choices. I wanted Mum and I to be able to enjoy my wedding day without feeling awkward that Dad was there.

  I asked my father to meet me at a cafe on James Street. I wanted to let him know in person that I wouldn’t be inviting him to the wedding, and as much as I could, I wanted to explain why. I was apprehensive but I pushed my feelings aside, ignoring the depth of the hurt I felt around this issue so I could get the job done. When we arrived, we had drinks and nibbles and made light conversation, until finally I steeled myself and told him why I was there. ‘Luke and I are getting married,’ I said. ‘But I’m not going to invite you to the wedding. This has been a very difficult decision for me. I don’t want to hurt you, but I just don’t feel comfortable for you to be there on my wedding day when you haven’t really been there for the rest of my life.’

  I knew he wouldn’t take it well. I was rejecting him, and no one likes rejection, but my dad has always had an incredible poker face. If my words hurt him, he gave nothing away. He paused for a moment and said, ‘Okay.’ No further comment, no questions.

  I think I had imagined we might talk it over some more, and that it might even open up a bigger conversation, one I’d probably always wanted to have with him. But that was all he gave me. Honestly, I don’t think I should have been surprised.

  Summer flashed by, and by March I was back in Melbourne, at the 2007 World Championships. I won five gold medals that year, one for almost every race I competed in. I broke three World Championship records as an individual, and another with the 4x100-metre freestyle team. It felt like I was on fire in the pool, at the top of my game, and I carried my winning streak from the World Championships straight into the Duel in the Pool in Sydney.

  The organisers had introduced a new race at the exhibition meet, a mixed-gender 4x100-metre freestyle relay with two guys and two girls on each team. Michael Phelps, who was at the peak of his career at that stage, was leading off for the American team. I was leading off for Australia. I gave him a little trash talking in the marshalling area: ‘You gonna bring it? You got nothing, Michael.’ It was meant to be funny—there was absolutely no doubt that the reigning male champion of the sport was going to thrash me completely—but he didn’t crack a smile. Maybe he was trying to psych me out, or maybe he just didn’t get my sense of humour. I was unfazed, anyway, because the Duel in the Pool was a light-hearted event. You didn’t win anything but bragging rights.

  I felt nothing but ease when I stepped up to the block, heard the gun and launched myself into the water. When I got to the 35-metre mark, I saw Michael’s feet out in front of me and smiled internally. Cool, I thought, this is going well. Going into my tumble turn, I saw that he had already pushed off and was heading in the other direction. Cool cool coooool. All I could do was try to hold on and not leave my teammates with too big a gap to make up. I just dug in and kept at it until I touched the wall.

  And then I turned around and saw my time—52.99 seconds. A massive grin broke out on my face, and I was suddenly elated. I was the first women in history to swim the 100-metre freestyle in under 53 seconds.

  Unfortunately, because a mixed-gender relay wasn’t considered by FINA as an official event, the time wasn’t ratified and wouldn’t be recognised. I didn’t know this when I was in the pool, waving at Luke and pointing at the leaderboard proudly, but Stephan delivered the news a couple of days later. He was almost as disappointed as I was. I felt thoroughly ripped off.

  To make matters a whole lot worse, there was a debate in the media about whether or not the time should be recognised, and a number of people decided I had essentially cheated. Their theory was that I only swam that fast because I was dragging off Michael Phelps. The idea was that I was swimming just ahead of Michael’s wake, which gave me an extra millisecond of speed as it pushed out behind me. From 25 to 35 metres, I definitely felt like I was in a sweet spot, but the minute he pulled away from me at the wall, I fell behind his wake and it was visibly smashing me in the face.

  Once again, I felt like my character was under attack—but unlike the previous year with the drug test, this time it was happening in public. It felt like everybody had an opinion, and the seed of shame within me grew a little more, though I was barely conscious of it. I was angry, and more determined than ever to prove something about myself to the world, because, in some small, dark part of my soul, I didn’t feel like the world had accepted me.

  Luke and I were supposed to get married at an open-air auditorium at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, but it was forecast to pour on our wedding day. There was also some concern about a possible paparazzi problem. Having paid for exclusive rights to my wedding day story, the people at New Idea wanted us to get married at a secure venue where I couldn’t be snapped by rival publications. Per our contract, we had to protect the secrecy and confidentiality of the event. They were particularly—and weirdly—concerned about my dress.

  The alternative venue we found was in Chowder Bay, a kind of wooden box that looked over the water, which reminded me of an old schoolhouse. There were views of the water from its tiny windows and it was beautifully decorated, but it was also brutally hot inside. Everyone was sweating profusely. I had to get ready in a room out the back of the sweaty wooden box because, again, the magazine was worried that I might be photographed by paparazzi if I travelled from one venue to another. I had never had a problem with paparazzi before, so it all seemed a bit ridiculous to me, but we got swept up in the paranoid demands of the magazine. Luke and I had made our bed and had to sleep in it, though it was increasingly uncomfortable.

  The worst and most embarrassing security measure the magazine insisted on was the tent. On the day of the wedding, we had to enter and leave the venue via a marquee, which even had sides to prevent the three news helicopters overhead from getting any footage of my dress. I was absolutely stunned to hear the choppers overhead, but not as surprised as I was when I looked out of my dressing-room window and saw a scuba diver clamber onto the pier outside the venue, pull a camera out of his bag and point it in my direction.

  There were so many things about the day that made me smile. My mother walking me down the aisle. Luke, so handsome there at the end of the aisle that it made my heart burst. Our family and friends, laughing and smiling and hugging me every time I turned around. So much of it was absolute joy.

  My dad wasn’t there, but Stephan came, and I had such fondness and affect
ion for him. I cared deeply for him, but more than anything else he had my respect. He’d been there for me from the beginning of my adult life, through all the twists and turns, and I was so grateful that he was there to share this special moment with Luke and me—especially as it was his own 40th birthday! He came to see us in the dressing room before the reception, congratulated us and told me I looked beautiful. For maybe the first time in our relationship he seemed full of open kindness and love. It made me smile. I didn’t need Stephan to be kind to me in the pool, but he was still one of the most important men in my life. He was definitely a father figure to me—the only one I ever really had.

  At the end of the ceremony, we were hustled through the tent and into a limousine with blacked-out windows, which drove us back to a reception room at Taronga Zoo. The room had a beautiful view but we couldn’t see it—the curtains had to stay closed throughout the reception. From our guests’ perspective, the day went really well. They had quite an adventure, being secreted down in buses to the venue in Chowder Bay and then back to the zoo for the reception. They got to hold some animals—an echidna, a koala and a crocodile. They also got to go outside and see the view. It was only me who was trapped inside, hiding from the media storm I’d created.

  This was certainly not what I had expected, nor what I wanted for my wedding day, but the reality was that I had allowed it to happen because I hadn’t had the strength to say, ‘No, that’s not going to work for me.’ I regret signing up with the magazine—though it did give me the opportunity to support three special charities—and I regret being railroaded after the fact by people who clearly didn’t care about my feelings.

  What I regret most of all is that we didn’t organise our own wedding photographer. We just figured the New Idea photographer would capture everything. But their photographer was on a job, and he wasn’t working for us. He didn’t care about our memories, or our family and friends, just the kind of insincere close-up shots of the bride and groom that look good in a glossy magazine. We didn’t get a group shot of the guests, or any family photos. We didn’t get pictures with the beautiful harbour behind us, even though it was glistening after the rain. I can see it in my mind’s eye, but that’s the only place I’ll ever see it. New Idea sent us a bunch of images from the day, but I have never printed any of them out.

  The worst part of the whole experience was the nastiness that it seemed to trigger in the Australian press. It felt like rival media outlets had decided to cut me down to size in retaliation for not getting the exclusive story—if they couldn’t run a picture of my wedding dress, they’d run an article shaming me for hiding it. The Daily Telegraph ran a particularly brutal piece the following day, just as we were leaving for our honeymoon, saying I had allowed my wedding ‘to be hijacked’. The maliciousness made my head spin.

  Lizard Island, in the middle of the Great Barrier Reef, is one of the most pristine, spectacular places I have ever been. We went there for our honeymoon and sank right in for five days. It was expensive to book but once we got there everything was included, and we made the most of it. Breakfast was included, so we ate breakfast twice every day. We had dinner on the shore and went ocean fishing; we took a dinghy to a secluded beach and had a romantic picnic. We swam in the crystal-clear waters, snorkelling above the most beautiful fish, turtles and coral.

  It was enough to make me stop thinking, just for a second, about everything that had gone wrong over that year. The failed drug test was gone, the frustration over the world record was gone, the wedding blues were gone. I forgave myself for a lot of things, just for a second, and allowed myself to just be happy with the man I loved. It was beautiful. But I came crashing back down to earth before we even left the island.

  On the morning we checked out, the hotel manager told me a letter had arrived for me and handed me an envelope. How does anyone even know we’re here? I wondered. And how random to get a letter on my honeymoon. I opened the envelope and pulled out a long, handwritten note on beautiful stationery. The handwriting had the perfect slope of someone who had learned cursive before home computing was a thing. I knew it had come from an older person. I was curious but my heart sank as I started reading, and I quickly wished I hadn’t opened it at all.

  The woman who’d written the letter wanted to tell me how disappointed she was that I had sold my wedding story to New Idea. She had followed me through my entire career, she wrote, and all she had wanted was to see me on my happiest day in my beautiful wedding dress, but she couldn’t afford to buy the magazine. One of the greatest joys in her life was that she was able to share her own wedding day with her family and friends through her wedding photographs, and she felt I had done myself and my fans a great disservice by prostituting myself in this way. I was a very selfish person, she concluded.

  Part of me couldn’t believe someone would take the time out of their day to sit down and write these things to me, but a far bigger part of me felt like my worst fears had been realised. I was not good and I was not liked. The world thought I was a drug cheat, a race cheat, a wedding cheat—worthless. I was cheap and nasty, and nothing I did was any good.

  After our honeymoon I was supposed to join the Mare Nostrum Tour in Europe, a series of swimming meets that give Australians exposure to intensive racing under tough conditions. You travel and race, travel and race, building up your capacity to perform at an elite level without a lot of rest or preparation. The tour involves quite a bit of prize money, but it was also just fun travelling from one beautiful location to another over four or five weeks of the European summer. The problem was that I didn’t feel like having fun.

  When we got home from Lizard Island I slumped into a funk that I just couldn’t shake. Luke couldn’t talk me out of it, and Stephan couldn’t coach me out of it. I started performing poorly at training, and eventually met with Stephen to tell him I needed a break. I sat in his office with tears welling in my eyes, unable to explain why. He was bewildered, but what choice did he have? It was clear that I couldn’t perform in this state. I pulled out of the Mare Nostrum Tour, and for the next three months I dropped back to one training session a day and started eating mountains of chocolate—I’ve always been an emotional eater.

  I just wanted to sit on the couch and cry. When I looked back over the past year, I felt so ashamed and small that I couldn’t find the motivation to go on. I didn’t see the greatest winning streak of my career—I only saw the ways in which people felt I had come up short. I saw the newspaper headlines, the suspicion, the letter. The letter was the feather on top of a pile of shit that made the whole thing fall over. In my mind, the public hated me, they doubted me, and they were laughing at me. All I wanted was for people to like me, but they didn’t. Whether or not this was actually true had no bearing on how I felt.

  Maybe I was just tired from the punishing training schedule, the back-to-back meets, the wedding, but I had hit a wall and I couldn’t get over it. For three months I couldn’t bring myself to care about swimming—certainly not in the way I needed to if I was going to be successful. That all this was happening just a year out from the Beijing Olympics was a problem. I could almost hear Stephan grinding his teeth, but it was pointless. I’d been knocked off my game. I was depleted, physically and emotionally. And when I did feel anything, I was just sad.

  I didn’t know that I had depression. In retrospect it’s obvious, but I couldn’t articulate it at the time. I had no language to talk about mental health, only elite performance. What was happening to me was clearly the accumulation of years of stress, pressure, expectation, drive, constant pushing, the instability that is caused when you train your mind to be laser-focused, and you push away any negative thoughts that distract you from your goal. Eventually, those thoughts were bound to come back. And when they did, they came in a flood.

  Chapter Six

  2015

  ‘Courage, dear heart.’

  —C.S. Lewis

  My obstetrician wants me to rest a cycle, but the PCOS is so unpr
edictable that it could mean anything up to two months. I hate having to wait anyway—it’s so damn frustrating—but not knowing how long the wait will last makes me totally crazy. I feel so out of control. The idea of having to get on that treadmill with Luke again is also pretty overwhelming. Sex every two days really kills the romance in a relationship.

  In some ways, the miscarriage has brought us closer together. Every challenge we’ve had to face has helped us to grow and understand each other a little bit better, and Luke was heartbroken too. But I know it didn’t hit him as hard as it has hit me. He is my life partner and he has always supported me, but there are times when he makes offhand comments that cut me to the bone.

  ‘You just need to get over it, Lib,’ he tells me one day a couple of months after it happened. He is so frustrated that we’re stuck in the same place, talking about the same thing over and over again. He’s made his peace with it, and he can’t understand why I haven’t. Maybe it’s because I’m a woman, I don’t know, but I really feel the need to talk about it. That’s just how I process things. And even though we are now trying again, I still feel devastated. I can’t believe we were pregnant and now we’re not. I can’t believe my body rejected the baby, and now we have to go through the process all over again. Luke just sighs and shrugs his shoulders. ‘We just have to move on,’ he says.