Body Lengths

by Leisel Jones

  Except my parents can’t afford correction. One quick glance at the statement of fees the surgeon slides across the desk is enough for them to see there is no way they can pay for this. ‘Um, that’s a bit more than we were expecting,’ Mum mumbles as she ushers me out the door.

  I want to throw myself at this guy, beg him to give me straight legs, but we’re out of the surgery and back on the street before I have the chance. Standing on the footpath in the blinding Queensland sunshine, my heart breaks as I stare down at my knees. They are burnished gold in the afternoon sun.

  It’s not until years later that we discover my knock-knees really are gold. Olympic gold. As a result of my twisted hip, I have excessive range in my hips, so that in any movement where my knees go together and then apart – a movement such as breaststroke – I am able to bend my knees wider than 99.9 per cent of the population.

  Because of my physiological make-up, I can move my legs in ways almost no-one else can. I can move faster, and with more power, grabbing more water with each frog-leg kick, to give me greater propulsion through the water. It’s as if I were born to do this. It’s a unique gift: my special, freakish talent. And all because my parents couldn’t afford to have my legs ‘corrected’.

  Later in my career I am dubbed ‘the extreme example’ whenever our swimming team works with our physiotherapists. As the physios run us through their usual tests and exercises, looking at things like shoulder extension and core stability, I am always off the chart when it comes to degree of flexibility in my legs and hips. ‘Ignore her: she’s a freak,’ they console my teammates as I move my legs easily past the 180-degree mark out to each side. ‘Don’t compare yourself to Leisel, she’s different,’ they say.

  There’s that word again, I think. Different.

  I am the white kid in the Indigenous hospital, the poor kid living on 300 acres, the swimming freak, the only child. From the moment I am born, I am like no-one else around me.

  I am a fish out of water. Even in the pool.

  2

  First Splash

  My first proper swimming lesson, age two, is a shocker. I nearly quit on the spot.

  Before this, I have had a few early splashes in the pool at Woy Woy, a quiet sunny hamlet on the Central Coast of New South Wales, where I visit my maternal grandparents. For some reason, in Woy Woy in ‘87, they are teaching kids to swim with floaties on their upper arms. In the rest of the country this is a no-no, even in the 1980s, but apparently no-one’s told Woy Woy. So at two-and-a-half, with imitation arm muscles of inflatable fluoro-orange plastic, I start making waves in the Woy Woy pool. I am a dog-paddle prodigy, a wunderkind of the water. I am super-confident and super-proud as I plough up and down the width of the pool.

  But then we move to Queensland, the Sunshine State, and it is a completely different story. In my first proper swimming lesson there, I am thrown – quite literally – in the deep end. Because Mum has told her I can already swim, my teacher flings me blithely into the pool and then watches in surprise as I sink and do not swim. I sit on the bottom and stare up at the world, bare-armed, blue-lipped and about as buoyant as a brick.

  ‘She’ll come up soon. She’ll surface any minute now,’ the teacher mutters on the pool deck. ‘Just gotta let her work it out for herself.’

  Only I don’t work it out and I don’t surface. Eventually someone realises that without my floaties I’m useless, and they fish me from the depths of the pool. I cough and retch and then, when I catch my breath, I throw the kind of epic tantrum two-year-olds are best at. I stomp from my swimming lesson, then bolt through the front entrance gate of the pool and hole up in the backseat of the car until Mum comes to find me. I am not going back, I tell her. The water has traumatised me in less time than it takes for my chubby toddler fingers to wrinkle like prunes.

  But Mum is adamant I will return. There are not many things in life that Mum will stick to her guns about. Not softly spoken, passive Mum. But learning to swim is one of them. Because we live in Queensland, where kids practically grow up in the water, and because Mum’s always taking me to Bribie Island or somewhere to have picnics and muck about on the beach, she is insistent that I learn to swim. It’s important to her that I am safe in the water. So much so, she becomes a swimming teacher in exchange for my swimming lessons, which she can’t afford any other way.

  Mum doesn’t have a job at the time, so she starts working at the pool, teaching other kids to swim. It’s funny – Mum only gets into it because of me, but she will teach swimming for the next twenty-seven years, long after I’ve perfected my dog paddle. She can’t swim herself, and she hates getting her hair wet, and it’s not long before she’s checking with me that she’s teaching correctly, but right from the very start, Mum is a pro at wrangling kids in the water.

  And she needs to be. After my first terrible swimming lesson, it takes some tough negotiating on Mum’s part to get me to return the following week. I don’t know what she promises me (red frogs from the pool canteen? my favourite TV cartoons when I get home?), but whatever it is, it works. Back I go, and in I get, and – week by week, slowly but surely – I learn to swim on my own.

  It takes some practice, though. I’m not one of those prodigies you hear about where the minute they get in the water the clouds part, a bolt of lightning hits the earth and an Olympic champion is born. I have to learn to swim just like everybody else. Kick – stroke – breathe. Kick – stroke – breathe. I even have to learn how to do breaststroke. It’s not innate. Far from it. My body might be built for this strange frog-legged stroke, but my brain and limbs and muscles don’t know that. I have to kick and ‘bubble’ and ‘froggy legs’ my way up and down the pool with all the other toddlers.

  And yet, at two-and-a-half, I am less than ten years away from setting my first Australian record.

  But first, long before I dip a toe in an Olympic pool, there’s the Burpengary Swimming Club.

  ‘Swimming club’ is a pretty flash name for a dinky pool in someone’s backyard, though, don’t you think? Our local pool – a 25-metre one, half the size of an Olympic pool – is a thirty-minute drive from our house in Wamuran. It’s basic: not glamorous whatsoever. It’s housed in what looks like an oversized backyard shed: roller doors, corrugated-iron roof and all. In front, a house has been plonked just off the roadside – an ordinary brick blob, with its back turned on the shed out the back and the pool inside it.

  Both the house and the pool belong to Colin Clifford. Col. The boss-man. He is my first real coach.

  Col coaches the squad at Burpengary: a bunch of twenty or so skinny-limbed, freckle-faced kids from the local area, ranging in age from about fifteen to seventeen. To us ‘learn-to-swim’-ers, squad is a big deal. It’s the dream. For us younger kids, the chance to one day join Col Clifford’s squad is the reason we’re all here. Well, that and friends and fun and Friday night club nights, when we all race one another while our parents cheer from the pool deck and get the barbecue ready. We play ‘Marco Polo’ and have bombing competitions and flick each other with wet towels and do all the things over-energised, over-excited kids do. And I love it.

  When I start at Burpengary, I am two-and-a-half and by far the youngest kid there. By the time I am twelve, I have been invited to join Col’s ‘squad’ and I am training with, and racing against, kids who are four or five years older than me. It doesn’t matter to Col how old you are. He wouldn’t care if you were 110 and swam with one arm tied behind your back. If you can keep up, you can step up, as far as Col is concerned.

  I love racing against kids who are older than me. Far out – I love racing against anyone! One of the first things I learn at Burpengary – other than how to stay off the tiles at the bottom of the pool without the aid of floaties – is that I love a challenge. I’m mad for it. You only have to think of a dare and I’m up for it. Give me a test, a task, a chance to prove myself, and I’m in. Reckon I can’t go sub-two-minutes at 100-metre breaststroke? Want to see me do an underwater handstan
d for longer than anyone else? Dare me to set a sausage-sandwich-eating record? Watch me! I just can’t help myself. And I’m sure Col uses this against me at times, manipulating my enthusiasm, my dogged determination to win, in order to make me train harder. I can see him doing it, yet I’m powerless to resist.

  One day during strength training Col passes me a besser brick. Don’t ask me why he has a besser brick handy. We are training in what is effectively his back shed, so maybe it is just the first thing he spots, there behind the Victa lawnmower and the old paint tins. Who knows? What I do know is this: a besser brick is bloody heavy. Like, five kilograms heavy. For anyone not familiar with the building industry or the inside of Col’s shed, let’s just say you wouldn’t want to drop it on your toes.

  This is my challenge: I have to tread water for five minutes, with no breaks, while holding a besser brick above my head. If I can do this, I will earn myself a Mars bar.

  ‘You in?’ Col asks.

  I am in. I stand on the edge of the pool, clutching my brick, readying myself to jump. Col rolls his eyes and takes the brick from my hands. ‘Get in first.’

  I plop into the water. I probably weigh only as much as eight or nine bricks myself. Col lowers the brick down to me and taps his watch to indicate he’s about to start timing. I grit my teeth and start to kick. Slow, circular, methodical kicks. I will do this, I think to myself, even if my arms fall off trying.

  Two minutes pass, then – slowly – three. My legs are tiring and my arms are burning. I adjust my grip where the edge of the brick is cutting into my wet fingers … Three-and-a-half minutes. Now four … Col stares at his watch with a poker face.

  ‘Nearly there?’ I puff.

  Col nods. And the thought of finishing gives me another burst of strength.

  ‘You did it,’ Col says, leaning over to take the brick. He raises one eyebrow to signal he’s impressed. Then he chucks a Mars bar into the pool for me, and I grin before diving for it. Victory tastes sweet.

  Treading water with a crummy old besser brick becomes a regular part of my strength-training regime. At least once a week I jump into the deeper end of Col’s pool and settle into an egg-beater kick while hoisting a brick above my head. At first, I manage five minutes. Then five and a half. By the time I can get up around the six-minute mark, Col decides it is time to call it a day. I’m not sure if it’s because he now deems my leg strength sufficient, or because I’m costing him a packet in Mars bars. Maybe Col never expected me to rise to the challenge in the first place. Whatever the case, we’re done.

  But I don’t really need Col’s Mars bars. I never did. I would gladly tread water with a brick for no reward. It’s the sort of thing I will happily do, simply to prove I can. I don’t need any incentive other than to know that I can do it.

  As I get older, I train harder and harder, because I have this insatiable hunger to win. I never stop to think whether I love (or hate) swimming. That never comes into it. All I know is that I need to win, and swimming fulfils that need. I need to be a winner: swimming gives me that.

  By the time I’m nearing the end of primary school, I’m training every day. Mum drives me the thirty-minute trip to the pool so I can be ready to jump in at 5 a.m. each morning. Then I train for a couple of hours, doing drills, exercises and fitness training – lap after lap after lap – until I’ve swum a few kilometres. Next is breakfast in the car while Mum drives me back to school in Wamuran. After school, I am back in the water by 4 p.m. and I train for another hour or two.

  Homework is squeezed in either before my afternoon training session or after I get home, but I always do it, just like I always turn up at training. I want to do everything and succeed at everything. And while I am not quite as focused at school as I am at swimming, I refuse to let it slide. I can’t. I’m just not that person. I want to earn more stickers from my teacher than anyone else in my class; I want to win the spelling bee despite not being the best speller in our grade. Whenever I get a ‘B’ on my report card, I think, Dammit! How can I improve? How can I get better? ‘B’s won’t cut it. I need to be awesome at swimming and awesome at school. I try to be both. I try to be everything. I am never happier than when I am winning. From when I am eight or nine years old, my Type A personality is alive and kicking. Leisel the winner. Leisel the perfectionist. She shadows me in training. She shares my lane. She matches me tumble turn for tumble turn. Then she springs out of the pool after squad is over, showers and changes, and follows me to school.

  I am in my final year at St Peter’s Primary School in Caboolture, and my classmates and I are signing farewell messages on each other’s school jumpers with black markers when a kid from my class approaches me.

  ‘Are you going to swim at the next Olympics?’ he asks.

  I’m baffled. ‘The next Olympics? You mean the ones in Sydney? In 2000?’

  It’s hard enough to believe that I might one day be good enough to swim at any Olympics. But that ‘one day’ might be in three years’ time? I admire this kid’s optimism, I really do. But I also let him know that he’s being ridiculous.

  Because it’s 1997, and apart from breaking the Australian 50-metre breaststroke record at the School Sport Australia Swimming Championships in Adelaide earlier this year, in a time of 35.36, the highlight of my swimming ‘career’ to date is still Friday night club nights at Burpengary.

  Club nights are the best part of my week. Each Friday evening I line up against the other kids from squad in a tournament of guts and glory, with a sausage sizzle on the patio outside afterwards. I am still a scrawny, runty kid – all skinny legs and knobbly knees. But that doesn’t stop me swimming my heart out while Mum barracks proudly from the pool deck. All ‘official’ timing is done by our mums, using handheld stopwatches, and our times are recorded in chalk on an old-school blackboard (a world away from the electronic pads and scoreboards that are mandatory today). Because club night is deemed an ‘official meet’, these times are the ones we use to qualify for bigger comps, like regionals or states. It seems incredible, but if you have a good night at our little backyard club night on Friday, you can find yourself heading off to the Queensland State Titles.

  I live for club nights, and I’m pretty good, too. But Burpengary on a Friday evening is a far cry from the Olympic Games. The Olympic Park Aquatic Centre in Sydney can hold more people than the entire population of Burpengary.

  In actual fact, Burpengary on a Friday night feels like a far cry from anywhere. The town is smaller than nearby Caboolture and Redcliffe, and it’s certainly nothing like the sprawling metropolis of Brisbane. There is a petrol station, a bakery and a post office. There’s no local high school, and the first major shopping centre won’t be built until six or seven years after I leave Col’s. They do have a train station in Burpengary – only there’s not much reason to catch a train there.

  And so I tell that kid in my class that he’s crazy. I’m just a Burpengary club swimmer and the Olympics are less than three years away. There’s no way I’d be good enough by then. No way.

  ‘And anyway,’ I add, ‘I’d only be fifteen.’ Who’s heard of a fifteen-year-old swimming at the Olympics?

  He seems satisfied with this answer and probably doesn’t give the conversation another thought. I certainly don’t: I am too busy swimming. In addition to seven or eight training sessions and club night each week, there are also Saturday competitions now and the occasional Sunday one, too.

  For every kilometre I swim in the pool, I reckon Mum racks up fifty in the car. She drives me to training, swim club, competitions, school and home. The only place Mum doesn’t drive me is to my friends’ houses to play, because there’s not much time for that these days.

  But I don’t miss it. I’ve got my swimming friends and, to be honest, I am probably closer to them than I am to any of my school friends, because we have more in common. We are all so determined. The kids in squad at Burpengary go to different schools, in different regions, but we all start and end the day together. An
d I love that. I love that it doesn’t matter who we are or where we’re from – it doesn’t matter what happened during school that day or what’s going on in our lives outside the pool – every morning and afternoon we’re all in the pool together. We’re pounding up and down in our lanes, caps and goggles on, doing our best for Col. Here, at Burpengary, I’m with the people who understand me most. The people who really get me.

  The other person who gets me is Mum. She knows what makes me tick and exactly how to handle me. Mum never pushes me, because she knows I would only rebel and do the opposite of whatever she said. Instead, her attitude towards swimming is always, ‘If you enjoy it, then go. But if you don’t, then don’t.’ As soon as I learnt to swim and was safe in the water, Mum was satisfied. From that time on she never forced me to go to a training session. But she supports me, of course. (What else could you possibly call a 50-kilometre round trip, twice a day, starting at the eye-wateringly early time of 4:30 a.m.?) Supporting is different to pushing: Mum is never a pushy sports parent.

  Hilariously, Mum never gets to grips with the intricacies of swimming as a sport. Sure, she understands the basic mechanics. She’s a learn-to-swim teacher: she has to. But as for the nuances, even when I reach an elite level, Mum is clueless. She can’t tell you the difference between a stroke rate and a lactate if her life depended on it.

  But what Mum does know is that I am absolutely driven. She’s very aware that if I take an afternoon off training and stay home watching TV instead of getting in the water, I’ll be sulky and restless and I won’t be able to shake the feeling that I’m missing out on something. If I know all my friends are at the pool having fun, there is no way I won’t want to be part of that.

  And then there is the winning. It’s obvious to Mum just how important winning is to me. She can see the importance I place on achieving and she knows all too well how angry and upset I get with myself when I don’t win. So Mum helps me to understand the sacrifices involved in achieving my goals.