Body Lengths

by Leisel Jones

  ‘I couldn’t resist it,’ she tells us. ‘I know it’s big, but a fish just seemed so appropriate for swimmers.’

  The cake could be in the shape of a donkey for all we care. It’s cake, it’s covered in chocolate and it’s big enough to share: that’s all we care about.

  We dutifully sing ‘Happy Birthday’.

  Then the birthday girl blows out the candles while we all stand around wishing she’d hurry up and cut the cake.

  ‘Is it good? I bet it’s good!’ We’re all jostling and shoving and fighting over the forks.

  Then the birthday girl lifts that first sweet, sweet piece of cake to her mouth, she takes a bite, and she – spits it out? We watch aghast as this beautiful object, this thing of joy, falls from her mouth and spills apart on the carpet.

  ‘Oh my God! Is that salmon?’

  The birthday girl spits and coughs and we laugh. We have to hold one another up we laugh so hard. Because underneath the chocolate frosting, buried among the sponge cake, are bold pink flakes of tinned salmon.

  The fish cake is fish. It’s really salmon.

  That’s it! The dietician is banned from all future birthdays!

  I’m competing in both the 100-metres and the 200-metres at this meet. I’ve been playing around with the 200-metres for a while now at training, but Fukuoka marks my international debut in this distance.

  While my racing schedule might have expanded, my training routine remains 100 per cent the same. Under Ken, my race warm-up for any race, regardless of distance, looks like this: first, I swim 400 metres of alternate freestyle and backstroke (that is, 50 metres of freestyle, then 50 metres of backstroke, alternating until I reach 400 metres). Then it’s 5 × 100 metres of freestyle and backstroke, only this time I ‘descend one to five’ (that is, I get faster with every 100-metre set). Next is six laps of 50-metre ‘open’. ‘Open’ means ‘explode out of the blocks’, or swim breaststroke as fast as you bloody well can. This is followed by 35 metres of freestyle, and this continues for six laps. But for those first 15 metres of each lap, you should be going flat out. Sometimes these laps are ‘open and closed’, which means swimming flat out for the last 15 metres too (so, flooring it for the first and last 15 metres of each 50). Finally, I do dive sprints to finish. This means diving in, swimming 50 metres ‘descending’ again (so building my speed), then jumping out at the end, turning around, diving in and doing it again.

  Then there are the drills. One ‘pull’ of your arms to every two kicks. Or ‘submarine’ breaststroke, which is breaststroke underwater. Or breaststroke ‘pull’ but with a butterfly kick; this one we do using flippers or ‘fins’ too.

  After this is the medley work, where I swim a variety of strokes to get all my muscles moving, and by this time I’m feeling pretty warm. To stay warm, I go and have a long, hot shower, then I dry off, put my suit on and have about 40 minutes before my race to get myself mentally revved-up too.

  All in all, I swim a minimum of 1500 metres to warm up for a 100-metre race. For the 200-metre event, I swim two kilometres, which is a lot of swimming for a pretty short race. My warm-ups never change. And while I like the routine – I find the familiarity of it comforting – I do wonder if it’s really necessary.

  My meet in Fukuoka is a strange mix of triumph and defeat, highs and lows. A combo as weird as salmon and sponge. Despite all my plans for gold and glory, and despite two very promising swims in the heats and the semis of the 100 metres, I go on to lose in the final. I come second to China’s Luo Xuejuan. It’s a race I was supposed to win and I am devastated. I get silver when I really should have got gold. I seem to be developing a bad habit of that.

  My race plan for the final was the same as ever: go out and swim hard. This is all I know. There’s no planning, no tactics. I swim sans strategy. It’s more than that, though: I have not yet learnt how to win, how to put a race together. I need to learn how to compete. I need to learn how to have control. In terms of mental composure, I am all over the shop, and my racing technique is haphazard at best.

  I am carrying my 100-metre defeat with me when I swim the 200 metres later that week. It is weighing heavily on me. And yet I should be pleased to be swimming in the 200-metre event at all. Just to be competing in this distance is a milestone. I qualify for the final but miss out on a medal, coming fourth with a time of 2:25.46. It’s respectable for my first attempt, but somehow I still feel disappointed. Fourth is so close, yet so far. Almost, but just not enough.

  After my individual finals, I feel low – but then things turn around with the medley relay. I swim with Dyana Calub again, but this time we also swim with Petria Thomas and Sarah Ryan. And incredibly – unbelievably – the four of us win. We beat the Americans. The Americans! They whipped us at Sydney last year, but now we return the favour. We win gold in a heart-stopping time of 4:01.50 to their 4:01.81; it is the first time the USA have been beaten at world or Olympic level in this event. Ever.

  What’s more, Australia beats the Yanks in the overall gold medal count as well, meaning we assume the global number one ranking in swimming for the first time since the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games.

  We’re number one! We are ecstatic. We sing bye-bye to that American pie all the way back to Oz.

  8

  Under Pressure

  I come home from Fukuoka to face a drug test. It’s nothing to do with me or my results; it’s just a regular part of the job. Drug testing is the worst thing about swimming. As soon as you become a professional swimmer, you must register with ASADA (Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority), WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) and FINA (Fédération Internationale de Natation) – a whole alphabet soup of organisations – to prove you are not taking drugs. Every three months, you have to go online and fill out a three-page questionnaire for FINA and ASADA, called your ‘Whereabouts’, specifying where you will be for one hour per day, every day, for the next three months. You have to tell them where you will be, when you will be there, what you will be doing and where you were the night before. There are bail conditions more lenient than this. Then, whenever ASADA or WADA or another organisation is in the neighbourhood, they pop by for a visit and you have to pee in a cup with the toilet door open, to show you are clean.

  Let me be clear: I am not against drug testing per se. Not at all. In fact, I think these organisations do an admirable job keeping our sport clean. And it’s not like I’ve got anything to hide.

  My problem is with the process. Pee in a cup? With the toilet door open? Really? There’s got to be a better way.

  But if there is, ASADA hasn’t heard about it. They are here again at training this morning. They come once a month, picking people at random for testing. In my registration log, I told them I’d be here at the Redcliffe pool, from 4.30 a.m. onwards, six days a week, ready and able to pee (just not overly willing). Thank God I’m not sick, or stuck in traffic. Because if you say you’ll be somewhere and you’re not there when they arrive, you get a strike against your name. Three strikes, and you’re banned from the sport, which, in theory, makes it possible to get a life ban for being tardy. Or being bad with online logbooks. This is a staggering thought. So I am glad I’m here this morning, even if it does mean being tested. I only wish I hadn’t just had a wee …

  Drug testing is all part of the job for me: the job of swimming, which is now my day job. My all-day, every day, no-holiday-pay job. At the end of Year 10, after I get back from the Fukuoka World Champs, I quit school.

  I leave school, I have turned sixteen, and life is sweet.

  Like everything else, leaving school was my choice: my decision, on my terms. Mum said it was up to me. But it didn’t feel like there was much of a choice. In 2001, at Southern Cross Catholic College, there is not much support for someone who is underwater for more than thirty hours per week. The Queensland school curriculum doesn’t allow for my training, doesn’t accommodate my absences. I can do Years 11 and 12 over three years instead of two, but in reality that won’t be enough. Gett
ing a free period here or there is nice, but it’s hardly enough time for me to complete the mountain of missed work that’s fast piling up. There’s no way I can swim 100-plus kilometres each week, travel to international competitions and complete Years 11 and 12 – and there is no other option. We don’t have enough money for a tutor; we barely have enough for school, even with a sports scholarship. So I leave.

  ‘I can always finish my QCE later,’ I say to Mum. Yeah, right, like I’m going to do that. I shove my uniform to the back of my wardrobe.

  But what I think of at the time as liberation turns out to be something else altogether. After training each morning, I bypass the school gates and head blithely home to – what? Several hours of uninterrupted stewing? A long stretch of worrying, stressing and overthinking? With the distraction of school gone, I spend my days planning, dwelling and generally obsessing. There is no point in my day when I am not thinking about swimming. And at the end of a slow day spent entirely in my own company, I am back at the pool for training again, swimming up and down in my own silent world.

  It’s not that I’m bored: far from it. I’m too industrious for that. I divide my time methodically between exercises, strength training, eating and sleeping. I am a swimming machine, an aquatic android. But while quitting school removes the stress of study from my life, I seem to double my worries with my increased focus on sport.

  It all puts a lot of pressure on my swimming. I no longer have an escape route, a Plan B. If I don’t have swimming, I don’t have anything, I say to myself. This is not helpful in any way, but it’s something I bring to every race. If I’m not good at this, what am I good at?

  Socially, I miss out too. Because I leave school early, I never go to a school formal, never go to a dance. I don’t go to the movies at the weekend; my only friends are swimming friends and we’re all too busy swimming. I don’t go to parties (not that I am really a party person). I miss out on all that normal teenage stuff – the bad music, the messy drinking and the long-haired boys.

  I do have a boyfriend though. His name is Trevor Whitehead and I meet him – where else? – at a swimming carnival. Trevor is a surfie who lives on the Gold Coast. He swims for the Palm Beach Currumbin Swimming Club, and each weekend, after Saturday morning training, I shower and wash my hair, then drive thirty minutes down the coast to Trevor’s house. We spend the weekend hanging at the beach: he on his board, me on the sand. In my time off I really appreciate staying dry. I stay at his place on Saturday night and then drive home again on Sunday. Trevor is tanned and ripped in that surfing way. And I’m pretty sure that Mum hates him. You could say Trevor is my nod towards normality, a slice of the life I left behind when I left school.

  During that first summer after I leave Southern Cross, many things change: my routine, my focus, my friendships. But the newest and strangest thing of all is that, for the first time in my life, I have money. I have sponsorships that earn me an income. At first they are low-key, a bit of fun. But soon I am offered bigger and more lucrative deals. Innoxa and Thalgo and Speedo sign on. So too do Ford and Uncle Tobys. The fine print varies between each arrangement, but mostly I am required to make several public appearances per year, wear or use their products and swim fast. Really, really fast. I can do that! I think. Choose me! Trust me!

  I am sixteen when I buy my first house. With a mortgage, of course. I am mortgaged up to my goggle marks. But it’s a home and it’s ours and – unlike my dad – our house can’t up and walk away one day. Mum and I live in my house in Redcliffe together, Mum teaching swimming part-time and me swimming to pay for the rest of the mortgage. It doesn’t occur to me that it’s not normal for a sixteen-year-old to be the breadwinner of the household or that not everyone my age is buying houses.

  What does occur to me, though, is that I have responsibilities. I have a full-time job and a mortgage and household bills to pay. My swimming pays for just about everything. Mum is still earning the minimum wage, and Dad left us in an enormous financial hole. So even with all of my sponsorship deals, we’re not yet back in the black. I might have been to the Olympics and broken world records, but we’re heavily in debt.

  ‘If you leave swimming, what will you do?’ Mum asks whenever I am fed up or tired or feeling despondent. I know that in her own funny way – her pragmatic Mum kind of way – she’s trying to be encouraging. But I feel the pressure to support her all the more.

  If I leave swimming, what will I do? Swimming is no longer fun. It is simply a job now. I’m working so hard to pay off the house and support me and Mum. The pool is a workplace; swimming is my profession. Because I didn’t finish school, I can’t go to uni anytime soon. So if I’m not swimming laps then I’ll be a bum, won’t I? How can I hope to pay the mortgage? At least, that’s how it feels to me. And if I screw up, it’ll all be my fault. I’ve got nothing to fall back on. If I screw up I can’t go home to Mum’s with my tail between my legs and ask her to help me out. Ding dong! Hi Mum, what’s for dinner? Mind if I move back in for a while? I can’t do that, because my mum lives with me.

  So now every race, every swim meet, every international competition feels like a risk. Don’t screw up. Don’t blow this. You can’t afford to lose! This is what I tell myself every time I’m on the blocks.

  It is what I am thinking when I put on the green and gold and head to the Manchester Commonwealth Games.

  The Commonwealth Games are more relaxed than the Olympics and much more low-key, given that many of the big swimming nations, such as the USA, aren’t included. When we arrive, the Manchester pool feels dark and dingy somehow, although that might just be because of the weather outside. Since swimming is a summer sport, we get used to perpetual sunshine as we travel the world to compete, so the grey skies of Manchester are something of a shock. So too are our dorms. That’s right: we’re sleeping in dorms in the athletes’ village in Manchester, complete with bunk beds and everything. Our accommodation is never glamorous, but these bunk beds are something else. It’s like being back on school camp. It’s like the Girl Guides I never joined.

  Bunk beds aside, Manchester is a great meet for me. I win the 100-metre and 200-metre breaststroke events. These are my very first titles on the international stage, and my heart swells when I stand on the podium and hear our national anthem playing for me. Mum isn’t here to watch me at these Games, because she couldn’t afford to come, but I can imagine her at home, cheering and crying with joy in front of the TV. I can’t summon tears myself though: I’m too busy feeling relieved.

  I did it! I made it! I’ve survived another day.

  I might have just won my first international title, but I am still just sixteen years old, and I’m all on my own.

  Except when I’m peeing: the ASADA guys like to be there for that.

  9

  Stilnox Days

  It’s 2003, and I’m in Barcelona. We are here for the World Championships, and it’s an important meet, because next year is an Olympic year. The Worlds serve as something of a practice run for the Olympics.

  I am queuing in the hotel dining room with the rest of the Australian team. It’s lunchtime and we’re hungry. Hungry in the way that swimming kilometres makes you hungry. Achingly hungry. Delirious, desperate and dreaming of carbs. The line for food snakes around the dining hall. It looks orderly enough, but peer a little closer and you’ll see it’s first in, first served. Youngest to the back! Respect your elders! Stacks on! Over here! The boys push and laugh.

  I pick up my plate, knife and fork, and take my place near the end of the queue. In front of me, two guys are talking and gesturing, but I can’t make out what they’re saying.

  Then all of a sudden the younger one, the one with a shock of sandy hair, turns to me and points his fork at me. I blink and back away in surprise. He stares at me. Without any hint of humour, he says, ‘I wouldn’t waste my time.’ He turns his back to me again.

  He wouldn’t waste his time on what? I’m stunned. I put down my plate and cutlery, and hurry away.
What did he mean? Is it some kind of joke? Is he saying I’m insignificant? What have I ever done to him?

  I know this boy. He started on the team only a year or so before me and we share the same management team. We could be friends; I’d like to be friends. But from what I’ve seen, he has trouble letting people in. I’ve watched him chatting with other people on the team, having a great time, getting along famously – and then, out of nowhere, he’ll cut them down. ‘That was really dumb,’ he’ll say and walk off leaving them speechless. Even now, after this incident, I wouldn’t say he’s malicious, or even particularly mean. Just warped. He has a warped sense of humour.

  He’s a big deal at these World Champs, though. He’s having a good meet. With three gold, one silver and one bronze at this meet alone, this kid is a household name. You might remember him from the Sydney Olympics? His name is Ian Thorpe.

  There are a few new names in the Australian swimming team at Barcelona. A few new ones, and some old ones missing. Kieren Perkins retired after Sydney 2000. So did Susie O’Neill. We may be heading into the meet with the world number one ranking, but this new-look Australian team has something to prove.

  Another big name who is missing is South African Penny Heyns. For the longest time – five years at least – she has been the biggest name in women’s breaststroke. Penny was born during the era of racial segregation and was South Africa’s first post-apartheid Olympic gold medallist, in Atlanta in 1996. She has held a staggering fourteen individual world records during her career; she is one of the best female breaststrokers in history. A Penny Heyns record is a formidable thing. An awe-inspiring, fear-inducing thing. Now, however, Penny has hung up her togs. She bowed out graciously with a bronze at Sydney in 2000. And all the top breaststrokers are jostling to take her position.