by Leisel Jones
The first thing I see inside the international terminal, en route to Athens, is Laurie Lawrence queuing at check-in with a roll of artificial turf under one arm. Once an Olympic coaching legend, Laurie doesn’t coach anymore, but he’s still a big part of the Aussie entourage, travelling with us to motivate, inspire and unite the team.
Right now, we’re united. United in disbelief.
‘Grass?’ We tease Laurie. ‘We have to bring our own grass?’
We’ve all heard the rumours about the Olympic village in Athens. That it’s a little rough around the edges. That it makes the Acropolis look five-star. But BYO buffalo is ridiculous, even if it is plastic.
Laurie, however, is insistent.
‘This is homegrown Aussie pride!’ he shouts at us, though this grass has not been grown – or rather, produced – anywhere other than a plastic factory. Laurie doesn’t care. And Laurie never speaks; he only ever shouts. He shouts like it’s the last 25 metres of the final and in the lane next to you Amanda Beard’s togs have just fallen off. He waves his roll of shiny green plastic spikes at us: ‘I’ve got the green, now you bring the gold!’ Then he’s off giving a rendition of ‘Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, oi, oi!’ that echoes round the terminal and makes the windows shudder.
Later, on board our flight, I ask Laurie about the grass. He tells me it’s for the patch of dirt outside our Aussie compound in the Olympic village. The village will be our base for almost a month, so Laurie wants it to feel like home. Plus, you get the sense he’s marking our territory, protecting our turf, building us a barricade of inflatable boxing kangaroos.
‘And where else would we put the Hills Hoist?’ Laurie deadpans. And I’ve known him long enough that I’m worried he might just be serious.
Turns out, however, that the grass was a good idea. Athens is diabolically unfinished. It’s comical how dodgy things are. There are dirt mounds and construction sites all over the place. The plumbing is shoddy and we are banned from putting any toilet paper down the toilets. Instead, we have to dispose of it in rubbish bins in the bathrooms. One of our swimmers, Giaan Rooney, nearly floods her entire apartment when she forgets and tries to flush toilet paper down her loo. There are six-inch nails lying around, so we can’t walk anywhere, even the pool deck, without shoes on. And the pool itself is an outdoor affair, so when we’re not battling it out with our competitors, our inner demons or the stopwatch, we’re fighting against the elements. Every second day or so, the wind picks up, coating the surface of the water with a thick, sludgy layer of dirt.
Laurie should have brought more grass, I think.
Then, the day before my first final, I score myself a black eye. One of the things you have to get used to as an Aussie swimmer is the fact that everyone else in the world swims in the opposite direction. Just as we drive on the left side of the road, in training we swim on the left of the lane, whereas everyone else (apart from the New Zealanders) swims on the right. This makes it hard to warm up. You either have to get a lane strictly for Aussies and Kiwis, or you have to reverse how you swim. Having trained every day for years and years going clockwise (even your tumble turns are done with a clockwise approach), you suddenly have to reverse it in the lead-up to your Olympic race.
Today, during the swim-down after my semi, we have an Aussie lane going our way, but one of the European guys jumps into it and begins swimming the other way. He hits me smack in the face at full speed, and my goggles, which have no foam, cut me under my eye. Way to put a girl off before her race.
However, us Aussies have brought a secret weapon from home. There, perched proudly on our plastic grass are our POOS (Parents of Olympic Swimmers, or – in non-Olympic years – Parents of Our Swimmers). For most of our POOS, this is their one big trip for the year, the big overseas adventure to watch their kids swim. My mum saves up all year for a trip like this. They all wear matching caps and t-shirts and who knows what else, all printed with ‘POOS’, and they think they are just hilarious. There they are, lined up next to the American parents, who always look so slick, so cool, as if they’ve just stepped out of a Tommy Hilfiger ad. There are our POOS. The dags!
For me, Athens is a farce even before racing has begun. Walking around the pool deck in my togs and runners so I don’t impale myself on a rusty nail. Training in reverse. Remembering not to flush the toilet paper … But it’s not the hastily constructed buildings or the unflushable toilets that are the fakest part about Athens. It’s not even Laurie’s plastic grass. No, the falsest thing about my 2004 Olympic campaign is what my coach tells me.
According to him, I’m in unbeatable form.
As I hit the wall and look up, Ken shakes his head in disbelief. ‘1:08.19!’ he exclaims. ‘You’re unbeatable! Unbeatable! No-one in the world is doing these times!’
And so it goes. Every day: a better time. Every set: a greater accolade. I’m astonishing, incredible. I am by far the best women’s breaststroker on the planet. I don’t get out of bed for anything less than a 1:10. In the months and weeks leading up to the Athens Games, I am training harder than I have ever trained before. I’m training harder and harder, and my coach is talking more and more bullshit.
‘There is absolutely no way you can be beaten,’ Ken tells me. ‘You’re the best there is.’ ‘You’re unstoppable.’ ‘You’re a machine.’
The only problem is: it isn’t true.
Like most athletes, swimmers are much slower in training. When we train, we’re swimming kilometre after kilometre, and often with fins or drag suits or our slow togs on. (Yes, your saggy old togs do make you swim slower.) We get tired, we get bored and, as a result, in training we can be up to 12 seconds slower over 100 metres than we are in races.
And yet, according to Ken’s stopwatch, I am doing sub-1: 10s every time I get wet. These are speeds I might produce in a race. There were swimmers who would be slower in the semis at Athens.
Ken has always had a quick trigger-finger on the stopwatch. But can he really be that quick? The man is an Olympic-level coach, I tell myself. His timing can’t be too far off the mark.
And so I buy into the dream. I pay up in full. If Ken says I am number one, I’ll believe his maths. If he tells me I am the world’s best, well, I must be. And when Ken tells me I am doing 1:08s in training, then my only thought – the only possible thought – is: Imagine what I’ll do when I race?
Ken has me believing I am the best in the world. And when he isn’t yelling out my mind-blowing times, Ken is busy convincing me I am better than Brooke. ‘Do you think Brooke is doing these times?’ ‘You think Brooke’s doing a 1:08 in training?’
Brooke Hanson is my rival, my main competitor. She is also my friend. Brooke swims for Nunawading Swimming Club in Melbourne and is the only person in the world in the last twelve months to have put a scratch on me. At the Nationals in March, Brooke won the 100-metre breaststroke; it was the first time I had lost a National Championship since I started swimming in them. Now, though, Ken is convinced of my superiority and is reminding me of it at every tumble turn. ‘This is seconds ahead of Brooke!’ ‘You’re gonna smash Brooke!’
Oh, for God’s sake, shut up! I want to yell. I don’t care about Brooke!
I am not, by this stage in my career, interested in comparing myself to others. It might sound strange for a professional athlete, but I’ve been learning to focus on my own results lately. I just don’t think it’s any of my business what other people are doing, even my competitors. Also, who’s to say Brooke won’t pull something out of the bag on the day? I might be destroying every one of her training times, but what’s stopping Brooke – or anyone else for that matter – pulling out a 1:07 in the final?
I am only ever interested in competing with myself, so Ken comparing me to Brooke every day is doing my head in. But because he is my coach and therefore to be respected – and because I am only a kid, so what do I know? – I don’t say a thing. I just swim harder and hurt more. As if this will guarantee me gold in Athens. I will earn this med
al. I will deserve it more than anyone else, I tell myself.
In the month before we take off for Athens, I set a new world record in the 200 metres at a meet in Brisbane. 2:22.96. I am ready.
Then, several days before we leave for the Games, my local Ford dealership invites me down to their showroom. I am sponsored by Ford and ever since I won silver at Sydney in 2000, I have been zipping around Redcliffe in a snazzy red Laser. Now, however, there is talk of an upgrade.
‘See that?’ the manager says, pointing along a row of gleaming, metallic beasts. Their duco is so shiny I feel I should break the surface and start swimming laps in them.
I follow his finger. ‘That one?’
There, in all its majestic lime-green glory, is the most lurid, most garish, most hands-down showy car I have ever seen. It is love at first sight.
‘That?’ I say again excitedly. ‘That green one on the end?’
‘That’s the one,’ he says. ‘You win gold in Athens and that XR6 is yours.’
And that’s it: I’m a goner. I want it, and I want it bad. Just ten minutes in the Torque Ford showroom and I realise I’ve been colour-blind. For the last four long years, I’ve been focused on gold, when the whole time I should have been dreaming of lime-green. I tell the manager I will be back for my car. I swear I will. I will come straight here from the airport after Athens and I’ll bring my gold medals with me. I’ll wear them into his showroom right here. He shakes my hand and pats my back and tells me he doesn’t doubt me.
Now I’ve got lime-green pressure to go with my regular Olympic-flavoured pressure. Olympic-sized pressure to win Olympic gold.
Because I won two silver medals in Sydney, I tell myself that the only option in Athens is to win gold. Gold is the natural progression. It’s the inevitable result. And of course this time I want three: 100 metres, 200 metres and the medley relay. Three gold. An Athenian trio. A rolled-gold trifecta. Three gold to hang from the lime-green rear-vision mirror of my new XR6. Nothing else will do.
Looking back, it wasn’t even that I particularly wanted a green XR6. If Ford had never earmarked it for me, I would never have known I needed it. Mostly it was the fact that it was a free car (a free car!) that sucked me in, because I still hadn’t shaken the ‘poor kid’ mentality. I’d eaten too many minute steaks and cheap spuds for that. I am still fighting hard to dig me and Mum out of the financial hole Dad left us in. Every time I line up on the blocks to race, I am thinking about mortgage repayments and grocery bills and how a good performance now could pay our electricity bill for the next twelve months. When I see ‘AUS’ on the board beside my name. I have an urge to draw a line through the ‘S’ to turn it into a dollar sign. Yes, I am swimming for my country, and I couldn’t be prouder. But I am also forced to swim for money.
Money and a car. I imagine myself pulling out of the showroom in this lime-green monster and laugh when I remember how our battered old rust-bucket broke down on the highway en route to my first Olympic trials back in 2000. That memory will never truly leave me. Nor will my insatiable hunger to win. I want this car. I will win this car. Deep down, I am still that twelve-year-old kid treading water with a besser brick above her head just to win a Mars bar.
So when I arrive in Athens in August 2008, I am here for gold. I have been convinced that I cannot lose, that I cannot be beaten.
But that’s not right. Anyone can be beaten.
My first race is the 100-metre breaststroke, and I go into the event as the firm favourite. I am the fastest qualifier, having set an Olympic record of 1:06.78 in the semis the day before. This is more than a second clear of Brooke Hanson and almost two seconds faster than the USA’s Amanda Beard.
I cannot lose. I will not lose.
But in the final I am nervous, unsettled. I am strangely quiet in the marshalling area; I am not my chatty, silly self. I stand on the blocks thinking, This is it. This is do or die. As if I will be taken out the back and shot if I don’t win this race.
My dive is average, my stroke rate the same. My tumble turn (usually one of the best in the world) lets me down, and I struggle to bring it home in the last 25 metres, and finish third. Chinese swimmer Luo Xuejuan takes out the gold, and I squint at the board to see who is second.
Brooke.
Brooke Hanson has beaten me in the Olympic final. So much for Ken’s confidence. I have lost to Brooke by one hundredth of a second.
I am shocked.
People often tell me what an honour it is to be an Olympian. ‘It’s such an achievement just to be there,’ they say.
Let me tell you this: I don’t get up at 4 a.m. every morning and swim twelve kilometres a day ‘just to be there’. I don’t do three-hour gym sessions just to be there. I don’t do weights until I want to cry, I don’t eat like a robot, and I didn’t give up school and my friends and being a normal kid just to be there. I do it to win. And when I don’t win? When I come third in an Olympic final that I am the fastest qualifier for? When that happens, it hurts so much I want to die.
I go to bed that night and cry. I feel like I have let my coach and my team down; I feel like I’ve disappointed the whole of Australia. I think about Mum and all the hours she has spent driving me to training, all the weekends she has given up to watch me swim. The thought of her and all the other goofy POOS, who were so excited and nervous before my race, makes me sob even harder. Going into the event, I was still brainwashed enough to believe that I was unbeatable, that Brooke’s win at Nationals was a mistake. A blip. I had all of these people to impress – my coach, my team, my country, my mum – and I never thought I could lose.
The next day I have a day off. A day to stew, ahead of my 200-metre event the following day. Inside the Olympic village we have very limited access to the outside world. There are no newspapers and there is no news from home, so we know nothing of the outside world. In 2004, there isn’t easy internet access everywhere like there is now, and we certainly don’t have the internet on our phones. You have to go to a PC if you want to look anything up. But you don’t. You have a job to do and you focus on that – and it never occurs to you to google yourself. So when our swimming team manager bails me up in a corridor that morning and begins ranting at me, my first reaction is simply confusion. I have no idea what she’s on about.
‘Your attitude is going down very badly back home,’ she says. ‘The Aussie fans are deeply unimpressed and you’re being crucified in the press.’
I am baffled.
‘You might want to work on that attitude of yours, Leisel.’ Without any further explanation, she stalks off down the corridor.
My attitude? I’ve just swum the most disappointing race of my life and people want to complain about my attitude? Fair enough if it’s about my stroke rate or my tumble turn or my performance in the last 25 metres. I have a few complaints of my own to register about these things. But my attitude?
And that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that I have to get up and do it all over again tomorrow. I still have the 200 metres and possibly the 100-metre medley relay to go.
I can’t help feeling that this conversation should never have happened. For a start, the swimming team manager should never have spoken to me (that’s a job for our media manager who, on this trip, happens to be Brooke Hanson’s dad.) Moreover, nothing should have been said by anyone until after I’d finished racing. But as mad as I am that this conversation took place, I have to put it out of my mind and focus. Somehow, I have to get my head together and get back in that pool.
But first I want to know who’s been saying what about me.
The ‘who’ bit is easy. It doesn’t take me long to learn it was former Olympic swimmer Dawn Fraser. Dawn, who has been here and done this, and who should know better than anyone the kind of pressure I am under.
The ‘what’ part is harder to swallow. Dawn has told the papers that I am ‘suffering from having a swollen head’ and that I haven’t been ‘the most popular person in the team’ because of the way I ‘tur
n my back on my rivals’. (Here, she is referring to Ken’s technique of separating me from my rivals. Even in training he makes sure Brooke and I are in separate lanes, or in separate training groups. ‘This is stupid,’ I complain. ‘We’re friends!’ And we are. We had fun together at our orientation camp in Stuttgart, ahead of Athens. We will room together in 2006. But Ken will not be moved.)
Dawn is out of line in commenting on something she knows nothing about: namely, me, who she’s never met. But it’s not just that. Nor is it just that her comments seem to be made in response to a photograph of me on the podium, a photograph that, taken in a split second, appears to show me scowling. (In fact, I am scanning the crowd for Mum’s face. I am devastated with my performance. I am bitterly disappointed. And I am looking for my mum for some reassurance.) No, it’s more that I feel like Dawn should be on my side, in my corner. I’m swimming for the same country as you did! I want to shout at her. We’re on the same team, Dawn, remember?
But then I read the thing that will get to me most about Dawn’s tirade – the thing that reaches into my guts and twists them hard. Dawn calls me ‘a spoiled brat’.
A spoiled brat.
When does Dawn think I was a spoiled brat exactly? When Dad walked out on me when I was twelve years old and our house was repossessed? When I was sixteen and we used the money I earned from swimming to pay the mortgage and put food on the table? Is that when Dawn thinks I was the most spoiled?
She clearly has no idea of the pressure I am under to win.
And so I seethe for the next twenty-four hours.
I am seething when I lose the 200 metres to Amanda Beard by 0.23 of a second. And I am still seething when we win the 4 × 100-metre medley relay in a world-record time of 3:57.32. But I don’t dare look like I am seething. From now on, I will only go out and front the media with a great, big, stupid grin plastered across my face. I will never again be myself in the public eye, I vow.
In fact, the only time I am not seething is when I see Brooke near the pool deck and I walk slowly and deliberately towards her.
