Body Lengths

by Leisel Jones

  ‘Brooke?’

  She looks up. At the best of times, Brooke has a reason not to like me. We’re rivals, after all. I understand this. In the previous twenty-four hours I have taken her place in the gold-medal-winning medley relay team, and that alone is reason enough to resent me. Brooke beat me in the 100-metre breaststroke final and so automatically earned a place in the medley relay final. But our relay coaches were aware that my best time was around a second and half faster than Brooke’s time in the individual final. I also had some Olympic experience under my belt and they knew they could rely on me to step up and perform under pressure. And so they chose me to swim. It was an unusual decision, a controversial one, and one that would have done my reputation back home no favours. Because, technically, Brooke had earned a start. I knew I could do a good job, but even so, all I could think as I stood on the blocks was: I’m already public enemy number one and you’ve gone and put me in the final? What will the ramifications be?

  The truth was I never put any pressure whatsoever on the coaches to pick me. And I want to let Brooke know. There has been talk in the Australian media in Athens of a rift between us and I want to make sure Brooke knows there’s no animosity on my part.

  ‘People are saying we’re fighting,’ I say to her. ‘Just so you know, that’s not how I feel. I have no hard feelings towards you. Never have.’

  I explain to her about Ken’s tactic of isolating me, how he is constantly pitting me against her. Perhaps this is the reason for rumours of a catfight between us, I suggest. ‘I’m really sorry if you’ve been offended throughout any of this, or if you think I don’t like you. It’s just not the case,’ I say.

  Then we give each other a hug. It’s simple and private. And so much better than making cruel and bitter comments in the national press, don’t you think, Dawn? When Brooke and I leave Athens, it’s on good terms. Screw Ken and his rules. Screw Dawn and her fucked-up opinions.

  After Athens, our team heads to the Greek Islands to celebrate. Mykonos: one of the most stunningly beautiful places on the planet. But I can’t even raise a smile. I am convinced my teammates don’t like me, and I spend days by myself, lying in bed.

  I have failed; I am a failure. There will be no new car, no sponsorship deals, no money to help us pay the rent again next month.

  I am, above everything else, devastatingly disappointed in myself. I want to go home, but I am fearful I am going back to face an angry Australian public. I want to crawl into bed and never leave it again. I have lost; I am a loser. I am alone and scared, and exposed on the world stage. The way the media is reporting things makes me feel as if I have shot someone, when all I did was try my best.

  I turned nineteen the morning after the Closing Ceremony. I’m now well and truly an adult, according to the law. But if this is what it feels like to be an adult, I want my money back.

  After my final press conference in Greece, one of the journalists asks me for an autograph. I sign it, of course. But as I do, I say to them, ‘I’ll sign this if you can please write the truth about me. Please write that I’m not really like they are saying I am.’ I don’t know if they ever do.

  I go to the markets in Mykonos, where Jodie Henry buys herself a giant yellow diamond ring to celebrate her performance at the Games. Jodie is the golden girl of Athens, with her three gold medals and three world records, and I am so happy for her. I really am. Jodie is a genuinely nice person, not like some athletes who are just in it for the fame. She hates all that stuff and I really like her because of it. But while I am pleased for Jodie, I can’t help but think, What happened to me?

  In Athens, every time I jumped in the pool I felt the pressure building and building, getting worse and worse, until I was begging Ken not to make me race.

  ‘Can’t I pull out? Can’t I pull out of this race?’ I asked Ken at one point. It was the Olympic final of the 200-metre breaststroke. My pet event. ‘I don’t want to swim. I don’t want to go out there,’ I tell him.

  I have never had the luxury of a sports psychologist, because Ken won’t allow them. They are for weak people. For losers, not winners. But that’s what I need. I need help; I need support. What I do not need is the likes of Dawn Fraser beating up on me, because I am now more than capable of doing it myself.

  And so begins my long battle with depression. A battle that nearly ends everything.

  11

  A New Start

  I return home to Brisbane and try to forget Athens, forget I ever went to that crumbling ruin of a city. This would be easier, however, if my first job off the plane wasn’t a welcome-home parade. It’s hard to forget you’ve been away when there’s a 10,000-deep crowd in the street to welcome you back.

  I am riding down Queen Street Mall, perched high on the back of a convertible, and there is an ocean of people in all directions: toddlers and grandparents and just about everyone in between. There are men and women in business suits who have given up their lunchbreaks so they can see us; kids in school uniforms, their safari hats pulled down low to keep the scorching midday sun out of their eyes. How do I thank these people? I wonder. How can a quick smile and a wave convey just how much they mean to me?

  Then a woman leans forward from the crowd and for one moment I think she might be about to throw something. A tomato? A rock? ‘You’ve got to work on your attitude, girl!’ is what she eventually hurls at me.

  I’m shocked. Is that what everyone thinks? Are all these people pretending to cheer and smile at me, but really they’re thinking I’m a bad loser? A poor sport? I choke back tears. I try to look grateful and gracious; I try to look happy. But this woman gets to me. She really does. What did the media say about me while I was in Athens? I wonder. What is it that these people think they know about me? It’s my fault, I suppose. Me and my stupid blank face. People think I’m angry or disappointed if I’m not grinning my head off when I’m standing on the medal dais. I don’t mean to look ungrateful. I don’t mean to look anything at all.

  And the truth is, sometimes I don’t feel like grinning. Sometimes I feel like crying or screaming or punching a wall. After all that training, all that effort, sometimes second place just isn’t good enough. Sometimes it just won’t do.

  I wish I was better at faking it, I think. Also, I wish she had chucked a tomato.

  After the parade, Geoff Huegill comes up and punches my arm. As well as being on the Olympic squad with me, Geoff, who we call ‘Skippy’, is my teammate from Redcliffe. ‘Hey, aren’t you going to get a tattoo?’ he says. ‘Wanna do it now?’

  Skippy’s right; I am planning to get a tattoo. At the Sydney Olympics, when I was only fifteen, I said that if I made it to a second Games I would get a tattoo. Now, at nineteen, I am legally old enough to get ink. Fresh off the plane from Athens, today’s as good a time as any.

  ‘Sure,’ I say to Skippy. ‘Why not?’ It’s turning out to be a good day for letting strangers stick pins in me.

  Skippy takes me to a tattoo artist in The Valley (Fortitude Valley, in Brisbane). The guy is a mate of his and Skippy rates his work. I ask for a tattoo of the Olympic rings that will sit just below the line of my togs on my lower back. Working painstakingly, the guy stencils the image onto me then tells me to look in the mirror.

  I take a quick glance.

  ‘No worries?’ he says.

  ‘No worries,’ I say. ‘Looks fine to me.’

  I walk back over to where he is armed with the needle and I brace myself for the pain.

  ‘Stop! You can’t tattoo that!’ Skippy says. The tattoo guy and I look up alarmed.

  ‘It’s upside down!’ Skippy says.

  He’s right. The Olympic rings icon – the internationally famous symbol for sporting aptitude and (presumably) an ability to know up from down – is sitting upside down on my lower back: two rings on the top, three on the bottom.

  ‘It’s three rings on top! Three on top!’ Skippy and I say, while falling all over each other laughing. ‘Take it off!’

  The
tattoo guy does as we instruct.

  ‘Can you imagine if you hadn’t pick up on it?’ I say to Skippy. ‘I would have looked like the biggest idiot! Oh, my Olympic rings? Yeah, I’m from Down Under. We like to stand things on their heads here …’

  Skippy and I double-and triple-check the colours of the rings before we give the final nod. Then I bend over a stool and white-knuckle it for the next forty-five minutes or so while I get inked. Mum would totally disapprove of this if she knew, I think with teenage satisfaction. I don’t care. Not too many people have an excuse to get the Olympic rings tattooed on them. I grit my teeth and squeeze my eyes shut as I lean over the stool, my hair flopping towards the floor.

  Citius, Altius, Fortius. The Olympic motto: Faster, Higher, Stronger. That’s what I’ll be. That is my future.

  Faster, higher, stronger. I’ll win gold next time. I’ll beat them all.

  Just about everything else in my life is turned on its head in the weeks and months after I get back from Athens. The first thing I do is call a press conference to announce that I am switching coaches. I need a new start, a new approach. After five years and two Olympics, after all Ken’s smother-love parenting, I have decided I need a new coach. At the conference I field a barrage of questions.

  ‘What made you choose Stephan Widmer?’

  ‘What do you think you can achieve with Stephan?’

  ‘What about Ken? He got you to your first two Olympics. Don’t you owe it to him to stick around?’

  ‘Have you told Ken? How did he take the news?’

  ‘Are you and Ken still on speaking terms?’

  ‘Why change now?’

  ‘Why not change later?’

  ‘Why didn’t you change earlier?’

  But my favourite question – and hands-down the funniest thing I have ever been asked by a journalist – is, ‘So, Leisel, tell me: are you a Buddhist now?’ The reason for the question is the book I am reading: The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. One of our team managers on the Australian team lent me a copy after she saw how angry and frustrated I was after Athens.

  ‘A Buddhist?’ I repeat. ‘Am I a Buddhist now?’ I don’t know what a Buddhist is supposed to look like (I haven’t got to that chapter yet). But standing there wearing my Team Australia tracksuit, with my racing-red fingernails and my chlorine-bleached hair, somehow I don’t think I quite fit the bill.

  Anyway, Stephan is my Buddha. He’s my maharishi now. My guru. With his sensible sandals and his all-seeing blue eyes, Stephan fast becomes my Swiss saviour in the Valley pool. Stephan gives me a whole new approach to swimming, a whole new direction.

  He even gives me my very own mantra: ‘This is my job. I know what to do.’ Stephan has me repeat this 20,000 times on a race day to remind me of all the training I’ve done. ‘This is my office. I come here to work.’ My job. My office. I can do this.

  Stephan teaches me to approach my swimming calmly and rationally. ‘You have a job to do, that’s all,’ he tells me. It’s not scary or intimidating. Swimming is simply what I do, day in, day out. Rain, hail or shine. Over and over and over again. And so when the time comes to race – no matter how big the event, no matter how high the stakes – there’s no need to choke. I am just carrying out my job.

  Stephan also teaches me to be methodical and precise and to focus on my technique. He is Swiss and his brain works just like the intricate, beautiful watches his country is so famous for. He is a joy to observe. His analysis, his strategising: it’s all new and amazing compared to my training with Ken. Everything we do is done for a reason. I no longer have the sense that I’m swimming kilometre after empty kilometre just because that’s what’s always been done. Stephan likes details and methodology. He likes there to be a reason for everything. And for the first time in my life, my training sessions are mentally exhausting. I love all the thinking, rationalising, planning and correcting. Unlike Ken, whose focus was on distance, Stephan will stop me after 100 metres if my stroke is not right. If I’m fatiguing, he will point it out; he won’t let me get sloppy. He is very technically advanced, and he is not afraid to try new ideas. Stephan has one house rule: no mobile phones at the pool. Each arvo at 3:30 p.m., my phone goes in my bag and I’m not allowed to touch it again until after I’m dry. I like this: I like his thinking. We are here to work; we are here to focus on swimming.

  This is my job. I know what to do.

  As soon as I switch to Stephan, he wants to start from scratch. ‘Let’s change your stroke, let’s be more efficient here, more streamlined here …’ He is going to rebuild me, re-mould me. He will make me his own. Where Ken was all about embracing who I was, Stephan can see who I am going to be.

  I watch videos with Stephan: hours and hours of footage of myself. Stroke after stroke, lap after lap. Stephan is not interested in having me campaign against anyone else. There’s no talk of Brooke or Tarnee or Amanda or whoever. It is all about me. About who I can be.

  About me, and also about ‘efficiency’. He repeats the word all day long: hardly efficient, but he gets it through our thick heads. Stephan’s accent is heavy; he carries Switzerland with him here in The Valley. And when he’s not talking ‘efficiency’, his other favourite is ‘undulation’. He says it deeply, with meaning and with passion. He sounds like Schwarzenegger, telling us to ‘undulate’. Un-du-laaa-shon. The word undulates itself as it echoes off the tiles. It is a joke in our squad for a long time.

  But he does get us undulating. We are smooth and rhythmic; we are moving with the water. Up and down, up and down: we are dolphins, we are seals. Stephan is instrumental in changing my stroke. The changes he makes will set me apart from everyone else for the rest of my career. He takes me from good to great. He creates my stroke.

  Then, when he’s fixed my stroke, he starts on my head. ‘Are you enjoying your swimming? Do you like coming to training?’ he asks. No-one has ever asked me this before. ‘Do you know why you’re doing this exercise? Can you see the point of that?’ He strengthens my brain while he tones up my body. Stephan teaches me how to compete, how to behave. He turns my attitude around. Stephan shows me that, come race time, the only real competitor is the one in my head. He teaches me to recognise what I can control. ‘These things,’ he tells me, tapping his head, ‘are the only ones to worry about.’ He makes us leave our issues behind when we train: we physically touch the door frame as we enter the pool deck to show we have left our problems at the door. It is mental, he teaches us, this swimming game. This job. He wants the best from us, the best for us. And he knows the way to achieving this is not by physical punishment.

  By early 2005, within six months of starting with Stephan, it is working: I am winning. I have never swum faster than I have with him. When I race now, it’s structured: planned. It feels right. I have a completely different racing warm-up now, one that’s much shorter and that includes lots of explosive work at the start to wake me up and get me going. Like ‘dive 25 metres descending’ (that is, getting faster and faster), which warms me right up and perfects my technique.

  My gym program is also new. I have started at the Queensland Academy of Sport (QAS) and I have a proper gym coach and a proper regime for the first time ever in my career. No longer just some guy running the local leagues club (as I’ve always had in the past), my coach is a professional and it shows from day one. Anthony Giorgi is the head coach at QAS and he has me working on my technique, doing some proper lifting. Back at Ken’s, I lifted adult weights as a thirteen-year-old. But 100-kilogram leg presses and pec machines have nothing to do with swimming. It was all about how much we could lift, how hard we could go. There was no strategy, no planning. Looking back, it was probably dangerous. Now, however, my gym training is structured and safe. I do lots of leg work and strength work. I hold the girls’ chin-up record, for doing a chin-up with 36.5 kilograms strapped around my middle. (We use a 20-kilogram plate, a 10-kilogram plate, a 5-kilogram plate and one 1.5-kilogram plate. I look like the Michelin man, but made from steel.) I
love the work. I love using weights. And I am leaner and fitter than I’ve ever been before.

  But it’s not just my physical fitness that Stephan is concerned with. One day he stops me on the way to do my warm-down.

  ‘What are you doing outside swimming?’ he asks. ‘What do you do when you leave the pool?’

  The list is short. Eat, recover, dream about swimming.

  With Stephan’s encouragement, I enrol at the Australian Institute of Applied Science (AIAS) at Stones Corner in Brisbane. I am going to do a diploma of beauty therapy. Mum saw the ad; she cut it out of the local paper for me. It’s not something I ever thought about doing until now, but as soon as Mum suggests it I like the idea. Beauty therapy. Why not? I’m interested in beauty and healthcare. I like making people feel pampered and special.

  It’s somewhat ironic that I choose beauty therapy as a hobby: as a swimmer, my body is treated like a machine. Swimming doesn’t allow time for pampering, doesn’t care how you’re feeling. Swimming is about performance, not appearance (although, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that on weigh-in days, when we stand around in our togs and await judgement on our bodies from our coaches, dieticians, gym coaches and the rest).

  Just as my school did, the college gives me a scholarship so I can afford to attend. The course is great. We learn how to do facials and waxing, and learn all about various skin products. It’s not rocket science, we’re not saving lives, but it’s fun and interesting, and most of all: it’s not swimming.

  The college is very flexible about accommodating my swimming schedule and I attend classes maybe twice a week, for a three-hour session each time. Some weeks I only manage to go once, sometimes not at all. But the teachers are always very understanding and I stick it out for two years all up. It’s such a good distraction; it’s just what I need. And at times the course content is actually really useful. Learning about the structure of our skin and the best ways to look after it helps me protect my skin, given all the chlorine exposure it gets. I have acid burns in several places on my body from swimming in chlorine for so many hours. I can never do enough to soothe my raw skin. But now at least I know a few things that might help.