Body Lengths

by Leisel Jones

  I have an amazing ability to block out everyone else – and everyone else’s opinions – and go it on my own.

  Then once I do? Well, then I am stubborn and dogged and I see the thing through. If I’ve dug myself into a hole then I just keep digging! I dig and dig until I finally prove you wrong. This is the reason I made it to the London Games. The reason I got back into my togs after Paul Kent’s article. The only reason I ever got up off the floor of that hotel bathroom in Sierra Nevada.

  It took me a long time to realise that sport is as much a mental game as anything else. When you step up behind the blocks, when you’re on the Olympic stage, if you can’t put it together mentally then you’re screwed. It took me more than five years of racing at the highest level to figure this out. Racing is seventy per cent mental and only thirty per cent physical, I reckon, and once you master the mental side then you’re fine.

  I field all the inevitable questions once I’ve finished speaking: ‘Why now?’ ‘What’s next?’ ‘Have I thought about a comeback?’

  I laugh at this last one. I have to retire first before I can come back, I say.

  ‘Career highlight?’ someone calls from down the back of the pack. And I pause before answering: ‘Winning individual gold at Beijing in 2008.’

  It’s the obvious answer, but not the only one. I could just as easily have answered: right now. Retiring right now, right here, like this: that’s a highlight, for sure. I am lucky to be leaving the sport on my own terms.

  By this point in my career, I’ve done everything I set out to do, I’ve ticked every box. I’m not walking away feeling dissatisfied at all. I’ve been to more Olympic Games than any other Australian swimmer. I’ve won more Olympic medals than any Aussie in any sport (equalled only by Ian Thorpe). I’ve had a thirteen-year international career. Won nine Olympic medals, ten Commonwealth gold medals. And now I get to retire the way I want, too? Not many athletes get to go out this way. On their own terms. I’m not injured, not sick; I didn’t miss out on team. In retirement – as with the rest of my career – I couldn’t have asked for more. I am doing it my own way.

  There was a poster on the wall of the marshalling area at the London Games. A huge thing, stuck to the wall just by the doorway, so that it was the very last thing you saw before walking out onto the pool deck. It was an old black and white image of the Olympic torch being carried into a stadium crowded with spectators, and there, high above the stadium, were the words of Pierre de Coubertin, the father of the modern Olympics: ‘The important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part. The essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.’

  I looked at that poster every time I walked out to race at London and each time it affected me deeply. It was a beautiful thing, that poster.

  That is what it’s all about, I think. For so long – for so much of my career – I had been doing it all wrong. Doing it for all the wrong reasons. Swimming wasn’t about me, I finally realised. It wasn’t about me at all. It was so much bigger than that. It was about everything. It was about life and taking part and about conquering the human spirit. It took me so long to figure that out.

  After all the shit that happened in London, after Stephanie Rice’s cruel comments, after the bullying from the boy’s relay team, after Paul Kent and fat-gate: after all these things, I finally realised that the Olympics is about more. It’s about coming together. About olive branches, not competition. One glance around the stadium, with all its flags, all these countries represented, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out it was about so much more than winning a medal.

  Yet it took me a long time to realise it. I had made my whole career about winning, but it wasn’t the point. It wasn’t the point at all.

  One of the greatest lessons I took from my career was that my gold medal didn’t make me into something I wasn’t already. Winning didn’t make me a better person, or a more attractive person, and it was never going to. But the Olympics might have made me a better person. Meeting people from all over the world; learning to get on with sixty different personalities within a swimming team. Learning how to deal with criticism, learning how to deal with praise. These things might have made me better. I’m a different person to that skinny little kid from Burpengary who first qualified for the team at just fourteen years old. But not because of winning. My medals don’t mean much; meeting the people I’ve met, having the experiences I’ve had – these are the things that mean something to me.

  Next week, I leave on a tour of regional Australia to help host swim clinics in mainly Aboriginal communities. Back to where I came from, back to my roots. There’s something circular in that. I may have come full circle, but I’ve changed along the way.

  You may not win everything in life. In fact, you are sure to lose sometimes. But the most important thing is to have a crack. I love that saying. Just give it a go. Just have a crack.

  30

  Back on Dry Land

  The most common question I get asked these days is: do you miss it?

  Do I miss it? Let’s see. Which bit do you mean? The 4 a.m. starts? Being so tired that I stagger around all day like a zombie, limbs heavy, muscles weary? Never, ever getting enough sleep? Smelling of chlorine all the time? Having wet hair, peeling skin? Do I miss that? Nope. Not on your life.

  What I do miss, though, is my friends. I miss being around like-minded people. People who are competitive, who have clear goals and who are as passionate about what they do as I was. Also, as much as the early starts sucked, I miss the routine, the structure. My day used to be organised down to the last minute. I knew when I would eat, when I would sleep and how much time in between I would spend in the pool. I knew exactly what I was doing when – and most important of all, I knew why.

  That’s the biggie. I miss why.

  When I was swimming, every single minute of every day was dedicated to getting faster. Swimming is so specific. You always know exactly what time you’re aiming for, to the smallest fraction of a second. To two decimal places! Now I find that life’s so vague. When I was swimming, I always knew my job. I knew exactly what I was doing and why: when I retired, I lost all that. That was really hard.

  A lot about retiring has to do with loss. Lost goals, lost purpose, lost hours of the day. The days seem to vanish. Some days I wonder how I used to fit it all in.

  I’m still in the midst of that lost feeling now. It’s almost three years since I announced I was retiring, and I still struggle with direction, with knowing what to do. In those first few months especially, I was not clear on why I was doing anything. Why was it I was getting up in the morning? Some days I didn’t: I just stayed in bed. I had to find new goals, new directions. I had to learn how to fill my life. All athletes go through this process, and all of them deal with it differently, but I’m in a better place now than I have been in the past. I’m more comfortable in myself. More myself than ever before. I will always be grateful for my swimming, but I am happy that chapter has closed. And as much as retirement wasn’t the party I hoped for, I wouldn’t change it for anything.

  Am I planning a comeback? I know it’s quite a popular thing to do. Libby did it, Skippy did it. Even Thorpie had a go. But I’ve started doing other things now. Commentating, for a start.

  My first commentating gig is in Glasgow at the Commonwealth Games in July 2014: the first Commonwealth Games, since 2002, that I attend but don’t compete in. I’m doing the late-night program on Network Ten with sports journalist Matt White. It is aired just in time for breakfast back in Australia. We have a great time. Matty is so much fun to work with, so professional. He has been commentating at the Olympics for nearly as long as I was swimming at them, he reminds me. I learn a lot from him, in between all the laughs.

  I do a lot of pool-deck interviews, speaking with swimmers straight after their races. I love this; this I can do. It’s like chatting with my friends, with my teammates. Most of the time I know just how they feel. Ian Thorpe and Steve Hooker are also
on the commentary team with us, and Thorpie and I agree it’s nice to be dry, nice not to get in the pool for a change.

  The network is happy with my performance at Glasgow and they ask me to do the Pan Pacific World Championships on the Gold Coast straight afterwards in August. The Pan Pacs are more low-key, more relaxed, but it’s still a good opportunity to get some commentating experience. Plus, the crew is the same one that we had in Glasgow and we have a ball working together again.

  I’m still keen to get more commentating experience, and Network Ten gets in touch with me for a third time. They have a project coming up – something new, something big – and they want to know if I might be interested.

  ‘Definitely,’ I say without hesitation.

  ‘This one’s different,’ warns the network. ‘It will be challenging.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’m interested,’ I say. After all, how challenging could it possibly be?

  So on 1 February 2015, I am helicoptered into Kruger National Park in South Africa for up to six weeks of gruelling reality television. It’s I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!. The premise is simple enough: take ten celebs and torture them with obstacles, challenges and the dreaded ‘Tucker Trials’ – where they have to eat everything from maggots to ostrich anus – until they cry: ‘I’m a celebrity, get me out of here!’ and they are evacuated and flown home.

  I cannot wait.

  Before it goes to air, the show’s line-up is top secret, so I can’t tell anyone what I’m about to do. Not my family, not my friends. I am sworn to secrecy and I don’t tell a soul. But one evening, just days before I fly out for South Africa, my friends and I are at a bar in Surry Hills and the show comes up in conversation. It has been heavily advertised – everyone knows about it.

  ‘Why would anyone do that?’ asks one of my friends. ‘Why would anyone volunteer to have to survive in the jungle? And on live TV?’

  Everyone agrees. ‘What’s the point?’ ‘What are they proving?’ ‘Are these people really at such low points in their careers?’ This is the general consensus: that to go on the show you must be desperate. I know a lot of people diss reality television, and that it can seem silly or futile (or just plain gross!). But to me, it’s a challenge: an opportunity. And I can’t say ‘no’ to either. I am still the same person I was back in Burpengary all those years ago. The ‘Type A’ kid. The perfectionist. I need to be better, aim higher, reach further than I did yesterday. And strangely, I’m A Celebrity gives me the chance to do that. I mean, how many times in life do you get the chance to be buried in offal? It might sound ridiculous to some people, but I’m always up for a tough challenge – especially a unique one like this.

  It doesn’t take long for me to discover that reality TV, especially this reality TV, is much harder than it looks. We fly into Kruger National Park and we’re immediately required to jump into crocodile-and hippo-infested waters. From here, it’s a twenty-kilometre hike into camp, only there are no dry socks for us, so the ten of us go sockless, with damp feet, in our new hiking boots.

  This hike is the real deal. It’s tough going and uphill all the way. More than once, a cameraperson goes sliding, and a couple of times they really hurt themselves. By the time we reach our campsite, we all have blisters: wet skin and hard boots are not a good mix. Over the course of the next week, our blisters become infected to the point where Maureen McCormick (‘Marcia Brady’ of The Brady Bunch) has pus-filled blisters the size of fifty-cent pieces. My blisters are almost as bad, but it’s hard to get medical attention without leaving the show. The best they offer is for us to show our feet to a doctor over CCTV.

  We are given seven and a half tablespoons of beans and rice per day, in total. We sleep outdoors, even in the rain. We shower outdoors. We poo in a pit toilet. And we are living this twenty-four hours a day. Viewers only see the highlights, boiled down into seventy-two prime-time minutes. In the jungle, we are pushed to our limits. We are perpetually being tested to see who will break.

  It’s very boring in camp. Boring and claustrophobic. We can’t go anywhere except the campfire or down to the river, so the ten of us bounce around, stepping on one another’s heels. We have to ask permission to go anywhere, even to the watering hole, and it can take up to half a day to get it organised and for them to move a camera crew down to where they are needed.

  But I never lose sight of why I signed up for this: the challenge. The thrill of pushing myself further than I have before. Back home, I am constantly challenging myself. I do it all the time in the gym. I can’t help it; it’s just my personality. I am constantly competing against myself. Constantly pushing myself to the limit. Just so I can feel alive.

  I am the first person in camp to be voted group captain. I admit, it feels good.

  I am gutted when I leave the show after only ten days. I am the first to go, the first one out. And I feel like a failure because of this. In my exit interview, I explain how I had hoped to stay in a lot longer. Not only to raise money for my charity, Headspace (which gives young people a forum to talk about mental health issues such as depression and eating disorders and bullying-related issues), but also because I haven’t challenged myself enough yet. I am pissed off about that. It may sound strange, but I’m disappointed that I get off unscathed. I never even get to do a Tucker Trial.

  What I did find time to do, though, was unleash my inner bogan. In camp, I become fast friends with the stand-up comedian Joel Creasey. I had never met Joel before the show, never even heard of him, but before long we are joking and mucking around like old mates, like I used to with my flatmate Barnsey. As you’d expect from a comedian, Joel has an awesome sense of humour and together we come up with a host of character roles that we use to amuse and annoy the rest of the camp. There are our anorexic models from Westfield Bondi Junction (‘Oh, I love the Junction. Just love the Junny. Have you seen my tiny dog?’) and our hipster cafe waiters (‘You want a panini? We haven’t done paninis since 2005. A panini? More like a pa-no-no.’) But my favourites are our bogan mums from the ‘burbs: Jeanette and Tracey.

  Jeanette (aka me): ‘We go out every Friday for Chinese.’

  Tracey (aka Joel): ‘You and Larry?’

  Jeanette: ‘Me and Lazza. We love it. Beef and black bean.’

  Tracey: ‘Oh and sweet and sour pork! And some prawn crackers.’

  Jeanette: ‘Oh, I love me pork crackles!’

  And so it goes. The rest of the camp look at us like we’re hilarious, mad and the most dangerous things in the jungle. But Joel and I have a ball. We forget that anyone else – like, the rest of the country! – is watching, and we just have fun. Joel is a world-class comedian (he opened for Joan Rivers), so I don’t expect to be able to keep up with him. But apparently my inner bogan is not buried so deep, because it doesn’t take long for him to coax Jeanette to the surface.

  In my exit interview, Dr Chris Brown asks me, ‘How far from Leisel Jones is that character of Jeanette?’

  Not far at all, I admit.

  And she’s really not. Although Jeanette and I differ in many (I like to think fundamental) ways, when I am playing at being this character I am as close to my real self as I have ever been in my career. When I am mucking around like this, pretending to be Jeanette or a panini waiter or an anorexic model in a Subaru Forester, I am relaxed and silly and looking for laughs. My real self, in other words.

  I have never sought the limelight in life. That’s not me. I never wanted to be famous. I just happened to be good at my day job. But being on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! was different. I was on TV because I chose to be there. And I was not performing; I was just being me. I could never pretend to be anything other than myself, not for ten days. Nobody could. So the Leisel you saw in camp, the Leisel that’s up for a challenge but also up for a laugh: that’s the real me.

  I have spent so much of my life being something I’m not. Being guarded or self-censored or doing what someone else tells me to do. Swim like this, talk like this, think
like this. Win like this. My life has always been so controlled, so structured, from a very young age. There was always an agenda: a media agenda, a sponsorship agenda. I spent so much time giving other people what they wanted. But this meant that no-one saw the real me. No-one saw the Leisel Jones who did bad dancing to amuse her friends. No-one saw the Leisel Jones who stuck food up her nose in the Olympic village to get a laugh. No-one saw Leisel Jones, practical joker, class clown. No-one saw me laughing, but no-one saw me crying or hurting inside either. No-one saw when I cried out for help.

  The one regret I have about my career is that people didn’t see the real me. I never had much of an opportunity to reveal her, but when I did I kept her stuffed down inside. I kept her shoved under the rug with that moose. I really wish I was more myself. I really wish I had lifted the rug sooner.

  Mum says she got my medals out recently and had a look at them. Checked to see they were still ok.

  ‘They’re flaking a little,’ she tells me over the phone. ‘The gold is flaking off some of the older gold medals.’

  ‘Really?’ I say, half-listening. I am cooking dinner and checking my emails at the same time I am talking to her.

  ‘You could get them re-dipped, you know,’ Mum suggests.

  We talk for a while longer. Then we wind up the conversation. ‘Think about it,’ Mum says, at the same time as something begins boiling over on my stove.

  ‘About what?’ I say, as I rush to take the lid off.

  ‘About re-dipping,’ Mum says.

  I will, I promise her silently. I will consider re-dipping.

  But for now – for possibly the first time in my life – I am content with the way things are.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you:

  To Mum for never limiting my belief that I could achieve anything in this life. You have always allowed me to think anything was possible and for that I thank you.