Beneath the Surface Read online

  Libby Trickett OAM is an ambassador for Beyond Blue. A portion of author royalties from this book will be donated to assist Beyond Blue to continue supporting Australians suffering with mental illness.

  First published in 2019

  Copyright © LLT Discretionary Trust 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  ISBN 978 1 76063 282 3

  eISBN 978 1 76087 234 2

  Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Cover Design: Deborah Parry Graphics

  Cover Photograph: Louis Saggus

  To those who have known darkness.

  You are not alone, there will be light again.

  This is for you.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  2012

  1992

  Chapter Two

  2013

  2002

  Chapter Three

  2014

  2003

  Chapter Four

  2014

  2005

  Chapter Five

  2014

  2005

  Chapter Six

  2015

  2008

  Chapter Seven

  2015

  2009

  Chapter Eight

  2016

  2010

  Chapter Nine

  2017

  2012

  Epilogue

  2019

  Pictures

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  2012

  ‘The wound is the place where the light enters you.’

  —Rumi

  There are no waiting times for elite athletes. When the pain in my wrist doesn’t lift, I go to see one of the leading sports doctors in Brisbane; he sends me for an MRI and refers me to a specialist, and I get in straightaway. I go to Dr Phillip Duke in his private rooms at St Andrew’s Hospital, where the walls are lined with autographed rugby jerseys and sporting memorabilia. He treats the Wallabies and the Queensland Reds, so he knows a sporting injury when he sees one. And he knows exactly what he’s looking at when he sees my scans. ‘You’ve had a catastrophic injury to your wrist,’ he says. ‘It’s a full tear of the scapholunate, and it could very easily mean the end of your swimming career.’

  This is confronting—of course it is. The word ‘catastrophic’ is confronting. But the end of my swimming career? How is that even possible? I haven’t been in a car accident or had a severe fall. I’m not a footballer—I don’t get smashed around on the field every week. I was doing weights at the gym one day and felt a twang in my wrist. And now we’re talking about the end?

  In twenty years of competitive swimming, including three Olympic Games, I have never had a single injury. Okay, so I’m injured now, but that doesn’t mean it’s over. I feel like I only just found my groove again. I came out of retirement, I swam at the London Games. I’ve only just rediscovered my passion for swimming, that real love of the water. So it can’t be over now—I won’t let it be. No worries, I think to myself. I’ll come back from this. But the word ‘catastrophic’ keeps bouncing around in my head.

  I want to go to my fourth Olympics so badly I can taste it. After a while, your career is not about any single gold medal, it’s about longevity. It’s about how long you can perform at that level. The pack starts to fall away, and you find yourself in a rarer and rarer crowd, the elite of the elite. And you get a rush from chasing that kind of distinction. I’m swimming for my legacy. This goal has become weird and obscure, but it’s still a goal, something out in front of me that I can strive for, that drives me forward. It’s something that I can channel all of my competitive spirit into, that restless energy that has always been inside me. Three Olympics is impressive, but four is legendary. If I swim at four Olympic Games, history will remember me. I don’t mean to sound egotistical—I just want people to think of me fondly, the way I think about the great swimmers who came before me.

  Anyway, I’m not there yet. I haven’t achieved enough. There are so many people who have won more medals than me, and at fewer Olympics. There are people who have swum at more Games, and there are people with more world records. I’m never going to beat everyone, but I’m not done trying. At the very least, I have to make it to the World Championships in Barcelona next year, in 2013. It will be the tenth anniversary of the first time I qualified for the World Championship team, when I went to Barcelona in 2003. Ten years swimming at an elite level, bookended in one of my favourite cities in the whole world—what a perfect moment. I can’t even contemplate not making it.

  It was a maybe. Maybe my career will be over, maybe it won’t. Phillip refers me on to a wrist specialist, Dr Mark Ross, who recommends a full wrist reconstruction. I’ve never heard of a wrist reconstruction; it turns out they are quite rare, and as a result maybe ten or fifteen years behind knee and shoulder reconstructions in how sophisticated they are. Mark and a fellow doctor have pioneered a new procedure, which only twenty or so people have had before me. It involves drilling through five bones in the wrist and threading a piece of ligament through the hole, then anchoring it on the far side of the wrist. They’ve seen some great success in the short term, but they don’t have any long-term results. That makes no difference to me. This is my only hope—what choice do I have? Mark thinks it’ll take around three months for me to rehab and get back into training—assuming the procedure works.

  The surgery is scheduled for December 2012, and I’m in the pool right up until the day I have to go into hospital. I’m doing a lot of kick work, keeping my legs strong while my wrist is out of action. Three months is fine, I think. Barcelona is not going to happen, but I can have three months out and still get back in form and on track for the Rio Olympics in 2016. I’ll scale everything back, do what I can, keep my diet up, keep my cardio up, and I’ll be good. So many people have come back from severe injuries, I tell myself. Petria Thomas came back from three shoulder reconstructions—three! Eamon Sullivan had eight hip surgeries, countless cortisone injections, a broken foot. He had severe shoulder issues and back issues, but he came back, so I will too. That’s all there is to it. I am a doggedly optimistic person—pig-headed, some might say. But that attitude has always served me well—it helped me become a champion—so why should I behave any differently now?

  The surgery is a success, but it’s incredibly painful. I’ve never had any trouble sleeping before but I find that if I roll the wrong way in bed or Luke, my husband, knocks me in his sleep, I wake up with my wrist throbbing and break into tears. I’m on strong pain medication but it doesn’t touch the sides, especially in the first few days. The ache is constant. I’m used to pain, to pushing through aching muscles and tiredness in the pool, but this takes me by surprise. The swelling is intense, too. I feel really off-balance, and training in the pool is out of the question. I try to get back onto the exercise bike, to keep my metabolism up, and I do whatever I can at the gym that isn’t weight-bearing, but it’s not
much. My body really needs a timeout, but my athlete’s brain kicks in. Okay, I can’t swim—but I can run. I can work on my core, maintain my fitness. I can improve the parts of my repertoire that don’t usually get focused attention, and make them even stronger. I can maintain my momentum.

  The weird thing about this is that it has all happened so fast. I trained for two weeks after hurting my wrist, before I realised it was serious. I booked in with the physio and they told me I had tight forearms, but massage didn’t help. Two weeks after that I was in surgery, and now I’m here. My life has taken a very sharp turn, and my head is still spinning. I make an appointment with my sports psychologist, Georgia Ridler, to help me stay positive. Georgia has a lot of experience working with athletes, though a lot of it is performance-based. She helps with mental preparedness on the day of a race, which is a specific component of training. But if athletes are struggling with self-esteem or other mental-health issues, Georgia is a good person to see. She knows how we think.

  Georgia is warm, and I find her really easy to talk to. I make an appointment with her not long after the surgery not because I feel sad or angry, but because I know that seeing a psychologist is a smart thing to do. It’s part of a high-performance mindset, part of my training, to use all the available resources to keep me on track.

  Georgia helps me develop a strategy to get through this period by helping me focus on what I can control. Acceptance is key. I can’t control the fact that I have the injury, and I can’t control how long it’s going to take me to recover, but I can control my diet, I can control my attitude, and there is so much that I can do, that I can focus on. Once the stitches are out and the wound has healed, I can get back in the water and do some kicking exercises. That’s what I can control. That’s what we focus on. That’s how, step by step, I’ll get back in the water.

  I don’t know how I got from there to here. There’s no one moment when everything unravels, just an accumulation of time. It’s a slow winding down, like the air leaking out of a balloon. I start training less and less as time goes by. In the first three months, I am in rehabilitation, healing the wound. In the month or so that follows, I get in the pool and do what little I can. I do my kick sets, try to strengthen my legs, step through the process. I am waiting for the pain in my wrist to ease so that I can step up my training and restart my weight-bearing routine in the gym. But as another month passes, and drifts into two, the pain doesn’t improve—or it doesn’t improve enough. At first I’m patient, but time starts weighing on me. Every month of peak training I lose makes it less likely that I’ll be able to claw my way back.

  I spent a year out of the pool in 2009, when for a brief and depressing moment I thought I was done with swimming. I gained 10 kilograms in those twelve months and lost my edge completely. It was such a grind to get back in shape, because I was so far off my peak. And that was three years ago. I’m now 28 and keenly aware that, in the swimming world, I’m a geriatric. It’s not impossible for me to be the best, but it’s already an uphill battle, and that’s without this recovery period dragging on and on. I’m starting to doubt that, when I do get back, I’ll be able to swim at the level I want to. My goals are getting hazier, because they’re further and further out of reach.

  But what am I supposed to do, if not this? I have no idea who I am if I’m not a swimmer; my brief flirtation with retirement in 2009 really drove that point home. I have no other skills, no training, no plan B. And I don’t want to do anything else. I wish I could compete forever.

  Luke is incredibly supportive. We’ve been through rough patches before, and we both know that communication is key, so he keeps checking in to see how I’m doing. But there’s no pressure, no expectations—he just wants me to do what’s right for me, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. But as the doubt creeps in, I start wondering how we’re going to get by. I’ve been the primary breadwinner throughout our relationship, at first because my career was going well and then because Luke had a new business, and always paid himself last. I’m nervous about how we’ll manage if I’m not swimming. It’s uncharted water.

  These thoughts sneak in quietly and begin taking up space in my brain. It’s a gentle creep, month after month, dulling my competitive edge. I think it’s a form of kindness, really. Like my subconscious mind knows that I can’t deal with what is coming, so it loosens the cap just a little bit and lets the air leak ever so slowly out of my dreams. I so desperately want to keep swimming. I don’t want the last year to have been a waste—the hours I’ve spent in the pool, the weight training, sacrifices. My body and my heart have accepted that I have to move on, but my mind is slow to catch up. I know that this is a process I have to go through. I think the actual injury was necessary, because I would never have retired of my own volition. And that’s what I have to do: I have to retire. And this time I will not go back.

  When I announced my first retirement from swimming in 2009, I just wanted to get it over with, but my manager at the time counselled me to wait until I knew what I was going to do next. ‘You’re not retiring from something, you’re retiring to something,’ he told me. ‘It’s a much better look.’

  I’ve got nothing to retire to this time. I have to tell people that I’m retiring from swimming and I’m drifting off into oblivion, with no further plans. The path ahead is totally dark—that’s the honest truth. But I have a new manager, and she’s also of the opinion that I should retire with a forward schedule, and failing that I should just make one up. ‘Go out on a positive note and people will remember you in a positive way,’ she says. She’s wangled some early meetings about a reality TV show proposal that I might be involved with, and even though it’s a bit premature we agree that this is what I’ll mention when people ask me what’s next. Apparently, ‘I have no idea and I’m terrified’ is not an acceptable answer.

  I’m scheduled to appear on The Project in July 2013, seven months after the operation. It’s time. Part of me wonders if I should even bother making a formal announcement, but it seems to be the done thing and it’s better for my career. I’m thinking about this while sitting in hair and make-up at the Channel 10 studio in Melbourne. What career, seriously? My career is behind me. But the hope is that opportunities will present themselves if people know I’m not busy in the pool. If the reality TV show actually gets off the ground, I’ll be a media personality, I suppose, but I wish I didn’t have to mention it in the same breath as the end of my Olympic dreams. One of these things means the whole world to me, and the other means nothing at all.

  There’s a huge spread of food and drink laid out in the green room, but I don’t touch it. I’m nervous. I’ve been in front of the camera so many times that it doesn’t usually bother me, but this time is different because my life is about to change. Once the words are out of my mouth, it’s done and I can’t take them back. Once I say it on live television, it’s real. I’ve been dreading this moment ever since I made the decision, and part of me wants to turn around and run. Another part of me is calm. Later, when I’m alone in the hotel room, thinking it all through, I will remember everything I have achieved over the last ten years and I will feel proud. You did a great job, Libby, you really did. But right now there are knots in my stomach.

  A production assistant comes to collect me, and we walk into the studio where The Project is filming. I marvel once again at how small everything looks in real life—the studio itself, the desk, the audience. But the lights are startlingly bright, and I can feel the adrenaline building as I take my seat and say hello to the hosts, who are shuffling their papers and getting ready to come back from the commercial break. Then the red light on the camera flicks on and everyone is smiling at me; all kind people. And I smile back and tell them that my swimming career is over.

  1992

  ‘The secret of getting ahead is getting started.’

  —Mark Twain

  One of my earliest memories of swimming was at a carnival in Charters Towers, up in North Queensland, where we lived
when I was a kid. I had broken my wrist a week earlier and I insisted on having a waterproof cast. It was designed to let me have showers or have a bath while I was healing, but in my mind it was all about swimming. I just wanted to get back in the pool.

  There weren’t many opportunities to compete in that part of the world, so my family travelled quite a bit to attend carnivals like the one in Charters Towers. My brother and sisters were going to swim but I wasn’t registered. Mum had decided, pretty reasonably, that a little girl with a broken wrist probably couldn’t swim in a race. I disagreed. I badgered her until she finally gave in, signing me up for the 50-metre freestyle the day before the competition.

  Poor Mum spent the morning fending off questions about why her daughter was registered to swim when she was wearing a cast, but they didn’t understand how determined I was, how single-minded, even as a kid. There was no stopping me. ‘When can I swim?’ I’d whine. ‘When can I swim, Mum? Why won’t you let me? Is it my turn yet? I want to get in the water!’

  She always said I was a bit of a nightmare until it was my time to race. I would fidget and get into mischief, running wild around the pool while she was trying to wrangle four kids. But afterwards, when I’d finished my race, I was a perfect angel, placid as a doll—maybe the only time I’ve been placid in my life. I was a headstrong little thing, extremely stubborn, and my mum, Marilyn, was the gentlest, most accommodating person imaginable. She always bent over backwards for her children, but at Charters Towers she was probably just picking her battles. I don’t know if jumping into the water was the best idea—I don’t know if the waterproof cast was really designed for a chlorinated pool—but I wasn’t going to have it any other way.

  I won my heat that day, broken wrist and all. I was so proud of myself—I knew I’d done really well against the odds. After I swam, I ate hot chips and red frogs. I remember thinking it had been the best day ever.