Beneath the Surface Read online

  When it came to sport, I was very good at following instructions. I was good at gymnastics when I was little. I had tennis lessons too, and would wait patiently in line for my turn to have a swing at the ball that the instructor popped gently over the net, and I would scurry around afterwards collecting the stray balls before jumping back in the queue. I loved being active and I was very focused, at least when I was outdoors. School was very different—I was never really comfortable—but when I was running or jumping or swimming, I was like an arrow heading straight for the target. I was very compliant when I knew I was going to get a turn. If I didn’t get to play, or didn’t know when I was going to play, I was probably pretty dreadful. My nerves were constantly tingling, ready to fire, a wriggling sack of beans.

  I was the baby of the family, which probably didn’t help. I had two older sisters, Justine and Victoria, and an older brother, Stewart, who was closest to me in age but still almost four years older. We lived in Townsville, where I was born, but we would often visit the cane farm up north where my mother grew up, where we’d spend the weekend riding quad bikes and climbing trees, exploring cane fields and swimming in the river. At home in Townsville, we had a backyard pool, which was crucial in that baking tropical climate. We loved the heat, loved the outdoors and spent endless hours in the water. There was something magical about diving out of the muggy air and into the crisp, cool water of a swimming pool. That’s where my love of swimming started.

  Our whole social world seemed to be built around water, whether it was swimming at home or going to the beach, or hanging out along The Strand in Townsville, which was down by the water. We learned to swim very young, probably for safety as much as anything else; I wasn’t more than a year old when I started. My siblings were all doing their lessons and I was just along for the ride, a mini paddler in the baby pool who was quickly diving hell-for-leather into the deep end. Most Australian kids learn to swim in summer, but it felt like summer all year round in Townsville. I had a swimming lesson every week, and I joined my first swimming club when I was four. From then on, there were club meets every Friday night, with a sausage sizzle and ice-cream when the racing was done. It was just what my family did, for as long as I could remember.

  My first-ever race was a 25-metre breaststroke. I always hated breaststroke, but boy did I love competing. I just fell in love with it, even as a four-year-old. Cool, I can see how fast I go! I thought. What could be more exciting than being fast? Usually parents would jump in the water to help the very little kids through the race, and my dad was next to me trying to help keep me afloat, but I wasn’t having it—I was annoyed that he was getting in the way. The four-year-old age group wasn’t exactly teeming with competitors, but I wasn’t thinking about the other kids in the pool. From the very beginning, I just wanted to be a rocket, to speed through the water, and I loved, loved, loved how it felt to kick as hard as I could and churn my arms until I touched the wall. I remember that feeling so well—that absolute thrill. I’d be chasing it for the rest of my life.

  Oddly, that first race is one of the only memories I have of my father. He was a successful ophthalmologist, and he worked long hours. In fact, he prided himself on being a workaholic. He may also have travelled for work—I don’t actually know—but for various reasons he wasn’t much of a presence in my life.

  It was my second swimming coach, Luc Senent, who recognised that I had talent in the pool. My family had moved from the Aitkenvale Swimming Club at Kokoda pool to the Townsville Tourists at the Tobruk pool on The Strand, by which time I had already been competing for a few years. Luc wasn’t an elite-level coach but he was exactly what I needed at the time. At seven or eight years old, I was a headstrong little fish, and I was absolutely devoted to racing, and Luc was excellent at helping me develop my skills while keeping everything fun. We had a special ritual at training where both of us would inflate our bellies with air and stick them out as far as they could go—I was very proud of my bulbous tummy. Everything about training and swimming carnivals was fun back then, although I had started a journey that would ultimately become very significant for me.

  Every step was a small one. At first I was racing just to reach the end of the pool, then to win a ribbon or a trophy from my club, and then I was racing to qualify as a junior competitor in the State Championships—I just needed to get a fast enough time.

  As an eight-year-old in 1994, I was swimming in the Under-10s category, so some of the kids were a year or two older than me, though not necessarily much faster. I qualified for the 100-metre butterfly final at States for the first time that year, which was very cool. I was crazy nervous. I always needed Mum’s help to get my swimming cap on, and this time I asked her to put my goggles on for me too, to make sure they were perfect. From the moment I left the grandstand until I was on the starting block I was wearing my goggles, and so by the time I got to the block they were completely fogged over. I couldn’t see a thing. Still, I did a massive personal best time to qualify for the finals. I finished dead last in the final, and was very disappointed, but overall it felt like a win. I was determined to come back and do better next time.

  We went to the State Championships in Brisbane every year after that, at what used to be called Chandler and is now the Brisbane Aquatic Centre. They were held in January, during the school holidays, and it was always a huge event for our family. We’d make the long drive down from Townsville and stay at the Dockside apartments, near Kangaroo Point—small-town kids in the big city for the biggest swimming event of my year. We often drove a couple of hours to attend swimming carnivals, but this was something else altogether: fifteen hours down the Bruce Highway for a couple of days of competition. I don’t know how Mum did it! I think she enjoyed it because she knew it made us happy.

  For me it was always a joyful time. I remember the feeling so clearly—an eager, hungry kind of happiness. I loved to compete. Winning a medal or coming first was great, but that wasn’t what drove me. I didn’t want to be better than other people; I was just very focused on doing better than I had before. I wanted to improve on my best time, every time. If that meant I won a medal, great—but the medal wasn’t the point. I just wanted to go faster.

  When I was ten years old, I moved with Mum and my siblings to Brisbane. My father didn’t come with us; I was told he would be joining us at some point, though the timing was always vague. Later in 1995 I went to Perth to compete in the Western Australian Pacific School Games, and we stayed with my sister Justine, who was living there at the time. Mum told us after the meet that she and Dad were getting a divorce. I remember sitting in a hot tub with my sister Victoria, trying to figure out what it meant. I didn’t know what a divorce was or how it would affect me. In fact, my father was already such a ghost that it hardly made a difference.

  I could sense the grief and stress in my mother, but I was shielded from the truth for many years. I heard the late-night phone calls and heated conversations, but I was well into my teens before anyone told me about my father’s affair. Perhaps he thought leaving his wife meant leaving his children behind as well, but however rarely we had seen him before, it was nothing compared to the years after the divorce. My father did move down to Brisbane eventually, with his new wife and his new child, but he made no attempt to see the rest of his kids with any consistency. Two or three times a year he would pick us up and take us to the movies. He’d buy us a book or a toy and drop us home, and that would be it for several months. I felt no connection to him at all—it was like hanging out with a distant relative who lived in another country. Even though I knew he should be someone very important to me, these outings always felt forced and awkward. We weren’t picking up where we left off, as there was nothing there. Whatever natural yearning I had to have a father didn’t match up with what he had to offer.

  We were so lucky to have Mum. She cared for us and loved us to a fault. She cleaned my room for me every week and put dinner on the table every night, and bent over backwards to give us eve
rything she could. It’s easy to think that she was trying to make up for the fact that our father wasn’t around, but I think it was just her nature to be selfless. She was quietly but fiercely supportive of me; she believed in me even before I believed in myself.

  In 1999, when I was fourteen, I failed to qualify for the finals at States for the first time. I didn’t make a single race. And there was a very good explanation for it: I was a massive bludger. Up until that point, I had been coasting on my talent and doing to the bare minimum at training, while girls around me like Amy Townend, Sarah Bowd and Katie Canning were in the pool ten times a week. They were committed, and the results were starting to show; they were outswimming me at carnivals, and that year it finally came to a head. Not only did I not win anything, I wasn’t even a contender. All the thrill of competition suddenly evaporated.

  I was devastated on the ride home from Chandler. Mum couldn’t stand seeing me so upset, so she consoled me in the best way she knew. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘You tried your best. You don’t have to swim next year. Let’s just forget about it.’

  I thought about this for a while, trying to figure out how I felt about her proposal. For me, the joy in swimming came from competing—but if I wasn’t competitive, what was the point? I wasn’t happy being average. But the thought of losing swimming made me feel incredibly uneasy. Between the divorce and our move to Brisbane, there had been some big shifts in my life. I had also just hit puberty, and I had started to discover boys, so in addition to being a people pleaser in general, I was suddenly struck by an urgent need to feel validated by the opposite sex. Everything was changing, but I had always been a swimmer, and it felt like the last solid thing I could hold on to, the last thing that was comfortable and familiar. I didn’t want to give that up.

  I also didn’t want to lose—which posed a real problem. Ultimately, I decided that if I wanted to stick with swimming, then I had to train a bit harder.

  At that stage, I was in the pool four times a week, and I’d made a habit of taking things easy. My signature move was to say I had to go to the toilet, then spend fifteen minutes killing time under a warm shower in the change rooms. I’d skip laps, I’d sit on the edge of the pool pretending to fix my goggles for five minutes, I’d don flippers for sets that were supposed to increase my heartrate and stamina. Basically, I’d cheat whenever I got the chance.

  After that disastrous State Championships meet, I was a new swimmer. I didn’t skip laps, I ditched the fins, I did the work, I improved my times—and I started to win races again. That was a lightbulb moment for me. When I made the connection between doing the work and getting the result, making the commitment was easy. The competition started at training.

  The following year, Katie Canning and Amy Townend weren’t swimming at State Championships because they were at the Youth Olympics, but I swam and I did far better than I had the year before. I recorded personal bests in all my races, and won two gold medals. I understood for the first time that the work was part of the win.

  Chapter Two

  2013

  ‘I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.’

  —David Bowie

  For my whole life up to this point, someone has told me what to do. And that worked really well for me, to be honest. Somebody told me what to do and when to do it, and I followed their instructions. I followed them incredibly well. I’m now 28, nearly 29, and no one is telling me what to do anymore, and I’m not sure I like it. My life feels like it has no structure.

  There’s no structure to my body, either. I miss the physical routine. I was training 35 hours a week, conditioning my muscles, building strength, burning fat. It’s brutal work. But if I’m no longer competing, what’s the point? Why would anyone do it—what’s the motivation? It’s not sustainable. My training has been tapering off for months now, and I can feel my super-strength draining away. It’s just inevitable, I guess. If I’m not an athlete, I’m not an athlete, but the idea of losing that strength makes me nervous.

  One of the first things I notice is that I don’t sleep as well anymore. The thing about doing 35 hours of training a week is that you’re so physically wrecked at the end of each day, you just hit the mattress and you’re gone, but these days I’m finding it hard to get to sleep. I’m going to bed at the same time that I used to, nine-thirty or ten, but I find myself staring at the ceiling for a couple of hours, or surfing the internet on my phone. The frustrating thing is that my mind is tired at the end of the day, maybe more now than it used to be, but my body is pinging with energy that I haven’t used up. I used to push my body to extremes in training, and I was almost always shattered as a result, but that exhaustion felt so much better than this. It felt healthier, somehow.

  I can feel my body changing. I’ve had practically no body hair for most of my life—it was dissolved by the chlorine—and the hair that stuck out of my swimming cap at the nape of my neck was always a little crispy. I’m happy the crispiness is gone, but I’m less pleased that my body hair has grown back. I miss the silky-smooth swimmer’s skin I used to have.

  My body is looser, too. Just a little softer. The difference is minute right now, but I know it will get more pronounced as time goes on. The days when I could haul couches and dining tables with Luke without even registering the weight are over. Gone is that airy lightness of being that I would get when I tapered, just before a competition, that feeling of every lean muscle being perfectly connected. Gone too is that hypersensitive knowledge of my physical self, when any minor twinge told me something was out of place. I guess that’s not a skill I need anymore.

  I miss being strong. At my peak physical fitness, I could do 27 chin-ups. I threw weights around the gym like they were made of foam. I really loved that feeling. It’s not the end of the world that it’s gone, but being physically strong made me feel emotionally strong. I don’t like feeling like I’m losing control. It’s more than just the end result, the physical result—I miss the sense of purpose. I had a reason to be strong when I was swimming. There’s no reason to do anything now. But I have to do something.

  I’m not panicking yet. I assume something will come up and, sure enough, a short-term answer presents itself—one that is delightful to me, quite frankly. Shortly after my retirement, I hear through the grapevine that Channel 7 is recruiting for the next season of Dancing with the Stars. Laugh all you want, but I’ve always dreamed of being on Dancing with the Stars, a reality TV show where minor celebrities partner with ballroom dancing professionals and compete to be the most outstanding dance couple of the series. It’s totally ridiculous and I love it. I know I’m a massive dork, but I don’t care—I want to be on that show so badly. I have always loved dancing. It’d be a physical challenge that would be completely new to me, but I would be using my body again, pushing the boundaries of what it can do. As an added bonus, being on television would give me a public platform that might lead to other media opportunities. I’m an ex-athlete, so that’s what I’m supposed to do, right?

  Dancing with the Stars is relaunching in 2013 with the very handsome Adam Garcia as a new judge, which makes the whole thing that much more appealing. I ask my manager to look into it, and she comes back fairly quickly and tells me the season is cast and there is no budget for any more celebrity dancers. Devastating. ‘They can pay me nothing!’ I tell my manager, but she’s not keen on that. ‘They can pay me next to nothing!’ I insist. As it turns out, this offer is too good for Channel 7 to refuse. At the bargain price of next to nothing, which is quite a bit less than my co-stars are getting paid, I am recruited into the thirteenth spot for the thirteenth season of Dancing with the Stars, set to air in October 2013.

  It’s not a good time for me to be working cheap. The investment fund that Luke established in 2010 is still young and relatively small, and all the money he makes is reinvested back into the business—and of course my income has dried up since my swimming career sputtered to an end. The change
in our finances was sudden and stark, and not at all what we expected, because I’ve been riding a strong wave since the beginning of my career.

  In hindsight, I hit the elite level in swimming at a good time, when the Australian public was most in love with the sport. I came up just after the Sydney Olympics, off the back of a golden era for the sport, when swimmers like Susie O’Neill, Sam Riley and Kieran Perkins were national heroes, winning gold medals in the pool and being great Australian role models when they were out of it. Swimming was broadcast on primetime television when my career was at its peak, which gave us a huge audience and a huge amount of corporate support off the back of that. I had a steady, comfortable income throughout my career, and never really had to worry about money.

  But times have changed for Australian swimming, which means times have changed for Luke and me. It feels like the profile of the sport is sagging, because it no longer gets the same primetime broadcast slots, and advances in technology have fractured the audience. There’s also the reality that some of the star athletes have misbehaved in public. Changes in racing equipment, such as the super-suit era of 2009, perhaps cheapened our record-breaking achievements. It’s all about public perception, ultimately, and by 2013 it’s clear that public interest in the sport has definitely waned.

  Luke has always been anxious about my income because he works in finance—it’s his nature to look to the future and plan ahead. Every bit of income I’ve earned up until this point has been a discrete chunk of money. I’ve never had a salary or a recurring payment for anything, and of course it’s impossible to predict what contract or opportunity will come up in a month, six months or a year. I’ve been pretty blasé about it in the past, because money always came in, but Luke has been warning me since we got together that the good times wouldn’t last forever. ‘We’ve got a 30-year mortgage,’ he would point out gently. ‘You probably won’t be swimming for 30 years.’ I knew the sponsorships would drop off when my career ended, but I expected more of a taper than a cliff.