It was clear to me that Steph was a professional—that he knew what he was doing. His results were evidence of that. Marieke Guehrer was in his squad, and she was going great guns with his coaching, swimming super-fast. She swam the same races that I did, and she was doing the kind of sprint-orientated training that I needed to do too. I started paying closer attention to Steph, and I think he was doing the same with me. While I was still with the other club, he and I had a couple of brief conversations by the school pool, and I decided he was a really nice person, then at some point during the year he complimented my racing at a school meet. I don’t know if that was a calculated move on his part, but it worked on me. I felt like Stephan saw something in me that my other coaches didn’t.
When I made the decision to leave Mr Carew and Glenda to move over to Stephan’s team, I felt very strongly that it was my responsibility to deliver the news to them myself. I don’t know why I was so determined about this, since I’d been happy to let Mum call Stephan and ask if I could start training with him, but I wanted to be a grown-up about it and that meant giving them the bad news myself. And I’m glad I did, because the conversation we had was a real eye-opener. Glenda and Mr Carew were genuinely disappointed that I was leaving because they had had plans for me, plans that involved the 2004 Athens Olympics. They were working to a monthly schedule with a whole lot of seasonal targets, but yes, they had seen my potential and they had planned to help me reach it.
I was stunned. No one had ever mentioned the Olympics to me, and I hadn’t had the audacity to think about it myself. And while I was busy making all these plans to find a coach who would take me seriously, it turned out I already had two coaches who were very ambitious on my behalf.
To have someone articulate a vision for me involving the Olympics was just incredible. I had a feeling I could do something exceptional in the sport, but I would never have been able to frame it like that. I hadn’t achieved much in swimming at that point, so it was just an energy starting to build up inside of me, but the coaches knew. It’s just a pity Mr Carew and Glenda didn’t say something to me earlier. I don’t know if they were trying to keep me humble or if they didn’t want me to become complacent, or if they’d just neglected to mention their plans to me, but by the time we had this conversation my mind was made up. I stood on the pool deck in my swimmers and tracksuit, terrified but resolute, and told them that this had been my last training session at the club.
It was a hard day. I don’t like letting people down and I don’t like confrontation, but I knew it was the right decision. I was young but I was clear-eyed. I knew what I wanted to do.
By the end of 2002 I was training with Stephan at the Commercial Club in Fortitude Valley. There was no talk about the Olympics or any grand plans for my future, which was probably for the best. We started with modest goals. I was in my final year of high school and had already decided to take the following year off to focus completely on swimming, as I was hoping to make the Australian team for the 2003 World Championships.
A friend of Mum’s was surprised to hear that I was deferring university to swim. ‘Is she really that good?’ he asked.
‘I guess we’ll see,’ was all Mum said quietly.
The first thing I had to work through with Stephan was his heavy Swiss accent. I struggled to understand his instructions over the sound of my own exhausted breathing at the side of the pool, my exercise-addled brain fighting to comprehend his English. But what he did, in a very subtle way at first, was make me want to train more. We started with six or seven sessions a week, which was one or two more than I had been doing with my old squad, but a few sessions less than the rest of the team. He didn’t throw me in the deep end; he stepped it up slowly and let my natural competitive edge do the rest. Just by being around other girls who were working a bit harder and seeing the results, I would start pushing up to that level. I was still quite young and goofy, but I was more ambitious than I’d ever been, and my teammates set a high bar. I was a late bloomer as a swimmer, a couple of years behind most young women in my racing achievements—there were so many girls who had made the national team at sixteen or seventeen—but I had faith that I would catch up.
The type of training the squad did was completely different to what I was accustomed to, but I took to it immediately. Stephan didn’t have anyone on the Australian team at that point, but he created an incredibly professional environment for the squad. Everything felt different, from the way he set up each training session to the overarching program he developed for each of us. He focused on the quality of our training over the quantity, and he was consumed by technical details. His ability to recognise and correct a minor flaw in a swimmer’s stroke could have a huge impact on their race. If you adjusted the position of your hand by a centimetre, you could hold more water in every stroke, which made you more efficient, which meant you wouldn’t tire as easily and you could maintain your speed at the end of a race. He was so keenly analytical and insightful in understanding how different bodies moved through the water. It wasn’t a one-size-fits-all approach—he saw how different bodies performed and he made specific adjustments for each swimmer. I had to adapt from the distance stroke I had been using—where I paused for a fraction of a second between the right and left stroke—to a continuous, powering movement.
Moving over to Stephan’s squad felt like the best decision I had ever made. Physically, I responded well to the training, but we also connected as people. I immediately felt a trust in him that I had never felt with my other coaches. Stephan took all the thinking out of it for me—I just followed his instructions and I began to see exponential improvement. Even after just a few weeks with him, my body felt radically different when I swam. He did specific training in kicking and pulling (isolated stroke work), which I had never done before. ‘You have to get over the barrel, Libby,’ he would tell me in his thick Swiss accent, meaning I should keep my elbow high and strong under the water, using my lats to power through with every freestyle stroke. We loved mimicking his accent, which was like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s in Kindergarten Cop: ‘Get over the barrel, Libby!’ Our other favourite phrase of Stephan’s came from our kick training in the butterfly. ‘You have to get the undulation going!’ he’d say, pronouncing it un-doo-lay-shun. It was pretty funny. But as much as I laughed, I know these tiny details would make all the difference in the world at an elite level.
I had only been with Stephan a couple of months when I finished high school. We had a very serious discussion about schoolies week on the Gold Coast, the traditional week-long blow-out for graduating students. Schoolies was a total bacchanalia of drugs and booze, and it was highly unusual for coaches to allow young athletes to go, but I was keen and Stephan agreed to it for some reason. The rationale for keeping swimmers away from schoolies was not so much the fear that these young athletes would be led astray as the fact that they’d be out of the pool for several days. At that level, there was already a heightened pressure around swimming, a sense that swimming was everything, which is incredibly intense for a young adult. As much as I wanted to win, there was some small, stubborn part of me that resisted the idea of giving myself over completely to swimming. I still wanted to be a regular seventeen-year-old, doing stupid eighteen-year-old things. Schoolies felt like an important rite of passage and I wanted to be part of it.
I hadn’t been a complete angel up until this point. I had started going to parties when I was about fifteen, where I would regularly drink, and drink too much, every second weekend or so. For some of this time I was taking things easy in the pool, but even when my competition started to gear up, my teenage antics didn’t have much of an impact on my swimming. My young body could take a bit of battering and still do just fine in the water, because teenagers don’t seem to get hangovers. I suppose I thought I could carry on that way indefinitely.
I went to schoolies determined to have a very good time in the time that I had. Stephan had only signed off on a couple of nights on the Gold Coast, becau
se I was due to compete at the Melbourne World Cup event just over a week later. As it turns out, two nights was plenty. I booked an apartment at Surfers International with my three closest girlfriends, right amongst the action, and Mum dropped me off at the entrance on Friday afternoon. Hours later, I was drunker than I had ever been in my life.
I can’t say that it wasn’t a good time. I had fun, hanging out with my friends. We snuck into Crown Towers at some point to meet up with some boys we knew, and we met a lot of other random boys on the street. I was still at a point in my life where I needed all the boys to like me, so I lapped up the attention. But so much of the night was a blur, and I can’t recall how I got back to the apartment. The next morning I was violently ill. I started vomiting and thought I would never stop—it was five o’clock in the evening when the nausea finally subsided. At that point I started drinking again, because that’s what you do at schoolies, though I was far less enthusiastic about it the second time around.
Mum picked me up on the Sunday afternoon so I’d be ready for training on Monday morning. I felt relieved when I got into the car—sheer relief that I didn’t have to jump on that drunken carousel for another night. I couldn’t imagine what my friends were going to be doing for the rest of the week, but I knew I didn’t want any part of it. I felt like I’d poisoned myself. I got a fairly nasty cold in the days after schoolies, but still had to train, still had to swim. My sister got married the following weekend and I was still sick at the wedding, And while I didn’t regret going to schoolies, I didn’t ever want to do that to myself again. It felt like I’d got something out of my system.
The week after my sister’s wedding was the World Cup meet in Melbourne, one of a series of events held around the world that focuses on short-course swimming, where the races take place in a 25-metre pool. There’s a lot of prize money involved, so people came from around the world to compete, which made it a great training ground for swimmers to experience world-class competition.
Race practice is crucial—it’s a completely different mental and physical experience to training, and any swimmer who wants to achieve greatness needs to be exposed to as much racing as possible. For example, one of the reasons the United States breeds such great swimmers is because they get to compete in high-level races all year round through their NCAA college system.
I saw a lot of the people at the World Cup meet who had been on the junior national team with me, including Luke, who I’d been flirting with on MSN Messenger ever since we left New Caledonia. I don’t know if our online chat had an effect or if Luke had had a growth spurt, but when I saw him on the pool deck in Melbourne I was very impressed. Hmm, Tricky got hot, I thought to myself. We’d been flirting for six months but I hadn’t thought all that much of it until he was standing in front of me, looking very lean, very tall and very tanned. I was looking forward to getting to know him much better at the swim camp we would both be attending after the meet, though I didn’t have a clue just how hard and fast I was going to fall for him.
I had no expectations around how I would perform at the World Cup, but I had a great run. It was my first experience racing against elite swimmers in open competition and I didn’t shy away from the challenge. I hit a significant personal best time and won silver in the 100-metre freestyle, but what I remember most about that meet was a conversation with my coach.
Before the 100-metre freestyle final, while I was warming up, Steph pulled me aside and had a word with me—his version of an inspirational chat. ‘If you listen to me, if you work hard, if you focus, you won’t know yourself as an athlete in twelve months,’ he said. He didn’t articulate any specific goals, and he didn’t set any boundaries or expectations, but he gave voice to the feeling I had inside me. And because I respected him so much, his opinion carried huge weight.
Having Stephan express that belief in me was a very powerful moment. I trusted him, and it sparked a new level of clarity in me towards swimming. It was like schoolies and the World Cup represented two different paths for me. I could see where they both led, and that they were two very separate things, and I had to make a choice between them. That choice turned out to be very easy, though my friendships were challenged along the way and my social life all but evaporated. I was ready to make swimming my everything, no matter the cost.
Chapter Three
2014
‘By replacing fear of the unknown with curiosity we open ourselves up to an infinite stream of possibility.’
—Alan Watts
I’ve had the same girlfriends since high school, but I’ve found it difficult to talk to them about the career anxiety I’m experiencing because I’m acutely aware that I’ve lived a very strange life up to this point. I really don’t want to seem like I’m complaining when I’ve had such extraordinary opportunities and experiences, but it’s so strange just sitting around after Dancing with the Stars waiting for something to happen. I talk about it with Luke, who is pretty understanding, but when I’m with my girlfriends I try to listen rather than talk about this stuff.
I begin to realise that a lot of people feel directionless a lot of the time. A lot of people feel unsatisfied with their careers and don’t know what to do about it. So the way I feel isn’t unique, but that doesn’t make me hate it any less. If anything, I become more acutely aware of my own personality, and how important it is for me to feel like I’m driving towards something. As a swimmer, I had all this energy and passion pouring into one dream. The dream is over, but I still have the same energy and passion—I just don’t have anywhere to channel it. I’m worried that I will never feel that sense of purpose again.
I start looking at degrees and tertiary courses, trying to find something that could light a spark inside me. A qualification would give me some credibility, I think. I don’t want to be someone whose only professional qualification is that they used to swim good. I consider teaching, and I think I might like to study psychology, but both of those will take years of full-time study to finish, and I don’t want to be starting a new career when I’m in my thirties. And we don’t really have the money to put me through uni, so really those options are out anyway. In the end, I sign up for a massage therapy course and a personal training course because they seem like a natural fit, but even as I’m doing the online modules I’m feeling kind of blah about it. I can’t really see myself doing massage therapy for a living, though I do have very strong hands. I feel like I’m on autopilot, just doing the logical thing.
Luke isn’t pushing me in any particular direction. He lets me know I’m supported and tells me I should take my time to figure out the next step, but there’s no urgency. All the fear and angst around my future is coming from inside me, churning quietly around the clock. My income is back down to virtually nothing, which I hate. I feel like I’m not contributing anything, and that makes me feel worthless, like I’m doing something wrong. Ironically, Luke still isn’t bringing in much money either, he’s just a lot more relaxed about it. He’s a lot more relaxed about things in general.
The most difficult thing for him, I think, is that I’ve become a different person since I retired. When I was swimming I had a singular focus. I was so driven, so clear. All of a sudden, this new person has appeared in the relationship who is just careening all over the place. I’m indecisive, flighty, unsure of myself. I’m not the same person he married, and I feel like a lesser person than the woman he married. He’d never agree with that, but I’m sure he’s frustrated. This didn’t happen to Luke when he stopped swimming, because he had another passion—for commerce and finance—that was absolutely genuine. He made a smooth transition from one life to another, whereas I just keep walking into walls while I’m feeling my way around in the dark.
The uncertainty is a grind. Although we’ve managed to hold on to the house, we still don’t know how we’re going to afford it, or whether we’ll have to put it back on the market. I don’t know what I’m going to be doing every day or what I’m working towards. A lot of the time
I feel like I’m just shuffling papers, trying to look busy. I don’t know how to support Luke in growing his business, either. We aren’t having a great time together, to be completely honest. The grind feels like it has spilt over to our relationship and now and we’re just hunkered down like roommates, waiting for something great to happen.
In the end, Dancing with the Stars does the trick. I have a brief, terrifying waiting period where nothing happens, and then Channel 9 offers me a job as a health and wellbeing commentator on their breakfast show Today. Perfect! I love health and wellbeing. I’ve been an elite athlete most of my life, which makes me a credible expert on the subject, right? It lines up with the courses I’m planning to do, while also building my media profile, so it feels like the right career move. It has to be, actually, because it’s the only job offer I’ve got.
In reality, I’m less of a health and wellbeing expert and more of a general talking head for hire. Starting in February 2014, I appear on a segment called ‘The Grill’ every Thursday—it’s one of those conversation panels where they get a bunch of public figures together to express their opinion on topical subjects of the day. It’s a great opportunity to be on television, to stay relevant, but also to have a regular commitment each week that I can build a schedule around. I’m so sick of floating.
Beneath the Surface Page 4