Beneath the Surface

by Libby Trickett

  I’d won five gold medals at the 2007 World Championships, I was the reigning world champion in the 50-metre and 100-metre freestyle and the 100-metre butterfly, and I had every expectation that I would become an individual Olympic champion in Beijing in 2008, my second Olympic Games. Four years earlier, in Athens, I had been new to the international swimming circuit—strong but green. Going into Beijing, I was an established figure in that world. Despite the tumultuous twelve months, I knew I was at the top of my game.

  You never relax. That kind of success breeds high expectations—the more you win, the further you expect to go. All the dreams and goals you’ve been carrying around for years start to solidify until you can almost touch them. They’re within reach now, but you have to focus even harder than before. I was aware that I was lucky to get a second bite at the cherry—few athletes got to compete in one Olympic Games, let alone two—and to come back even stronger, more experienced, wiser, felt like an incredible privilege. I was a champion; I could be the best in the world. I put myself under incredible pressure to deliver on that promise.

  I was faster than ever, stronger than ever. My body had changed dramatically since Athens and I was proud of every sharp contour of muscle under skin. I had a lean, defined six-pack and phenomenal core strength; razor definition through my delts and lats; traps muscles like hunks of meat that you just wanted to grab and squeeze. In the lead-up to Beijing I was doing ten two-and-a-half hour sessions in the water every week, two heavy lifting sessions in the gym, pilates and yoga, and two running sessions a week. In my own time, I still did the four ab and core strengthening sessions a week, plus two half-hour sessions on a stationary bike to keep building strength and endurance in my legs. I was doing squats with 90-kilogram weights across my shoulders and chin-ups with 37 kilograms strapped around my waist. I was shredded. Shred. Ded.

  Ironically, all I could see at the time was imperfection. As an older woman with maybe 15 kilograms of extra fat and nowhere near the same muscle definition, I am more confident and comfortable in my body than I ever was as an Olympian. At that time, my body was a means to an end, a finely tuned machine, and any sliver of weakness or imperfection was standing in the way of my dreams. I was so lean that I almost felt prepubescent—no breasts, no butt, no curve in my hips. I was fiercely proud of the control I exerted over my own body, and endlessly frustrated if it slipped out of my grasp.

  Every three weeks in training we had a weigh-in and a skinfold test—a pinch test with calipers, measured down to the last millimetre. In reality, the skinfold test could vary week-to-week just because of who was conducting it, and how aggressive they were with the callipers, but if I found myself two or three millimetres over my last measurement I would walk out cursing. What are you doing? It’s not good enough! I felt like Stephan was judging me, like the voice in my head was his, though he never said anything like the cruel things I said to myself. But if I sense some minor flicker of failure, I would double down, work harder, push myself further. And I was so tired all the time that it never really felt good. My strong body was worked so hard that it didn’t feel good. But the focus itself was an addiction, a gravitational force of energy and drive that pulled me forward just as hard as I pushed myself. The intensity was incredible because the goal was incredible. I wanted to win.

  When you’re an athlete, you’re very selfish—because you have to be. For me there was no multitasking, no real consideration of others, no compromise. The training was a sacrifice, but I did it for my own satisfaction, because I wanted to make history. And outside of training, I was lucky if I had one errand or task a day. I can’t tell you how put-upon I felt having to do that one thing. I would put off going to the post office for weeks because I had to prioritise my daily two-to-three-hour nap. And if I had to sacrifice some nap time to make a sponsorship or PR-related appearance, or—god forbid—meet some family obligation, I could become genuinely frustrated, like a teenager.

  I was very aware that I was one of the few lucky athletes who was fully supported by sponsorship deals, so the breakfast events, the swim clinics and the photo shoots were all part of the territory, but if they cut into my training schedule, god help somebody, at least behind the scenes. In public, I did my best to conceal how tired I was. If somebody recognised me in the shopping centre—even if I’d had a terrible day for some reason—I tried not to let on and I’d smile and sign an autograph. But my manager fielded all my business emails, so I didn’t have to reply to people. I never had to say no; that was my manager’s job. My job was simply to try to be the best swimmer in the world.

  The Beijing trials were held at Sydney Olympic Park in March 2008. I was competing in my usual races, the 100-metre butterfly, and the 100-metre and 50-metre freestyle. I qualified for the Olympic team in the 100-metre fly on the second day of the meet, which was a huge relief. If I lost just one opportunity, one of my chances, the door would swing closed just a little and the pressure would stack on. My whole year could fall apart in a second—my whole career, if I didn’t make it past that hurdle. But I knew, on day two, that I was going to the Olympics again. Everything else was cream.

  My mission, my obsession, was the 100-metre freestyle. I was unofficially the first woman to swim the race in under 53 seconds, but until my time was ratified by FINA I was invisible. It was making me crazy, this idea that I’d draughted off Phelps. I knew it wasn’t true and I had a point to prove.

  You can never really race your competitors because you don’t know what they’ve been doing, how well they’re swimming, whether they’ve had a good season or been battling illness or injury. Ultimately, you’re always racing yourself, and the clock. Now that I wasn’t worried about making the team, what I wanted was the right time. Winning was an afterthought; if I got the time, I would win anyway. This confidence was steady, a solid thing inside of me. I knew that if I trained my arse off, if I was physically in top form, if I was mentally focused, then I would make it bloody hard for any other woman to touch the wall ahead of me. When I stepped up to the block for the finals of the 100-metre freestyle I felt like I was soaring, an eagle. I absolutely loved that feeling.

  I nailed my start off the block. I had a perfect entry into the water, had the right stroke rate and consistency. I didn’t over-expend energy in the first 35 metres, I nailed my turn off the wall, and I kept just enough in reserve to smash through the last 25 metres, driving for the wall with every stroke. It sounds simple, but each element was finely tuned, practised and honed over thousands of hours. My mind was blank. My body felt perfectly balanced, running on instinct, and I knew I was ahead in the race with adjacent lead, but I wouldn’t know for sure until I touched the wall and spun around to see the leaderboard—52.88 seconds. It was a tenth of a second faster than my time at the Duel in the Pool, and Michael Phelps was nowhere in sight.

  The 50-metre freestyle trials came at the very end of the meet, and for me they felt like a celebration. My goal was simply to qualify for the Olympic race, and I knew that my form was good. Everything felt like it was running perfectly—I just had to deliver. I wasn’t aiming for the world record because it seemed out of reach. For a long time, it had belonged to my idol, the Dutch champion Inge de Bruijn, a shredded beast of a swimmer and a really lovely woman. She had multiple Olympic gold medals and what seemed like countless world records. I just wanted to swim my best.

  That meant avoiding all the things that could go wrong in a 50-metre race, which whips by so fast that it’s almost impossible to swim perfectly. You have to balance a rapid stroke rate with just one breath, and be careful to balance your speed and power so you don’t end up spinning your wheels. The race starts with an explosion and is over before you can even think. A lot of it comes down to luck. At the Beijing trials, luck was on my side. I can’t really say how it happened, but I swam the 50 in 23.97 seconds, slashing 0.16 seconds off the world record.

  I should have stopped to breathe for a moment, but I didn’t. I always delayed the celebration and dela
yed the joy because my next goal was on the horizon. And that next goal was to win an Olympic gold medal—to step into that world and do what I set out to do.

  Everything about Beijing was better than Athens for me. I was better, the trials had gone perfectly, even the Olympic Village was a better experience for me. We swam in the open air in Athens—they ran out of time (and probably money) before they could finish the roof of the stadium. We walked over dirt paths in the Olympic Village because the landscaping was just never done. Beijing, by comparison, was a model city, perfect down to the last blade of grass, with young volunteers whose only job was to rake unsightly leaves from the lawns. I ate Peking duck every day in a cafeteria the size of two football fields, while outside the Chinese government was seeding rain clouds to wash all the pollution away. Olympic volunteers stood virtually metres apart to guide us from one place to another, the smiling faces of a massive, flawless machine. The organisation was extraordinary. The hospitality was incredible. All I had to think about was the race.

  My closest rivals were from the USA and Australia in the 100-metre butterfly, including Jess Schipper, who I had shadowed for almost my entire career. We both made our first youth team in 2002 and made the national team in 2003, and if anyone was going to beat me in the 100-metre butterfly, it was probably Jess. Our rivalry didn’t extend beyond the pool—she was just too sweet a person. She was extremely shy, and when she wasn’t swimming she was usually buried in a novel, but she had a doggedness about her that I recognised—that same hunger to be first to the wall.

  I can’t say we were close friends then, because we were bred to compete with each other, but there was still a genuine camaraderie between us. I was lucky that my greatest rivals in both the butterfly and freestyle were on my doorstep in Australia; they made me a better athlete. Later in life, when the competitions were over, Jess and I would become closer friends. By then we’d realised that no one but our competitors and rivals could truly understand the life we had lived. But not in Beijing.

  The first day of competition was focused on the 4x100-metre freestyle relay, and the heats and semi-finals for the 100-metre butterfly. I didn’t swim the heats for the relay because I wanted to conserve my energy, but I stepped in for the final and we won bronze, behind the Dutch and American teams. I couldn’t help but feel the slightest sense of disappointment, because we were Olympic Champions in Athens and the World Champions the year before, but an Olympic bronze medal is still an Olympic bronze medal. And anyway, I didn’t have time to think about it. I had five events to swim, with heats, semi-finals and finals for most of them, so I had to shake off the mildly disappointing start and step through my next races. You warm up, race, warm down and recover, then go back to the beginning again. It was a finely tuned process for me and required real mental discipline. Clear your head and keep going. Bronze is still bronze.

  On day two, after a morning spent lying idly on my bunk, I came close to nirvana. My race process for the 100-metre butterfly was so perfectly synced that I felt like I was gliding through air. Everything just clicked into place. That kind of performance is difficult under the best and easiest conditions, and feels nearly impossible at the Olympic level because of the pressure-cooker environment, where you have just under a minute to prove yourself, once every four years. I swam a personal best time—56.74 seconds—and brushed up against the world record. Most importantly, I won gold. I stepped up onto the podium and the Australian national anthem played, and I smiled. I began to feel confident that it would be the first of several moments just like it over the next few days. As ever, I was immediately looking ahead. I should have stopped to breathe, to appreciate the moment, to be proud of what I’d done.

  Over the next two days, I had to rest and recover, between the drug tests and the press conferences. I had regular swims to keep my body in form, to keep the fast-twitch fibres firing, but I spent my afternoons watching Grey’s Anatomy in our village dorm room, trying to keep my mind as blank as possible. I felt relaxed and ready to roll when day five came around—the 100-metre freestyle.

  When you have multiple events to swim, you try to take your foot off the accelerator during the heats and just do enough to get through to the next round. It was part of my process. I could swim the 100-metre freestyle in just under 53 seconds, but I knew I only needed to swim 54 seconds in the heats to make it through. I could conserve some of my energy for the final race by bringing it down a couple of notches, and part of the process involved trying to judge exactly how little I needed to do. No problem. I was the World Champion, but I finished fifth or sixth overall in the heats, giving me a decent spot in an outside central lane for the semi-final. I was calm, focused. On reflection, maybe I was a little too calm, too sure of myself.

  In the semi-final of the 100-metre freestyle, I had a great entry, a great turn at the bottom end of the pool and just the right stroke rate. Seventy-five per cent of my race went exactly how I wanted it to—as perfect as it needed to be. I worked that first 35 metres powerfully, driving off the wall in a nice, tight somersault, pushing out in a perfect streamline for the back half of the race. The next 25 metres felt good. I wouldn’t have done anything differently. But in the last 25 metres, I took my foot off the pedal just that little bit too much—and that turned out to be a terrible mistake.

  I thought there were three swimmers vying for the lead—me and two women beside me—but a fourth swimmer had pulled away in an outside lane and I didn’t have her in my field of vision. So instead of gunning it in that crucial end run, I kept pace with the women beside me, then let them pull ahead slightly, thinking I would touch the wall in third. The girl in the outside lane got there first; I hadn’t even seen her coming.

  I touched the wall and turned to look up at the board, and in that moment saw my dreams, my work, my sacrifice, my life, imploding on a digital screen. I was fourth?! Fourth place in the semis was nothing. Fourth place in the semis was not going to win a gold medal; fourth place in the semis might not even get me into the final. A cavity opened up in my chest, and I felt my heart falling out. From one second to the next, all my plans, all my purpose, went up in flames. What the hell have I done?

  I hadn’t even climbed out of the pool before I started coming apart psychologically, in a way that had never happened in my entire swimming career. The more confident you are, the further you have to fall, I guess, and I was falling rapidly into the dark. My mind was racing with grief, looping and twisting and galloping out of control, a whole planet of shit on my shoulders. I was disgusted with myself for being so stupid and letting everything go. You’ve done it again, I thought. It was Athens all over again; I was doomed to repeat this stupid mistake. You’re a loser. You’re pathetic. You are worthless.

  Moments after the race had ended, all my calm, all my focus, all my careful preparation was erased and I was flooded with self-hatred. My breathing was too sharp and my pulse rate was elevated, and I felt like I had no control. It was the beginning of a panic attack, which accelerated as the second semi-final came in. I waited in a corner at the end of the pool and watched, and saw with horror as my name was pushed down into ninth place. I had missed the final. Again.

  You’re a loser. You’re pathetic. You are worthless. I was so horribly down on myself. I actively avoided eye contact with Stephan. I desperately wanted to avoid the media pool as well. By now my panic had morphed into rage and I didn’t think I had it in me to speak to the press, but I didn’t have a choice about it because the media scrum was blocking the exit. I managed to dodge around the foreign media, but the Australian contingent was waiting for me and there was no getting around them. What could I say? What on earth was I going to say to them? I’ve thrown it all away.

  I was inches away from the waiting cameras when the Australian media liaison officer stepped in front of me. ‘One of the Chinese swimmers has been disqualified,’ he whispered. ‘You’ve made it into the finals.’

  I didn’t believe him at first—it seemed like a bizarre pra
nk. For some reason I thought he was being cruel, trying to provoke a reaction from me. But I glanced up at the board and saw it was true. My stomach lurched again. The Chinese swimmer Pang Jiaying had had a false start and was out, and I had moved up into the final. I was sick with joy, with guilt, with shame, all at the same time. The universe had given me a second chance, but only by taking it away from another swimmer.

  It didn’t matter that I was in the finals. I was in freefall, and I couldn’t grab hold of anything. I was still so angry at myself. All those years and months of training—all the discipline and hard work—disintegrated under the force of my self-doubt. I was four years older than I’d been at Athens, and supposedly four years wiser. I was a World Champion in the race and a world record holder multiple times over, and yet somehow I had still fucked everything up. I didn’t deserve any of it. You will never win gold in this race. That was the dark thought driving up through the storm in my head.

  Stephan met me in the corridor outside the changing rooms, looking truly shocked. ‘What did you do?’ he said. That was all. He couldn’t possibly have said anything worse. What did you do? It was the unguarded shock in his voice that hurt, like he had finally seen me for the loser I was and not the champion he imagined me to be.

  I was insanely disappointed in myself, because no one, not even Stephan, had higher expectations for what I should achieve than me. When it came to swimming, I was a perfectionist. I wanted to be the best, and I didn’t just want to be the best for me. I wanted to show everyone what an incredible coach Stephan was, how wonderfully supportive my family was, how loving Luke was. I had failed not just myself but all of them. This is what he was saying to me. It didn’t come from a place of not caring—it came from caring too much—but it felt brutal. I just wanted him to be proud of me.