Beneath the Surface

by Libby Trickett

  I had so much to be grateful for. You need to have a good connection with your coach: if you’re happy, you want to celebrate, and if you’re not happy, you want a soft place to fall. The only fault I could ever find with Stephan was that he was never that soft place. It was always, ‘Why did you do that? This is how we do better.’ He was always on, always goal-oriented. Sometimes it felt cold. Sometimes I just needed him to understand that I was a human being and not a machine, and that it was important for me to take a moment to process what was happening to me. But on the other hand, looking back, I know it would only have made things worse if he had indulged me. If he had opened that door even a fraction and allowed me to wallow in my grief, to throw myself a little pity party every time something didn’t go my way, I would have just stayed there. Because I have such big emotions, there was always the risk of getting lost in them. Stephan’s clinical attitude always pushed me out of the dark.

  It wasn’t more than a couple of weeks later that I decided to go back to swimming. I’m not sure what my real motivation was; things were still so muddled in my head. I wanted to take care of unfinished business, I suppose, and I wanted to prove to Stephan that I could do it without him. Also, I didn’t have any better ideas for what I should be doing with my time. I was never any good at really digging through my emotional and psychological experiences. I was an athlete, trained to focus and move forward, so I took that impulse and ran with it.

  The problem was that there were no real alternatives in terms of coaching in Queensland. Simon Cusack was probably the only option, but he was training Cate and Bronte Campbell over at Indooroopilly Swimming Club, and they were Olympic-class sprinters, just like me. Cate had won bronze in the 50-metre freestyle in Beijing, and Bronte was coming up fast behind her. Much like with Jess, I wouldn’t have felt comfortable training with girls who were my direct competitors.

  Luke and I decided that moving to Sydney was our only real option if I was going to continue swimming. We had always assumed that we would live there after I retired, out of some vague sense that I would get work in the television industry, which was largely Sydney-based. Plus, Luke’s family was there and his business prospects were good, so he wouldn’t be disadvantaged. And I’d recently learned that a coach named Grant Stoelwinder was moving to the New South Wales Institute of Sport. He was going to build a top-flight professional squad around a swimmer named Eamon Sullivan, who had won two silvers and a bronze medal in Beijing, in similar races to mine. It sounded like the perfect environment for me, as a step towards retirement. A new coach would be invigorating but I would be swimming with tried and tested athletes who had some maturity and experience in addition to raw talent. What I needed, I assumed, was a change of scenery.

  We moved to Sydney in December 2008, and I became the only female swimmer on Grant’s team. Our job was swimming and the training was structured to reflect that —swimming didn’t come second to study or some other kind of work. We kept professional hours, or thereabouts, arriving for training at 7 a.m. rather than 5.30 a.m. We’d be in the pool from seven until nine, then hit the gym for an hour or so before going home for lunch and then returning in the afternoon for another block of training sessions. I struggled with the routine because there wasn’t enough of a gap for me to rest and recover between sessions, but the guys seemed to thrive. Besides Eamon, there was Andrew Lauterstein, Garth Kates, Matt and Andrew Abood, and Geoff Huegill—all powerhouse swimmers who were extremely focused on beating their way to the top.

  Despite the promise of professionalism and the very serious boys I was training with, my athletic career felt less taxing in Sydney than it had in Brisbane. Grant (we called him Stolly) and Stephan had what felt like radically different styles, and I found training under Stolly to be much easier, in a sense. His approach was based on quality rather than endurance—high-intensity sessions, but fewer of them. I also felt like I was under less scrutiny for my technique and form, probably because Stephan for so many years had been so incredibly intense. Stolly wanted us to race fresh and at higher levels throughout the season, rather than smashing our bodies, tapering and springing from a tight coil in competition. It was a perfectly valid system and he was known for training champions, but it was just so much less demanding than what I was used to. Ironically, I lost quite a lot of fitness, but I raced very fast under his guidance.

  It was challenging being the only girl on the squad, and not just because the guys’ physical capacity so far outstripped my own. The real problem was that they were all really quite cool, and I was a bit of a nerd. I had a very daggy energy, and they were like a pack of strapping young gods. They were all confident, single and sleek as seals, and it affected the way they carried themselves and the way they interacted with me. We didn’t share a sense of humour. One-on-one, we could joke around and be friendly, because they were actually very sweet people, but I found them a little alienating as a pack. We also didn’t share the same interests. Lauto was a DJ in his spare time, Eamon was deeply into food, and Skippy (Geoff Huegill) was just a very social animal and was constantly tackling the next business opportunity. I never felt like I was part of a family. We were friendly but not friends, which made things harder than I’d imagined they would be, because I really didn’t know anyone else in Sydney.

  Surprisingly, although he had lived in Sydney for most of his life, Luke was also quite socially isolated. During the four years he’d been in Brisbane, Luke had lost touch with his schoolfriends, and he was now focused more on his new business plan rather than on making friends. In the fallout from the Global Financial Crisis, Luke wanted to start a new investment fund based on the principle of alignment, where he made money only when his investors did. But, as you can imagine, there’s a planet of red tape you have to navigate before you can start trading with other people’s money, so much of his time was consumed with setting up the business.

  It wasn’t much of a life. Luke worked, I swam and in the evenings we flaked out in front of the television. We couldn’t afford to do anything else. We lived in a small cottage in the inner west, in Lilyfield, close to the Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre and Homebush, where I was training. It was $750 for what was technically a three-bedroom house, but we referred to the third bedroom as the ‘couch room’ because our couch was the only thing that fitted in there. We could reach out the side window and touch the neighbour’s house. Everything in Sydney was either hard to get to or really expensive, so we didn’t have much quality of life after the rent had been paid.

  We felt very optimistic going into the move, but life in Sydney soon became very lonely, very quickly. I had a lot of time on my hands to sit and think about what I was doing with my life and with my swimming, and I found I was always ill-at-ease for some reason. I couldn’t find my groove. I enrolled in an online course in marketing and communication, but it was just something I thought I should do. I was completely unmotivated about study—I was just trying to fill some hours in the day.

  A big part of the problem was that we just weren’t well suited to Sydney. It felt frantic compared to Brisbane: high-energy, high-paced and highly competitive. And it all felt so superficial to Luke and me. It didn’t help that we were so far from family and friends, cooped up together in our tiny house.

  There were other issues as well. Luke was so focused on building his business that everything else seemed to fade from his attention a bit, including me. For so long we had been such great friends and partners, and had shared so many of the highs and lows of our young lives together. Now I felt like he was travelling in a different direction, and wasn’t including me on his journey. He felt cold and distant, like my father, like Stephan. I didn’t know where the warmth between us had gone.

  The other big issue contributing to the cracks in our relationship was money, which again felt directly related to Luke’s work. It wasn’t just that the rent was exorbitant, but our income was slowing and Luke had invested all our savings in the stock market—that’s why we were renting. In the
meantime, Luke’s business was still in its formative stage, which meant he was earning nothing from it. We lived on the money from my swimming endorsements, but the boomtime surrounding the Olympic Games had come to an end, so the river of income was dwindling to a stream. It added pressure that we didn’t need when we both felt quite unhappy, which was only heightened by the long stretches we spent apart in 2009, as I travelled often for swimming meets. Stolly wanted us racing us much as possible, including professional tours like the Mare Nostrum and the Paris International. There was a three-week training camp in Italy at one point. Cumulatively, I spent at least three months away that year.

  My swimming career was going well, or it appeared to be. I looked like I was in condition and I was racing well, but in the back of my mind I didn’t necessarily feel that I could progress much further under Stolly’s tutelage. I was still an elite athlete, one of the fastest women in the sport, but the ferocity and hunger that had fuelled my early career had started to wane, though it was difficult to see that at the time. To me, it felt like the whole sport was changing, not just my place in it. And this was driven home in July 2009, at the World Championships in Rome.

  I was an ambassador for Speedo, but much like the rest of the Australian swimming team, I was under pressure to wear a full-body swimsuit made by another company that became known in the press as the ‘super suit’. It was made of thick rubber and felt like a wetsuit, covering my body from shoulder to ankle. The minute I put it on and jumped in the pool, I knew it would give swimmers an unfair advantage. The thickness of the material gave you additional buoyancy, and that meant you’d expend less energy staying afloat, which could make you more efficient in the water. It was clear to me that people would race much faster wearing the super suits, which of course was clearly the intention. Tests were done that demonstrated that the suits were performance-enhancing, but for some reason they were ignored by FINA and by Swimming Australia, as well as many other peak swimming organisations around the globe. Every team adopted them, because no one wanted to be at a disadvantage in international competition. I guess they figured it wasn’t cheating if everyone was doing it.

  Jaked, the company that manufactured the performance-enhancing suits, was based in Italy, and with the World Championships taking place in Rome, I assumed that everyone would be keen to have a spectacular year in the pool. And the company got exactly what it was hoping for with one record-breaking swim after another. In fact, every single world record was broken that year, except for the men’s 1500-metre freestyle.

  Against Stolly’s advice, I made a decision not to wear the super suit in my individual races. It was a team decision for the relay and I went along with the team, but I just didn’t feel right about it at any point—in fact, the whole thing made me incredibly depressed. I didn’t make any grand announcement in the media, I just suited up in my usual swimsuit, feeling at least like my own integrity was intact. As the week of the World Championships went on, there was increasing speculation in the media about the effect the suits were having on these suddenly accelerated performances, not just from the top-ranked swimmers but from the top sixteen. The tone of the discussion was a little sour, or it seemed that way to me, as though the whole sport was tarnished.

  I had worked my entire career on my starts, turns and finishes. I’d put in gruelling hours of training to hone those skills, which gave me a competitive edge. My free swim and my back-end speeds were strong, but it was the starts, turns and finishes that made me the athlete that I was, and it was a long, hard road to the top of the pile. The super suits allowed people who weren’t necessarily good at starts, turns and finishes to become good at those skills overnight. It allowed people who had taken three-month breaks after Beijing to still do significant personal best times—to become instantly far better swimmers than they had been a day before. The public seemed underwhelmed by any race that wasn’t a record-breaker, which devalued the amazing achievements of all the incredible swimmers who came before. Do you know how hard it is to become the fastest person in the world? I wondered. It shouldn’t be easy, and it shouldn’t happen every day. And it certainly shouldn’t happen just because you’re wearing the right outfit.

  I resented the super suit and the effect it had, so deeply I couldn’t even express it. It just seemed incredibly unfair. It made me feel like the sport I loved had been corrupted, in a way I had never seen before.

  I was despondent in Rome. More than anything, I was burnt out. The suits were just another thing that felt out of my control. I took home a bronze medal in the 100-metre freestyle, a silver in the 4x100-metre medley relay and a bronze in the 4x100-metre freestyle relay, which was barely better than I had achieved six years earlier in Barcelona. Things were slipping backwards, it seemed, slowly but surely. Maybe I had made a mistake trying to keep my career afloat. This dream I had—I will finish a champion—was slipping through my fingers.

  I sat in a corridor with Luke, in the hotel where the Australian team was staying, and we talked for a solid hour about my career and where we had ended up. I told him that I was ready to retire, and he understood. He could see how emotionally depleted I was—by the suits, by Sydney, by everything. He backed me, like he always did. I would swim at the Australian Short Course Championships, which had always been my greatest arena, and that would provide me with the high I needed to help me leave the sport with my pride intact. I wanted to feel great about swimming again before I said goodbye.

  At the Short Course Championships in August 2009, I broke the world record in the 100-metre freestyle. I swam 51.01, my personal best. It was an amazing moment, and I had no regrets. I was doubly sure coming out of that achievement that it was time to retire. Unfortunately, I couldn’t announce it. My management team decided that it was better for me in terms of my career prospects to be retiring to something. If I had a post-swimming career lined up, I had a story to tell that would make me a more attractive candidate for media and sponsorship opportunities that might arise in the future. I knew they meant well, and they had experience with this sort of thing; as well, athletes who just retired and disappeared into oblivion often seemed to struggle with mental health, in addition to being forgotten in the public sphere. My managers just wanted me to delay my announcement until they’d found me a job outside swimming.

  If it were up to me, I would have just ripped the bandaid off. Instead, I was left in this nowhere place, with nothing meaningful to do, in a city I didn’t like. And the only meaningful decision I made in the next few months was that I wasn’t going to exercise anymore. No more punishing routines at the pool, no more gruelling gym sessions, no more hammering, sweaty spin cycles on the exercise bike. Not even a daily run or a weekly swim at the local pool. I had been training virtually nonstop for ten years, 35 hours a week, 48 weeks a year, and I just didn’t want a bar of it anymore. I was so sick of it all.

  Luke was working from home and I was home all the time, so we were on top of each other at a time when I felt completely hollowed out and deflated. He worked in his office and I sat on the couch, eating as much as I had when I was training without recognising that my body didn’t need the fuel. I’d start the day with four pieces of toast and two eggs, eat two huge rolls for lunch and then three bowls of spaghetti for dinner. I was so accustomed to eating before I got hungry as an athlete, to keep all of the circuitry pumping, that I didn’t really understand what hunger or satiety felt like. The reality was I was eating far too much, and I gained weight as a result. The funny thing is, I didn’t care. I was tired, but not physically tired. I just slipped into a weird limbo where nothing really mattered.

  My retirement was announced late in 2009, along with the news that I had landed a job with Channel 10 in early 2010 as a reporter for Sports Tonight. I had no qualifications, no experience and no mentor on the job; I was just a 24-year-old woman who had spent most of her life soaked in chlorine, who was suddenly expected to produce feature segments. However burnt out I felt after Rome, however frustrated I was
in the holding pattern that came afterwards, it was nothing compared to the cold shock of feeling utterly out of my depth at this new three-day-a-week role. I didn’t connect with the job, so I wasn’t willing to apply myself to get better at it; the sum total of the experience was that I felt terrible about myself and my life. The best thing I can say about the job is that it didn’t last long: the network went through a cost-cutting phase and I was finished just as abruptly as I had started.

  I was lost. I didn’t realise how much of my identity had been tied up in swimming. I thought I’d done a good job of being more than just Olympic Gold Medallist Libby Trickett. I had studied, I had a husband, I had friends and family. There was so much to my life outside of the pool—right? But the further I drifted from the routine, from the performance, from the demands and expectations, the more I realised that it was the whole anchor of my being. I mean, of course it was—swimming had consumed most of the hours of my life—but I hadn’t pictured what life would be like when it didn’t. Who am I now? What are my goals? Who do I want to be? How do I value myself? And what on earth do I talk to people about?

  Everything felt like it was crumbling around me. To make matters worse, things with Luke had got very bad. We’d just stopped having fun together. It was like a fog had fallen over our relationship, and when we weren’t bickering about something or other, we were cold and distant, like two strangers who were struggling along separate paths. Every part of our lives was unwinding, and our love for each other followed suit. We frustrated each other, and we were unhappy. Nothing was working the way that it should.

  I don’t exactly know how my teenage sweetheart became so alien to me, but we got to the point, a year after Rome, when I just didn’t see a future for us anymore. I couldn’t imagine my life without Luke, but I couldn’t see how we could move forward. One night I sat on the edge of our bed and said, ‘I need you to leave.’