by Leisel Jones
I’m jostling too. But I’ve got a bit of a handicap, because there’s one more new name in the Australian camp in Barcelona in 2003: Stilnox.
Stilnox is a sleeping tablet, an allegedly harmless drug. It is known for its fast absorption (peak absorption kicks in just thirty minutes after taking it) and also for its addictive nature. The side effects of Stilnox are many: they include, but are not limited to, dizziness, headaches, fatigue, nightmares, nausea, vomiting and muscle weakness. Then there’s worsened insomnia, hallucinations, agitation and unexpected changes in behaviour such as rage or confusion. Oh, and don’t forget sleepwalking, sleep-driving, sleep-eating and sleep-sexting. By the end of the decade, coroners will have found that Stilnox contributed to the deaths of several people who met violent and unexpected ends. For instance, there’s the tragic story of Mairead Costigan, a philosophy graduate who died after falling from the Sydney Harbour Bridge during what was believed to be Stilnox-induced sleepwalking. After the Sydney Morning Herald reported the story, highlighting the dangerous effects of Stilnox, the paper received dozens of emails and phone calls. People knew this drug; they were frightened of it. And by 2012, the Australian Olympic Committee chiefs will have banned athletes from using it, after former Olympian Grant Hackett called Stilnox ‘evil’ and was admitted to rehab for his addiction to it.
But in 2003 Stilnox is still the go-to drug for Australian swimmers. Having trouble sleeping? Have a Stilnox! Bit wired? Bit tired? Got a headache? Try Stilnox! In Barcelona the team medics will provide us with a generous supply, with practically no questions asked.
Personally, I rarely have trouble sleeping. Jetlag isn’t a problem for me, and I find I’m usually so buggered after training that not even the pressure-cooker environment of international competition can keep me awake. I could sleep on a barbed-wire fence. In fact, I often find myself yawning involuntarily in the marshalling area before I race. (I later learn that this is to do with thermoregulation: that it’s the brain’s way of increasing heart rate and blood flow to the head and cooling the brain. Once I learn this, I stop worrying about yawning and start using it to my advantage. Sorry to yawn! But this is just so easy. I’ll see you at the finish line, folks!)
But sometimes I do suffer from the ‘taper sillies’. This is a common complaint among swimmers when we ‘taper off ‘ our training so that we conserve energy ahead of a big race. As you scale down your training schedule and simultaneously scale up the excitement and nervous energy, it’s much harder to sleep. Here in Barcelona, after sitting around resting all day in a hotel room, literally putting my feet up, I am wired and silly. I am bouncing off the walls.
I am rooming with medley-freestyler Jessica Abbott (Jabbott), who is only one month older than me and who seems to have just as much excess energy. We’re like puppies. We can’t sit still. We’ve made banners for our room and sung stupid songs. We’ve painted our nails (an oldie but a goodie) and we’ve watched so many movies we’ve exhausted the hotel’s selection. We’ve had a lot of fun – it’s been one of the best lead-ups to an international event I’ve ever had – but now, though, we cannot sleep.
‘Should we go and see the doctor?’ Jabbott asks.
‘Sure. We’ll get some medication,’ I say.
Of course, in our team, medication equals Stilnox, and Stilnox equals crazy.
In less than an hour we are back in our room, lying on our twin beds, each with ten milligrams of the non-benzodiazepine coursing through our veins.
‘Jabbott?’ I ask tentatively. ‘Is it just me, or is the room spinning?’
‘My room’s spinning too!’ she shrieks.
I could reach out and touch her, our beds are so close, so the ridiculousness of what she’s just said – of her having a separate room – sets us off. We’re giggling and spinning. We are completely off our heads.
‘This is like Alice in Wonderland!’ she says.
‘Like we’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, Jabbott. Hey, get it? Rabbit. Jabbott.’
This sets us off again. As seventeen-year-old kids (seventeen-year-olds who have never touched alcohol, let alone psychoactive z-drugs), Jabbott and I have no idea what has just been prescribed to us. I can see little creatures dancing on the end of my bed. Leprechauns and rainbows. I am rolling and spinning. We are falling on the floor.
Is this like being drunk? Like being high? I don’t have any life experience to know what to compare it to. I’m guessing it’s a bit like being on acid. Whatever it is, it’s unlocked some part of our brains reserved for the ridiculous. Jabbott and I are hysterical.
‘Electrical!’
‘Chemical!’
We’re having way too much fun. And as we finally drift off to sleep several hours later (probably several hours later than we would have done naturally), I think, No wonder the rest of the team are in on this.
That’s right: pretty much everyone’s doing it. Within the Australian swimming team, Stilnox is freely available at any time. It’s simply a matter of presenting to the team doctors and asking for it. In fact, as Jabbott and I found out, you don’t even have to request the drug by name. Just telling one of our doctors we’re having trouble sleeping is enough to elicit Stilnox tablets. It’s the first choice of our medics.
Admittedly, at this time everyone believed the drug to be harmless. What is staggering, however, is that once Stilnox is prescribed to us, nobody monitors our intake or our reaction to the drug. We are free to choose how much we take and how often, as we all dose ourselves. No-one warns us to be careful how much we take. It’s staggering. Quite aside from the fact that many of us are still kids, all of us are elite athletes whose bodies are their livelihoods. That we are given prescription drugs so freely and with so little supervision is quite shocking.
Jabbott and I are some of the last people on the team to catch on to the Stilnox craze. While we’re just starting out, some of the others have got it down to a fine art. The older swimmers teach us that for the best results you need to pop a pill then fight against sleep for the next half an hour or so. If you can get past these first thirty minutes, you get to the next stage – the fun stage – the ‘high’ that Jabbott and I experienced accidentally on the first night we took it.
On the international flights to and from meets, everyone on the team has competitions with one another to see who can last the longest without falling asleep. On the flight home from Barcelona, I compete against one of my teammates in the seat behind me. We both take Stilnox at the same time and then battle it out to see who can stay awake the longest. I have no recollection of what happened next, but I wake up several hours later with blisters around my lips and gums.
‘Did any food come out in the last few hours?’ I ask the poor guy seated next to me. He is not part of our team – just a random passenger.
‘Uh, yeah,’ he says tentatively. ‘And it was blazing hot, but you scoffed it really fast.’
I have burnt my lips and the inside of my mouth. I have bleeding gums and a swollen tongue. Behind me, my mate had fallen asleep before his food arrived, so his mouth is spared.
‘You fell asleep first!’ I crow. ‘I won!’
On the same flight, Travis Nederpelt, a champion butterflier from Western Australia, is hallucinating from Stilnox. He is sleepwalking up and down the aisle of the plane. He is wearing headphones and trying to plug the cord of them into mid-air. At the same time, he believes he has broken his leg and is dragging it behind him, while shouting to the flight attendants to come and administer first aid. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with his leg. Watching Travis limp up the aisle is the most hysterical thing I have ever seen. He’s a hilarious guy anyway, but right now I think I might die from laughing.
Between the pill-popping, we also do a little swimming in Barcelona. On the morning of my 100-metre heat, I wake up slowly, drugged. I have had a couple of Stilnox the night before (strictly to get me off to sleep this time, not for recreational purposes, but the hangover the next morning doesn’t know the differen
ce).
I’ll be fine, I tell myself. It won’t seriously affect me. I am young and invincible; I’m still one month away from my eighteenth birthday.
And in my heat I am invincible. I win easily in a time of 1:07.75. I am the fastest qualifier going into the semi, the fastest out of the top sixty-five female breaststrokers in the world. I am ready, I am pumped.
This gold is mine.
I return again that evening to swim in the semi-final. And as I line up for my race, I am thinking about Marilyn Manson. Yes, the shock rocker with the white eyes and bleeding make-up. The biggest goth of them all. In the winter of 2003, I am going through a heavy-metal/goth-rock/shock-rock phase. A ‘music your mum hates’ phase. Whatever Mum doesn’t approve of, I love. And right now that’s Marilyn Manson. ‘The Dope Show’, ‘The Beautiful People’: I know all of his songs by heart. But the tune running through my head on the night of the 100-metre breaststroke semi-final is ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’, Manson’s cover of the Eurythmics classic from 1983 (a song written before I was born.)
I bounce around the marshalling area on the balls of my feet, swinging my arms and mouthing the words. I am picturing Manson, with his creepy knives and strange tattoos, as I jump around on the pool deck – thinking about Marilyn Manson in the middle of this family-friendly venue.
And as I line up on the blocks, I am super relaxed. I am having fun singing my song. I’m psyched, I’m ready; I can do this thing.
Then I am in. I am wet. I am pounding up the lane, blood pumping, heart racing. My stroke is smooth and rhythmic. I feel good: fast. But I can’t get this song out of my head. The chorus is stuck on repeat.
At training, I often sing in my head to stop myself from getting bored, to stop the tedium of the black line from swallowing me up. I sing or I study. During exam time, I ploughed up and down, hour after hour, trying to memorise the symbols on the periodic table or the formula for the quadratic equation. I came up with cute acronyms and linked them to whatever set I was swimming, so that when I got to my exam I only had to regurgitate that mnemonic from the third 50-metres … But today it’s choir time.
Stop singing! I yell at myself. Concentrate! This is a semi-final at the World Championships for God’s sake!
But Marilyn Manson is a determined bugger, and tonight it seems he’s going nowhere. I can imagine the press asking me about my game plan after this race. ‘Oh yeah,’ I’ll say, ‘I just sang a little goth-rock, you know: the kind that comes with censorship warnings for parents on the CD covers. And I found that really helped me find my focus …’
When Ken and I chatted about my race earlier in the week, we decided my strategy should be ‘swim hard’. That’s all. It’s that simple. I am in the first of two semis for this race so I don’t have the luxury of seeing the other race times before I swim. ‘If you want a spot in that final,’ Ken warns, ‘then just swim bloody hard.’
And I am swimming hard. But I’m still singing too. My stroke, my breathing: I’m marching to Marilyn Manson’s beat. I hit the wall and turn and peer at the scoreboard. Then I scream.
Oh my God! Did I just break the world record?
I cannot believe it. 1:06.37. It’s my first world record. I’ve shaved 0.15 of a second off the existing one and I’ve swum a personal best. Sweet dreams sure are made of this.
I scream and cry and jump around in my lane, slapping the wall and grinning my head off. On the pool deck, Ken is wildly giving the thumbs-up sign. A world record! You’ve made the finals and you’ve swum a world record! We’re on top of the world! his thumbs are saying. In the pool, I still can’t believe it. I’m staggered. I knew I’d swum hard, but not that hard. I had no idea I was even in WR contention.
Then I remember. This was no ordinary record: this was a Penny Heyns record. This record was set by one of the best breaststrokers to ever walk the planet. By the woman who never wore goggles, even when racing, so superhuman were her powers. I have broken a Penny Heyns world record. I have never been so damned proud.
At this single moment in time, no-one in history has ever been faster than me.
That is the coolest thing in the world.
After my amazing swim in the semis, however, it all comes crashing down for me in the final. I do the unthinkable. I lose. Having broken the world record just yesterday, I bomb in the final and finish third.
Luo Xuejuan of China wins the gold, followed by Amanda Beard in second who is 0.05 seconds ahead of me.
I am shattered.
Later in the week, I come in behind Amanda Beard again, this time in the 200-metre event. Amanda wins in a time of 2:22.9o: a new world record. Only, she had the sense to get a medal for hers.
I also collect another bronze, this time for the medley relay, which I swim with Giaan Rooney, Jessicah Schipper and Jodie Henry.
Barcelona has been a roller-coaster of a meet for me. My first world record. Then a devastating loss. And no gold medal in any of my events. I’ve had a lot of fun at this meet, but a lot of heartbreak too. And I am now convinced that Stilnox is not for me. With such small margins, and with so much at stake, I’m nervous about anything that mucks with my training.
I find that whenever I take the drug I wake up feeling groggy and hungover the next morning. Foggy. Even after a light swim, I can’t shake the sensation the air’s turned to soup. Of course, if the air is soup, then the water feels like mud. Thick, gloopy, gelatinous mud. Stilnox has got to be detrimental to our performances, I decide. Not only is it taking us about half a day to wake up, but when we finally do shake off our hangovers, we’re still tired and lethargic and well below par. And the crazy thing is we really don’t need it. I’m sure that for most of us basic relaxation techniques like meditation could be used instead of drugs. Plus, the more we take it, the more we find we need it, and the higher doses we need to take. I start off needing two tablets to get to sleep and then sometimes three. By the end of the meet, I cannot sleep without it. But the thing is, I also can’t swim my best with it.
Sure, I may have got a world record, but I then bombed in my final, and I’m positive Stilnox is a big part of the reason why. And I’m sure it’s the case for others on the Australian team, too.
But nothing will be said about our Stilnox use yet. Not for another decade or so.
Late in my trip to Barcelona, I get to meet Penny Heyns. She’s been sitting in the stands each day for the past week or so, enjoying herself, just taking it all in, probably relieved she doesn’t have to get wet. She must have been there when I broke her record: the thought fills me with pride and horror in equal amounts.
I’ve never met Penny before now. She is so amazing and so much older than me that I’ve always found her impossibly intimidating. She’s got a stocky build, strong and powerful, and is quite beautiful in her strength. And there’s also something about her that says ‘calm’. She’s not scary in the way that someone like Amanda Beard is scary. Amanda is off-putting precisely because that’s how she wants you to feel: put off. But Penny is something else. She is awe-inspiring. And as a result I am both awed and inspired when I meet her.
‘Congratulations!’ she says warmly. ‘That was some swim you put together in the semi.’ I am sitting in the stands with her, several days after my race. She has called me over, has requested to speak with me, so that she can congratulate me herself. ‘So you’ve broken my record?’ she asks.
I nod, dumbstruck. I am sitting on the stadium steps, just below Penny’s seat. I have chosen a step at her feet. I am here to pay my respects: to worship.
‘You know, that’s what it was there for,’ she says kindly. ‘To be broken.’
I nod again.
When I leave her a few minutes later, I am glad we have met. I am better for the experience. In this sport, it’s not every day you meet someone as nice as Penny Heyns – and the fact she is like that after such a long and hard career is even more impressive. I vow to remember that.
That, and to leave the drugs alone.
Picture Section 1
Relaxing poolside,
Northern Territory, 1985.
Sand in hair, don’t care!
St Huberts Island, age two.
With Ken Wood.
Winning the coveted towel, as age champion, Sunshine Coast District Swimming Association, beside Josh Bettridge (right).
My first Age Nationals, in 1996.
Opening a new pool in the Tiwi Islands when I am about fifteen.
On the dais at Chandler in 1997.
Look at those flippers!
My family cheering me on during Sydney 2000.
Flashing the peace sign at swimming trials in 2000.
Our gold medal-winning medley relay team at Athens 2004:
Petria Thomas, Jodie Henry, Giaan Rooney and me.
With Anna Poleska and Amanda Beard after the 200-metre medal ceremony in Athens.
Training at the Valley with Stephan, 2005.
International competition, 2005.
In the Valley pool, 2005.
Taking out the gold in Montreal, 2005.
Smiling for Mum, after winning that elusive individual gold in Beijing, 2008.
All dressed up for a shoot for the Age’s
Sport & Style magazine.
10
Olympic Lies
It’s 2004. The Olympic year.