by Leisel Jones
Then one day Jeremy suggests I replace my evening meal with soup. ‘No biggie,’ he assures me. ‘It’s just you might swim faster if you were lighter.’
Ouch. The words sink like lead. They sink like an Olympic swimmer who’s overweight.
Lighter, huh? What exactly is he saying?
But Jeremy is so smart, he has so much knowledge when it comes to fitness, that I tell myself to get over it and just take his advice.
‘Alright,’ I tell him. ‘I reckon I could do that.’ And I go home to google soup recipes.
Marty is amazingly supportive about my diet. He is still chief cook in our house and even though he only ever cooks healthy stuff for us anyway, he relinquishes his role now, in order for me to make soup for our dinners. I cook a big batch each Sunday and then we eat it all week. ‘Whatever you have to do, I’ll do it with you,’ he tells me. And I am grateful to have him by my side.
So now I’m as disciplined with my eating as I am with my training. More so, in fact. I am a woman on a mission, a calorie-counting quest. For breakfast I eat one cup of high-fibre cereal with diced fruit and the lowest-possible-fat milk. For lunch I start out eating chicken and salad, or a sandwich, or tinned tuna, but it’s not long before I cut back to a single red apple. Dinner, of course, is the soup de jour. Often it is minestrone, sometimes pumpkin or tomato. And there is no bread allowed. No croutons, not even a little shaved parmesan on top. I only eat dinner if it can fit through a strainer. My teeth start to forget what I ever used them for.
I drink no tea, no alcohol, no soft drink. Just the odd coffee and sometimes a protein shake after the gym. It goes without saying there is strictly no snacking. In fact, except for my apple and my bowl of soup, nothing passes my lips after breakfast. I am still training six hours per day, most days of the week. And I am starving. I am stomach-achingly, head-spinningly famished.
Even as I am doing this, I can see that I have taken things too far. I know I’m being irrational about food. I am warped: obsessed. It’s all I can think about. The less I consume, the more I am consumed by it.
But I get too much satisfaction from dieting to ever stop now. It is powerful – it’s addictive – this ability to control. It feels like if I can restrict what I am eating I might be able to dictate everything else in my life, too. I am desperate to win; I will win at all costs. I’ve got it into my head that I am too fat and if I can just lose more weight then I will win the 100-metre event for sure. Then this pain will all be worth it.
My focus now is different to the way I was before the 2004 Athens Olympics. Back then I was obsessing strictly about swimming. This is broader and bigger. This is everything. I am determined to be the best athlete I can be. If I can just win gold, the rest of my life will fall into place. My relationship with Marty. With myself. Everything will be perfect if I can just win one race.
It is no-one else’s fault that I am so hungry, but that doesn’t stop me taking it out on everyone. I am grumpy at training, and at home when I’m with Marty. I have no energy and my metabolism is screwed. I struggle at squad. I have to keep getting out of the pool to vomit from hunger and exertion. I am swimming on nothing but stubbornness and thin air.
Jeremy organises a bike ride for us one day. We’re doing a lot of rides and hikes these days, uphill, for long distances and wearing that 10-kilo vest. ‘Sure you want to wear the vest today?’ Jeremy asks me. It’s going to be a long ride today. ‘Think I can’t do it?’ I reply. If there’s an extra challenge, an extra step, I’m always willing to take it. I am the only one making myself do all of this.
I strap the thing on and grimace under the weight. It’s only 10 kilos but that feels like a lot these days. Damn thing weighs more than what I eat in a week.
I am super-hydrated this morning. Jeremy warned us the ride would take us a few hours and that hydration would be important, and so, me being me, I’ve drunk four or five litres. More is more. The more extreme the better. I am taking everything way too far.
I say goodbye to Marty, who is out in the front yard talking to our new neighbours. We’ve recently left our flat and moved into a house on Davies Street in Moonee Ponds, and I haven’t yet had a chance to meet the couple next door. Marty has. He says they’re really nice. I wave and hurry off to several hours of gruelling training. Hurry, so I’m not late for the pain.
We do the ride and I don’t feel well. That’s no surprise, given that I have several litres of water sloshing around in my stomach.
I’m going to be sick, I think on the way home, and I wind down the window and vomit down the side of my car door. Then I bunny-hop all the way home to Moonee Ponds. Drive. Stop. Vomit. Drive. Stop. Vomit.
When I get home, there are strangers in the lounge room; Marty has invited the new neighbours over. I smile weakly but don’t stop to ask their names. I just stumble on through to the bathroom and vomit some more. I lie on the couch after they’ve gone.
‘Eat something.’ Marty waves a muesli bar under my nose, but the smell of the oats makes me nauseous again.
I vomit again, even though my stomach is empty.
A few days later, my physio comments: ‘Wow, you’ve toned up.’ I smile grimly and nod my head. But I haven’t really gained much tone. I haven’t gained much at all.
Here’s what I’ve lost though: my healthy metabolism, my energy and my perspective. Ironically, the one thing I haven’t lost a whole load of is weight. Yeah, I’ve shed a few kilos, trimmed down a bit. But it’s nothing I couldn’t have achieved a lot less painfully – and a lot more healthily – if I had done it slowly and properly over eight or ten months. I look fit now, and I’m probably the weight I should be going into an Olympics. But I’m still not skinny. Not lean. I guess I’m just not made that way.
So even after all my dieting, after all my angst, I have not transformed into someone new. I have wasted so much time trying to be something I’m not. I’ve spent hours torturing myself in training and I’ve bypassed thousands of calories, trying to magic myself into some super-skinny stranger. And by the end of it I am worn out and sick.
But I am obsessed. I am living and breathing Olympic gold. I am victory or bust. I am win-or-die-trying. I keep slurping that damn soup and dreaming of success. And by the time I reach trials at Sydney in late March, I refuse to even consider I could lose. I qualify comfortably for the 100-metre and 200-metre events for Beijing, then get back to the business of being obsessed.
At Beijing, for the benefit of US television ratings, the Olympic Committee has decided to reverse the scheduled times for the heats and the finals. Normally we swim heats in the morning and finals at night. But now, at the request of the NBC, they have turned that on its head so that finals coincide with prime time in the United States. They want Americans to be able to watch Michael Phelps win live when they settle down after work with a beer in front of the box.
‘We’re flipping our training,’ Rohan advises us. ‘Hard sessions in the morning, easy in the arvo.’
We are one of the only squads in the world to do this and I don’t know why no-one else follows. It’s smart and experimental. We’re adapting for our conditions. Rohan has us gearing up to do our best work before 10 a.m. in the morning, whereas at any other Olympics I’d barely be out of bed at that time.
But changing your whole program is very difficult. In the lead-up to the games, when we are in taper, I am off to the gym by 6 a.m. Jeremy has me doing a light session to get activated before breakfast, then it’s on to the pool by 7:30 a.m. From here, I will train hard for the next few hours, except, of course, on race days, when I’ll be preparing to compete. My body adapts quickly to the upside-down regime, but my mind less so. I am aggro and wired. I am highly strung 24/7. A cat on a tin roof with the temperature dialled to blazing.
Marty is good for me. He is stable and calm. But he has problems of his own. A few weeks out from Beijing he is dropped by the Western Bulldogs and his footy career is suddenly over. Retired, involuntarily, at the ripe old age of tw
enty-three. Now, in the days before we leave for China, he spends his mornings in bed reading the jobs pages and trying to look upbeat. He will still be travelling to Beijing to support me and act as cheerleader. Even though a sports stadium – as a spectator – is probably the last place on earth he wants to be.
Beijing is big. It is oversized, overdone. A caricature of an Olympics. And I love it. First, there’s the Bird’s Nest, the National Stadium, which will hold almost 100,000 cheering fans and which sits inside its tangle of twisted metal twigs, a latticework of imagination. Then there’s the Water Cube, the National Aquatics Centre, which is a fantastic blob of luminous bubbles that looks like it could wobble, bounce once or twice, and then drift away on the breeze.
When I first arrive, I am dazed by the sights. I wander around feeling dwarfed and insignificant. Then I shake off my awe and re-focus my mind. I’m not here to be a tourist. I have a job to do.
‘After you’ve finished racing, come and see the Great Wall with me,’ Marty says. He has never been to Beijing before either.
‘Sure, later. When this is all done,’ I tell him. When I’ve won, then he’ll understand. When I’ve won, he will see. After I win, we’ll be together and my fiancé will love me more than ever. These are the things I tell myself.
I skip the Opening Ceremony and stay in my room at the village instead. I have still never been to one of those things. I am rooming with Shayne Reese and even though she’s not out marching round the stadium either, she is giving me plenty of space tonight. Just what I want. I don’t need any company. I don’t need any distractions, not this close to the finish line.
These Olympics are the most expensive on record, the papers tell us. The biggest too. Beijing will be the most-watched Olympics in history, perhaps the most-watched event in history, the media reports breathlessly. But I skip the spectacle to stay in and focus. The world might be watching us, but I am navel-gazing.
Mum and Marty stay just outside Beijing, Marty in a hotel and Mum in a serviced apartment. It is someone’s home but it’s the size of a shoebox: tiny, dark and jammed into a towering unit block that’s identical to every other block on the street. It couldn’t be more different from my home for the next few weeks: the Water Cube.
Every time I walk past the Water Cube, with its hundreds of bubbles, I can’t shake the feeling it might just float away. Apparently, as a building, it’s incredibly robust. Each bubble is placed in just such a way that it’s so strong you could stand it on its head and it wouldn’t collapse. But it looks pretty shaky to me. Like one strong gust of wind might send it tumbling.
I’ve been in my own bubble these last few months, my own self-designed exile from the world. Isolated and self-contained, but much stronger because of it. Strong and tough and bubble-slick. I like this building. I will do well here.
I have a tough schedule at these Games. If everything goes to plan and I make all of my finals, I’ll swim in eight events over seven days: back-to-back races with only one day off. I am fit enough, of course – fitter than I’ve ever been in my life. But by this stage it’s equally about being able to put it together mentally on the day.
I cruise through the heats of the 100 metres on Sunday night, then back it up in the semis the next morning. I am the fastest qualifier in the heats (1:05.64), then again in the semi-finals (1:05.80). I am the only person to swim a 1:05. Rebecca Soni from the USA is the only one who can touch me now, and even she only manages a 1:07.07. This gold is mine. I cannot lose. I will shake off my hoodoo this time. I just know it.
But things get weird the night before my race. It’s after 9 p.m. when my phone rings, just when I’m winding down, ahead of my big day. Shower, teeth, double-and triple-check my bag for tomorrow. My stomach flip-flops with nerves (or is it because of the liquid dinner?). I sit down cross-legged on the bed to talk to Marty.
‘Hey, babe. Is everything okay?’ I ask. I’m concerned. Marty knows better than to call me when I should be in bed.
‘I don’t know. You tell me,’ he growls.
‘Huh? Marty? Are you alright? Where are you?’
‘I know what you’ve done,’ he mutters.
But I’m clueless. I have no idea what he’s on about.
He launches into a tirade. He accuses me of sleeping around. Specifically, of cheating on him with other swimmers on my team while I am inside the Olympic village.
I am gobsmacked. Baffled. It is such a bolt from the blue.
‘Wha– Are you kidding?’ I stammer. ‘When have I ever given you the idea I would cheat on you?’ My mind races back through the past few days for any sign, any gesture, that may have given him the wrong impression. I draw a blank.
But Marty is adamant. He will not be placated. He is shouting, then I’m shouting, and things are getting out of hand.
‘This is absurd. You’re being absurd!’ I tell him.
‘I’m not the one who’s having sex with other people!’ he spits.
‘Seriously? You seriously think that? I’m swimming the biggest race of my life in the morning and you seriously think I have time to be sleeping with anyone? Who in their right mind would do that?’ I am getting wound up now. ‘I have trained my whole life for this! I am swimming six hours a day and eating nothing but fucking soup! How would I even have the energy to sleep around!’
From down the hallway I hear a thud that sounds suspiciously like a shoe hitting a wall. ‘Oi! Keep it down or I swear I will throw that phone out the window!’ It’s my friend, KP (Kylie Palmer), and it’s not hard to tell she is seriously pissed. My roommate, Shayne, has retreated into the bathroom, but there’s only so long someone can feign being on the loo.
‘Look,’ I hiss into the phone. ‘No-one, no-one is going to be sleeping around before a major meet. As if anyone in the village would be doing that. These people are racing. This is the biggest meet of our lives! Besides, babe, I love you. Why would I ever do that to you?’
I spend the best part of an hour on the phone trying to reassure him. It’s ridiculous and damaging. I am disturbing so many people and I feel terrible. I am wasting so much valuable energy on his totally baseless fears.
Yet I stay on the line. I feel bad that my fiancé is feeling so bad. I could just switch off my phone and say ‘screw you, I need to sleep’. But if he’s hurting, I’m hurting, and I want to try and make him feel better. He’s been so supportive, I tell myself. This is the least you can do. And I stuff down the thought that perhaps his insecurities are rearing their ugly heads now that it’s me – and not him – in the spotlight, for the first time in our relationship. He has never been to an Olympics with me. We haven’t known one another long enough. And the last few days, with their merry-go-round of media interviews and autograph signings and special events has been an eye-opener for Marty, I’m sure.
But I am loyal to a fault. So I sit on the line and listen to his fears and soothe and cajole and stay up late.
The next morning at the pool, Rohan confiscates my phone. ‘You don’t have the energy for this. You need to focus,’ he admonishes me. He is not impressed. No-one who roomed near me last night is, and I feel awful that I’ve disturbed my teammates.
Then I walk out through the tunnel, onto the exposed pool deck, and I feel even worse. There, on either side of the pool, towers of supporter-seating rise up in all directions. There are only press photographers in here now, but soon these stands will be packed with journalists, fans, family and friends: all coming to watch us perform. All expecting the world.
And these people won’t know I’ve had a bad night. They won’t understand that I’ve had a fight with my fiancé, that I’m feeling upset. How could I explain all that? That’s behind-the-scenes stuff, the stuff no-one sees. To the rest of the world, we only appear every four years, step up onto the blocks and swim 100 metres. It’s what we’re trained to do, what we do every day. So how hard can it be to do it again today, right?
Unfortunately, life happens for us too. We’re human, and we have proble
ms just like anyone else. But when we have a bad day, we let down so many people. Our coaches, our teammates, our families and friends. And the spectators, the Aussie fans. When I have a bad day, I let down you guys at home in your lounge rooms watching. How do I make it up to you when I have an off day?
Marty was still texting and calling me when I handed my phone to Rohan. I pass it over feeling like that kid in the back row who’s been caught sending messages in class. But I don’t care. I’m happy to be rid of the stupid thing. I don’t want to think about it, don’t want the worry. I don’t want to deal with my fiancé right now.
I am mad. No, wait: all of a sudden I am red-hot furious. I am ready to explode. How dare he do this to me when I’m at the last hurdle? The night before my race? How dare he accuse me, distract me and disturb all my friends! And after everything I have done for him! I moved to Melbourne and changed coaches: I risked everything for him.
‘Forget it,’ Rohan tells me, and he gets me in the water and training. Up and down, up and down. Back on track. Thinking of gold.
Forget about Marty, that’s what he said. Forget that you are hurting and your fiancé thinks you’re a cheat. Forget that you’ve just turned twenty-three and you’re head-over-heels nuts about a guy. You must focus, must be clinical. You must be single-minded.