A bright light is shining down on Australian swimming a month out from the Paris Olympics, but it's not only the world-class brilliance of Dolphins superstars such as Ariarne Titmus and Kaylee McKeown attracting the glow.
The Paris 2024 trials, which wrapped up at Brisbane Aquatic Centre on Saturday night, left athletes with few places to hide as they navigated six days bursting with pressure. One after another, swimmers stopped in the media mixed zone and offered raw insights into the struggles they faced, opening up on debilitating nerves, crippling self-doubt or heavy disappointment. Beyond the media mixed zone, once swimmers had escaped to areas not so conspicuous, scenes far more confronting played out. Coaches, teammates, parents and Swimming Australia wellbeing staff rallied around inconsolable athletes.
Three years ago, the mental and emotional wellbeing of Australian swimmers were thrust into the spotlight when Maddie Groves, a winner of two silver medals at the Rio 2016 Olympics, withdrew from the trials for the postponed Tokyo Games and raised fresh allegations of misogynistic behaviour in the sport. Groves' explosive stand prompted Swimming Australia to commission an independent report on the experiences of women and girls.
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McKeown appeared to cope well with the intense pressure of last week's trials. "For me you've just got to dial it back," said the backstroke queen. "It's another pool, just in another state, me just basically training, putting on a race suit. I've just got to do my best on the day."
Sprinter Shayna Jack appeared entirely unfazed by the cut-throat nature of the event, where Olympic dreams are fulfilled or shattered in as few as 20-odd seconds. Jack, who talked to media repeatedly throughout the week, and always with a broad smile and a sense of insatiable hunger, spoke of enjoying the journey and having nothing to prove on her road back from the hellish drugs saga.
But the insights shared by McKeown and Jack were rare.
"I was not in a good place," admitted 20-year-old phenom Mollie O'Callaghan after her neck-and-neck 200m freestyle showdown with Titmus. "I couldn't really sleep last night," the world champion said when asked to expand on her remark. She also admitted to being "eaten up by nerves". And once she'd retreated to a darker, quieter area at the Brisbane venue, she burst into tears and had a heart-to-heart with coach Dean Boxall.
Two nights after O'Callaghan had let it all out, breaststroker Abbey Harkin unravelled in the same tucked-away area. Her hopes of competing at a second Olympic Games had just been shot to bits, leaving her crying hysterically.
Titmus was one of three people seen comforting Harkin, but even the two-time Olympic champion admitted to being tested by the trials. "At Olympic trials I just get way more nervous about everything," she said.
Distance swimmer Lani Pallister admitted to being so overwhelmed by nerves ahead of the 400m freestyle final that she couldn't talk. "I was standing in the marshalling room and I had no words," the 22-year-old said. "I was so anxious, and normally I'm quite bubbly and chatty, and I was just dead silent. [Dual Olympian] Leah Neale was speaking to me and she said, 'I've never seen you this anxious in my life.'"
Flynn Southam enjoyed a fabulous moment when he qualified as a 100m freestyle relay swimmer, but two nights earlier he'd had a shocker in the 200m freestyle final, leaving him in a deep rut. "You go from one of the lowest lows and being really down in the dumps to 48 hours later making my first Olympic team," said the 19-year-old. "I like to live by a quote that the comeback is stronger than the setback ... It's just about using logic and using those negative emotions and channelling that into energy."
One of Southam's relay teammates for the Paris Games, sprint king Kyle Chalmers, revealed his lead-up to the trials had been hampered by a back injury. He said it'd left him doubting whether he could do what was required to make his third Olympic team.
And Jaclyn Barclay, the 17-year-old backstroker set for her Olympic debut, was another of the many swimmers rattled by anxiety. "I was struggling quite a bit with my nerves and just the stress of what seemed to me like putting expectation on myself," Barclay said.
Few Australians are as well acquainted with high-pressure environments in sport as Anna Meares, the legendary track cyclist now serving as the Australian Olympic Committee's chef de mission for Paris 2024.
The two-time Olympic gold medallist got a sense of the ferocity of last week's trials, taking in the sights and sounds of the event upon her visit for the announcement of the Olympic team.
"Everyone's individual in how they see and interpret and feel pressure and therefore respond to pressure, and it's going through experiences that might be pretty uncomfortable that allow you to work with coaches and psychology staff to be able to upskill yourself to one; have awareness and recognise it, and then two; execute a change in how you respond to it next time," Meares said.
"And it can sometimes be quite a slow process, but it sometimes requires going through some pretty hard experiences of what pressure can do to you without realising it.
"The pressure's not going to change necessarily. It might come up, it might go down, but there's always going to be pressure in high-performance environments. You just have to work out how to survive them."
Meares shared a thought-provoking career reflection.
"I remember my first Games I loved trying to win, and my last Games I feared what happened when I didn't win."
The morning after the completion of the trials, Dolphins head coach Rohan Taylor spoke to media in Brisbane's CBD, where he outlined the work Swimming Australia was doing to assist athletes.
He noted that Linley Frame and Jodie Henry, Olympic swimmers at Barcelona 1992 and Athens 2004 respectively, headed up a support framework.
"They build the relationships with them [athletes] and then they'll enact the support, so immediately support is available to them," Taylor said.
"They would have been going around at the pool talking to them [at the trials].
"A lot of the time they don't really engage straight away; it's a little bit down the track.
"I think the most important thing is that support they have from their teams and then the support that we provide and wrap around that ... and more importantly, it's about more opportunities coming down the track that we try to help them refocus on."
Swimmers categorised as podium-level, developing or emerging also have access to the Australian Institute of Sport's Mental Health Referral Network, which links athletes with expert mental health clinicians who understand the extreme pressure that comes with high-performance sport.
Australia's swimmers will fly out this week and head to a training camp in Canet-en-Roussillon, a town in the south of France.
In little more than a month's time, they'll be walking out to the blocks at Paris La Defense Arena, where a bright light will be radiating down on not only the gold medal tally, but how they navigate the furnace.
