IRON JACK’S BACK ... AGAIN
A TWO-YEAR BAN, BROKEN HAND NOT ENOUGH TO DENY SHAYNA’S GOLD MEDAL DREAMS
NO matter how hard she tries, Shayna Jack can’t stop herself from ending up in hot water. Whether she’s winning races, in trouble with authorities or getting tangled in the cossies of other swimmers, Jack can’t keep out of the spotlight.
If everything goes according to plan, the 23year-old should be one of the biggest stars of the Commonwealth Games, hauling in a bucketload of medals.
But she is only in that position because of her steely determination to bounce back from almost any setback. One of Australia’s brightest prospects after bursting onto the international stage as part of the relay team that broke the world record and won gold in the 4x100m freestyle at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, Jack’s world was turned upside down when she failed a doping test before the 2019 world championships. She has always maintained her innocence — and succeeded in having her initial four-year ban halved to two years after proving she didn’t intentionally ingest any banned substances — but still served a lengthy suspension. She made a triumphant return to the world championships in Hungary last month, winning a gold medal in the relay, before breaking a bone in her hand in a freak accident where she got tangled in the suit of another swimmer while warming up for the individual 100m freestyle.
She withdrew from the race — won by her teenage teammate Mollie O’Callaghan — and returned home to Australia for surgery on her fractured fourth metacarpal, one of the tiny bones in the palm that connect the fingers to the wrist.
But she made a quick recovery and rejoined the team before Birmingham and Australia’s head coach Rohan Taylor is expecting big things from her.
“She’s back in training, modified training, obviously, just to build her back into where she was, but what I’ve seen is pretty good,” Taylor said. “Obviously there is going to be some deficit potentially in there from that time frame that she couldn’t continue to train, but I think she’s got a lot of that experience in the bank
“She‘s
She’s definitely very motivated, very keen and she got back here early Australia’s head coach Rohan Taylor
looking really good. She’s definitely very motivated, very keen and she got back here early, got back into camp earlier than we thought. So she was back in the training group a lot earlier. I think she’d come back a week earlier than we thought.”
Jack could win at least four medals in Birmingham. She has qualified for the 50m and 100m freestyle events — where her toughest opponents are her Aussie teammates — and will swim in at least two relays, possibly more depending on how the selectors juggle their lineups. With Cate Campbell and her sister Bronte both on a 12-month sabbatical from the pool, Jack is a certainty for the Australian women’s 4x100m freestyle team, who are odds on to win gold in Birmingham after taking the world title in
Budapest. A hard marker, Taylor has been hugely impressed by Jack’s comeback and expects her to continue her incredible form at the Commonwealth Games. “It was great to see,” he said. “What she’d gone through as far as the time out, being on her own and being able to get herself back to a world class level so quickly, is a credit to her and her coach and how they went about that.
“The performances in Budapest were pleasing because she’d been swimming quite well into that. So the form was there, probably just another level of spotlight, another level of pressure for her and she coped with it really well.
“So for me, it was just good to see her go through that step. It was obviously, unfortunate she had another setback, but she‘s a very resilient, young lady.”