FIGHT OF HER LIFE
A positive doping test tore her world apart but Shayna Jack never gave up the battle to clear her name. Now she has Olympic gold in her sights
Shayna Jack is 11 months old, eyes wide, watching the blue dance beneath her. Sprays of water arc across the pool as she wriggles in her mother’s arms, itching to get in. “She’s keen,” the swimming instructor at the local pool on the outskirts of Brisbane’s western suburbs says, “Why don’t we give her a go?” Jack’s mother, Pauline, agrees she can join her older brother’s swimming lesson, and when she does, it becomes part of family folklore.
How Jack jumped straight into the instructor’s arms. How she smiled when her skin touched the water. How she absolutely loved it.
And so it goes, every time Jack breaks the lip of the surface; the feeling of belonging, and later, the every-cell-in-your-body urge to race.
It stays with Jack as she churns her way through primary school swim teams, regional titles, state championships, nationals and the World Titles, all the way – if things go her way – to the Tokyo Olympics.
But things don’t go Shayna Jack’s way. In June 2019, at the Australian team’s swim camp in Nagaoka, Japan, the young freestyler is training for the July World Swimming Championships in Korea when her mobile phone rings. And in the moments, days, weeks and months that follow that call, everything falls away.
Jack is 20 years old, she has been labelled a drug cheat, and for the first time in her life, she feels like she is not swimming, but drowning.
Brisbane-based Jack is now 22 years old, and recently returned to competitive swimming two years and three months after she was first officially notified on July 12, 2019, that a banned substance, Ligandrol, had been found in her system.
The non-steroid anabolic agent had been detected in a random drug test conducted at a swim camp in Cairns, two weeks prior to the camp at Nagaoka.
Jack was immediately sent home from Japan pending an investigation by swimming’s antidoping authority, Sports Integrity Australia.
On her return to Brisbane, Jack requested a re-test (known as a B sample) be taken from her original urine sample, the athlete “100 per cent confident” that a mistake had been made. But that sample was also positive, and following a five-hour investigation by SIA, conducted on August 2, 2019, Jack was handed a four-year ban from swimming.
Jack, who has never wavered from her assertion that she has “no idea” how Ligandrol came to be in her system, appealed the decision immediately. But it would be almost a year later that her case would be heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
On November 16, 2020, CAS reduced Jack’s ban to two years, however less than a month after that, both SIA and the World Anti-Doping Agency challenged that reduction.
Both organisations requested the initial fouryear ban stand, but on September 16 this year, CAS dismissed their appeal, and Jack, having already served two years of the initial ban, was free to compete once more.
After the SA and WADA appeal was dismissed, an elated Jack posted to her 39,100 Instagram followers: “The nightmare is finally over!” But while Jack is back, training once more under the canny eye of coach Dean Boxall (he of the exuberant post-Ariarne Titmus victory dance at the Tokyo Olympics), at the St Peters Western club in Brisbane, she is not the same swimmer – or person – who answered her phone that day in Nagaoka.
As a person, Jack says she feels much older than her 22 years, but as a swimmer, Jack says she is hungrier than ever to win. Because despite everything – the lost years, the missed opportunities, the public shaming, the private grief, and the knowledge that in some minds, she will forever be stamped a drug cheat – the one thing that hasn’t changed for Jack is that she still absolutely loves it.
“I am a swimmer, that’s who I am”, Jack says after a recent training session at St Peters Western; her hair still wet, the sharp scent of chlorine on her skin. “That’s what kept me going through all of this.”
And Jack remembers it all; the events of that day in Nagaoka etched in her memory as permanently as the number 785 tattooed on her arm (Jack is the 785th person to make the Australian team).
She remembers the moment a swimming official informed her: “‘Shayna, we have found a prohibited substance in your system.’ She explained what the substance was, and I had no idea what she was talking about.”
“Everything dropped, I couldn‘t stand up. I could not control my body. I could not control the amount of shock I was feeling. I could not control my shaking. I could not breathe properly. I could not speak, and I felt my heart break.”
Jack asked for Boxall, who arrived at the room soon after and later described Jack’s state as “hysterical”.
“I was very concerned for Shayna,” Boxall now says, “deeply, deeply concerned.”
But for Jack, Boxall’s arrival in the hotel room was the first sweep of a lighthouse beam; a silver shimmer of hope in the troubled waters she had found herself in.
“When Dean walked in, once he was told what had happened, he walked straight over to me and looked me in the eyes. He said, ‘Shayna, don’t worry, this is a mistake and we are going to get through this’. It was this straight away belief in me, and I carried that with me all the way through.”
I COULD NOT CONTROL THE AMOUNT OF SHOCK I WAS FEELING … I COULD NOT SPEAK AND I FELT MY HEART BREAK
“All the way through” in a doping investigation means a lengthy and complex process, from the moment an athlete returns a positive drug test. Once Jack was notified of her result, she was sent home to Australia the next morning, chaperoned by a Swimming Australia official, and on arrival – and until the ban was lifted – not allowed in the vicinity of any swim squads or registered coaches.
“I had to train alone, and make sure I was out of the pool before anyone showed up,” Jack says. “It made me feel shunned by my sport, and it made me feel like nothing. Like a worthless person. Like trash.”
Jack begins to cry, and in that moment, she looks far younger than her already young 22 years. It’s hard to grasp then, what all this felt like at 20. Hard to imagine too, the backlash she faced; the headlines in some international media outlets that she had “embarrassed Australia”, and the social media messages that told her to take her own life.
“I tried not to read the papers when I got home,” Jack says, “but I did open my Instagram and the very first message I saw under my photo was a message calling me a drug cheat, and that I should kill myself.”
But Jack was not entirely without a squad of her own. In her corner, coach Boxall, as well as world champion Cate Campbell, who publicly lent her support.
Jack’s family – parents Pauline, a business manager, and Stuart, a diesel mechanic, as well as brothers Mitchell, 26, Zac, 24, and Jamie, 18 – “were there 24/7 for me”, she says. Also on her team, boyfriend Joel Rintala, 25, a carpenter and professional hockey player who says the hardest thing about the last two years was “watching the person I love fall to pieces”.
Some swimmers, who Jack declines to name, privately defied the “no contact” edict, to text or visit her as well. But many stayed away, choosing to follow the official directive, something Jack says she understands: “This wasn’t easy on anybody.”
In the meantime, Jack, who was part of the world record-breaking 4x100 freestyle relay team, along with Emma McKeon, Cate and Bronte Campbell at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, started digging.
“I thought, I have to do absolutely everything I can to try and find out how this happened. Because my character was on the line. So I decided to throw everything at it.”
Skin. Nails. Hair. Teeth whiteners. Nail polish. Beauty products. In her quest to clear her name, Jack and her team doctor, Luke Eggleston, had all these things tested, trying to find the source of the Ligandrol. Jack also engaged Brisbanebased lawyer Tim Fuller, who told the CAS that the young swimmer had “gone to significant effort to identify the contamination”.
And the man responsible for bringing notorious doping cheat, cyclist Lance Armstrong to justice, Travis Tygart, told the ABC’s Australian Story that the treatment of Jack was “not right”.
Tygart, the chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) said the entire anti-doping system was “unjust”.
“What struck me about the Jack case is (there’s) no performance benefit, no intent. Not even reckless, she did everything she could to abide by the rules, and yet she’s branded a drug cheat,” he said.
What struck the sole arbitrator who presided over Jack’s CAS appeal, Alan Sullivan, was the swimmer’s “credibility”.
Sullivan later described Jack as “completely straightforward, genuine and honest in the answers she gave. Her demeanour was excellent and her dismay at the situation she found herself in was evident.”
After the first appeal, Sullivan found “on the balance of probability, Jack did not intentionally ingest Ligandrol” and ruled that the standard four-year anti-doping suspension be halved.
Despite all their efforts, Team Jack never did discover how the Ligandrol was in her system – possibilities put forward have included contaminated supplements, using a blender which may have been contaminated, or touching a surface at the pool or gym in Cairns where Jack was originally tested. Jack says she doesn’t know – and it’s likely never will. And not knowing means that in some quarters, there will always be a question mark over her name.
It was also the sticking point that SIA says led to its appeal over her reduced suspension.
In his recent and first public comments about the Jack case, SIA chief executive David Sharpe said: “This was never about Shayna. World doping rules requires there to be evidence of how that substance enters the system, even if it‘s inadvertent. We believed that that evidence didn’t exist in the first tribunal, and that evidence of good character was used, which is fine and not doubted in any way.
“But that is not evidence of how it either entered the system either inadvertently or deliberately. We were challenging the application of the rules, absolutely not challenging Shayna and wanting to put her through any more trauma.”
Yet traumatised is exactly what Jack was, losing sight of the lighthouse’s sweep in the darkness.
Jack takes a deep breath, everything rushing out on its exhalation.
“So I no longer wanted to be around, because I didn‘t see a purpose in my life anymore. I’d spent my whole life thinking swimming was the best sport in the world, the most amazing sport, that it would do everything to support me, but I was very wrong. In no circumstances did I feel my sport had protected me in any way or helped me, and it got to the point where I just did not want to be here,” she says.
“And then I looked at myself and I thought about my parents and everything they’d done to support me, and I looked at Joel and my friends, and I thought, no, I cannot do that. And I also thought this is not who I am. I am not somebody who gives up, so I need to get help. I went to my doctor and I said ‘I’m not sleeping, I’m not eating, I’m having very dark thoughts’.”
Jack says the doctor referred her immediately to a psychiatrist, who she still sees, and who diagnosed her with “reactive depression” which is as it sounds, depression caused by circumstance.
“I want people to know that I am seeing a psychiatrist and that I went to that dark place, because I want people to know it’s okay not to be okay,” she says.
“Whatever your spiral is, or where it’s come from, it doesn’t mean you’re screwed up, or that there’s something wrong with you. It means something has broken you. That’s all. It just means that something has broken you, and you must not give up. You just need to try very, very hard to fix it.”
I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW I WENT TO THAT DARK PLACE, I WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW IT’S OK NOT TO BE OK
These days, Jack is back in the swim of things, literally and figuratively.
Living in South Brisbane with Rintala and the couple’s two dogs, Hugo and Willa, Jack has just started a new, part-time role with the Queensland police service as a business support officer.
She’s also back at St Peters Western, no longer required to train alone, and no longer afraid that it could all be taken away “in a heartbeat”.
“When the call came that my appeal had been upheld, my boyfriend Joel came to me and said ‘You‘re safe, you’re finally safe’, and that’s how I feel, safe,” she says.
She’s also feeling strong, and having missed out on the 2021 Tokyo Olympics due to her ban, Boxall and Jack now have their eyes fixed on Paris, 2024.
Asked if she believes she will be on the starting blocks in the French capital, Jack replies with a smiling “Oui, oui”.
It’s a light and carefree moment in an otherwise intense few hours, as Jack grappled with the litany of the last couple of years.
“I have been angry, I have been sad, depressed, traumatised, lonely, shunned and ostracised … but I never gave up the fight,” she says.
Although her mother, Pauline, doesn’t know it, “and probably won’t be happy about it”, Jack is planning on getting another tattoo. It will add to her number 785, and the phrase “Hakuna Matata”, the ubiquitous phrase from the Lion King, meaning “no worries”.
“I was watching the Lion King when I heard that my appeal was being challenged, and I had to do something to remind myself that everything was going to be OK,” she says.
Jack’s new tattoo will be of a lioness holding an arrow. The lioness, she says, is because she is “fierce” and the arrow to remind her that no matter how far she was pulled back from the bow, she kept going.
She still is; head down in the water, once more following the long black line, absolutely loving it.