Resurrection of a fallen star
From the depths of depression in Rio, to a world record on the Gold Coast, Cate Campbell’s redemption is complete
FOR Cate Campbell’s mother Jenny, the sight of her daughter slicing through the water on the way to a world record-breaking relay win on Thursday night brought emotions of pride, exhilaration … and relief.
It was almost two years ago that Cate returned from the Rio Olympics an emotional wreck. The pressure of entering the Games as gold medal favourite for the 100m freestyle proved too great as she suffered what she described as “the greatest choke in history”.
World record holder in the 100m, and expected to fight out the 50m with younger sister Bronte, Campbell finished sixth in her pet event and fifth in the 50m.
But it wasn’t her daughter’s failure to live up to the enormous public expectation that concerned Jenny Campbell. It was the fear that she could fall into a deep depression.
“It was a dark time for Cate,” she said yesterday. “Always in life there are going to be hardships and when someone you love is in those dark places you have to go with them.
“It’s not something I would want anyone else to go through. Sometimes it is harder on the sidelines. I know as a midwife I felt that sometimes it is harder on the husband than on the wife. The wife knows what she can do. The husband feels helpless.
“It is never easy to watch someone you love in pain, but if they are resilient they can come out stronger and that is how it has been with Cate. She is in a better place now than before Rio.”
Certainly she’s in a faster place. Her 51.00 seconds anchor leg in the 4x100m women’s relay on the first night of the Commonwealth Games swim meet was the quickest of all time.
And her body language during post-race interviews suggests it is just the beginning of a resurgence that will continue all the way to Tokyo in two years’ time.
It is a stunning turnaround from the mental state in which she found herself after Rio and she puts it down to the brave decision to turn her back on swimming for the first time in her life and embark on a journey of self-discovery.
“I knew Cate Campbell the swimmer,” she said before the Commonwealth Games trials in February, “but I didn’t know Cate Campbell the person.”
During her sabbatical, in which she didn’t swim for three months and made herself unavailable for Australian selection for a year, she did the things that other 25 year-olds take for granted.
“Sleeping for one, and hiking, and doing crosswords,” she said. “They might sound like normal things for other people, but they weren’t for me.
“It was hard to get my head around at first. I’d see the clock tick over to double digits and think, ‘uh oh, I should be in bed’, and then I’d remember, ‘I don’t have to. I can stay up’.
“I got to support local acts, go to gigs; do the things that other people my age do.
“If I wanted to have a swim I could, but I didn’t have to be 100 per cent. I didn’t have to be perfect. It was the first time I’d had a real break from training since I was nine years old. Basically me and the sport needed some time apart.
“It was a pretty strange thing, but now I know there is another side of life and when the time comes, I can make that transition.
“I don’t have to be resentful when I hear about other people going for a hike or listening to a band, because I’ve done it. It’s given me a whole new perspective, a more holistic view of life.”
She also got to look at swimming from a different angle.
“I went to the World Championships in Budapest as a spectator. I was in the stands for every heat and every final. It was amazing. It made me realise, ‘this is why people watch swimming’. It reignited my passion for the sport.”
On Thursday night after her history-making relay swim Campbell paid tribute to the part played by her coach Simon Cusack, saying, “he said ‘the atmosphere out there is electric. Go out and soak it up’ and that’s what we’ve done.”
It was a far cry from a year earlier when Cusack had his doubts she would ever return to competition.
“I didn’t expect her to be back after Rio to be honest,” he said. “I thought she would be lost to the sport. She would come to training but it was almost more for a visit than anything else.
“She came in to have a conversation and a debrief. She’d have a bit of a swim and say, ‘see you when I see you’.
“Sometimes it might be a week before I’d see her again, sometimes longer, and then one day she just didn’t come back.”
And when she did, she wondered why she had.
“For the first three weeks of full training I thought, ‘what have I done? This is worse than I remembered. My body can’t do this.’ After the third week, all those years of training kicked in and then I was swimming better than I ever have.
“The time out means I’m better physically and in a much better state mentally than before Rio. I feel like I know myself better now. I have a new love for swimming; a new hunger. Now I feel like I can knuckle down and be the best that I can be.”
All of which is music to the ears of her mother who compares Cate’s recovery from the trauma of Rio to going through the process of grieving.
“It gets back to understand-
ing what grieving is,” she said. “As a young nurse I felt that I could have handled it better; I thought I could have been of more help to patients, so I really studied it.
“With Cate I knew she had to go through a process, so when she was an angry ant, that was okay. If you don’t go through the process you can’t come out the other side. It is a healthy thing to express yourself and talk about your feelings.
“We haven’t talked a lot about it with Cate, but when she has wanted to talk we’ve been there. It is hard to sit and watch someone you love go through something like what Cate went through, but they have to go through things in their own way and in their own time.
“It is important that they know people are there for them, and for them to call on those people when they need them. Cate has some wonderful friends and they were a great support to her.
“I don’t know that I was convinced that she had made the right decision when she decided to have a break from swimming but now I know it was absolutely the right thing to do.
“It took her out of her only experiences of school and swimming and showed her there is another world out there, and more diversity in life.”
It also gave her a greater appreciation for her talents, Jenny says.
“About three or four months ago she rang me and said, ‘Mum, you know what I realised today? I’m a really good swimmer’ and I said, ‘That’s right Cate. The whole world knows that. You just had to start believing it yourself.”
On Thursday night, she once again made believers of us all.
“I feel so pleased for her,” Jenny said. “To see her swimming like that and to see her so happy was just wonderful.”