JOHANNA GRIGGS:

From a ruthless sacking, to a highprofile divorce, to heartbreak after an 18-month IVF battle, Johanna Griggs tells Tiffany Dunk how her lowest points have inevitably led to her biggest and brightest triumphs.

how her lowest points led to her brightest triumphs

When you walk into Johanna Griggs’ home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, one feature is glaringly absent. The House Rules and Better Homes and Gardens host was the first female Australian swimmer to break the 30-second barrier for the 50-metre backstroke. But you won’t find a single piece of memorabilia of the sport which shot her to stardom as a 14 year old before spring-boarding a successful media career that has lasted over 26 years and counting.

“All the stuff in our house is about our family unit and the memories that we’ve made together,” explains Johanna of her decision to leave the trophies gathering dust in the garage.

“In fact, my boys [Jesse James, 24, and

Joe Buster, 23] were quite old before they realised I’d even had a background as a swimmer →

because, to be perfectly honest, to them I’m just ‘mum’. I remember one of them coming home from school one day and asking if I was a swimmer, or a swimmer swimmer. I told him what I’d done and he went, ‘Oh, that’s embarrassing because I was saying to people that I’d never seen you swim before’.”

Today, Johanna laughs, the only swimming she does is in the dam at the farm in the NSW Hunter Valley that she and husband Todd Huggins, 44, retreat to in their time off. It’s a far cry from those early years, which saw the sports-mad teenager relentlessly powering through the pool after taking up the sport competitively at the relatively late age of 13.

A year later, she made the national team. At 16, she won bronze at the 1990 Commonwealth Games. But at 17, Johanna was felled by chronic fatigue syndrome, which was so severe she would spend two-and-a-half long and lonely years recuperating.

“I think the discipline of swimming was a blessing in disguise because we turned that discipline into trying to recover,” she recalls. In was a wheatfree, corn-free, beef-free, sugar-free, dairy-free, yeast-free, caffeine-free, spice-free diet. And out were the long hours in the pool, the (admittedly fairly intermittent) high schooling, the travels around the world. Out too, Johanna soon found, were many peers and sponsors who gradually faded from her life as the formerly gregarious teenager retreated into sickness.

“It definitely taught me that people are quite confronted when there’s something they don’t understand,” she reflects. “It’s given me a really good understanding of human nature. Certainly, at 17, it taught me what to value and what to let go of and of the importance of family and friends. And even though I’m 46 now, that period is the most I’ll ever learn about life or myself. I learnt to like myself, which I think is a big thing. When you have a lot of time on your own, you learn to be honest with yourself.”

Returning to the pool at 19 for the Australian Swimming Championships in 1993, the crowd went wild when Johanna not only touched the wall first in the 50-metre backstroke, but recorded the fastest time in the world that year.

It was then she would shock people once more, announcing her retirement from swimming the very next morning.

“I’d wanted to prove to myself that I could do it and get back to where I was ... but the second I hit that wall, I knew I was done,” Johanna explains, adding she called her mother, Leigh, to break the news before making an official announcement.

“Mum’s words were all super supportive and fabulous and about pride and all the rest of it,” she recalls of that late-night conversation. “But you could hear that little bit of fear in her voice of, ‘What are you going to do next?’ I essentially had no education, I hadn’t finished school. I joked to Mum that I’d go into media, but to be honest that wasn’t any kind of life dream. It was just something to say in that moment to appease her.”

So you can imagine the pair’s surprise when, the following day, the Seven, Nine and Ten networks all rushed to present Johanna with offers to appear as on-air talent. “It was so heady and exciting,” she remembers. “And again, I think how lucky I was.”

Diving right in

Still, she wouldn’t let luck be the only dynamic fuelling her new chapter. Once again, Johanna applied discipline after signing on the dotted line with Seven.

“If an opportunity comes up, you need to put your foot in the door and then you need to make yourself valuable,” she explains, adding that this is now advice she gives young athletes hoping to make the shift from competitive sport to TV.

“I did all the crappy shifts so I could practise getting better. I’ve lost count of the number of people who come in with a bit of an attitude, ready to start at the top and never at the bottom and they just don’t survive. The ones who are ready to do whatever it takes and will treat people with respect [will make it] – I think that’s why I’m still doing it all these years on.”

Certainly it wasn’t without a few stumbles along the way. “Failure is the greatest lesson in the world,” she says of those early days, which saw her derided by multiple armchair critics as she learnt the art of TV presenting. “The greatest opportunities in my life, the greatest lessons I’ve learnt and the greatest pivot points where you totally change direction have come from my failures. And that’s not a bad thing.”

That rationale could apply to her short-lived but high-profile marriage to actor Gary Sweet. The pair wed in 1995 and swiftly had their two sons. In 1996, Johanna was sacked via fax from her role at Seven – two weeks before she was due to return from maternity leave with first son Jesse and by then newly pregnant with Joe. A year after that, Gary was out of the picture.

Johanna is notoriously close-lipped about the breakdown of her first marriage, but she does tell The Weekly that while becoming a single parent was tough, it also brought her a lot of joy.

“When a marriage ends, you feel you’re such a failure in that aspect, but at the same time it really

“I learnt to like myself, which I think is a big thing.”

uncomplicated our lives,” she says, choosing her words carefully.

“I loved my years as a single mum. There are situations where people go between parents – we really didn’t have to do that. So you’re the decision maker, they’re your little buddies. And I had a lot of support around me.”

Her three siblings – Sarah, Emma and Matt – and her mother all lent a hand. And she turned to a psychologist for professional help. “Going through my marriage break-up, I didn’t even hesitate to get the help I needed,” admits Johanna, who today sits on the board of not-for-profit support service Beyond Blue. “There were times when I was feeling completely overwhelmed and I’d go and speak to someone.”

Her TV bosses (Foxtel soon snapped Johanna up, with the agreement to allow free-to-air TV gigs such as ABC’s Good News Week, before →

Seven re-signed her full-time in 2001) were also on her side, allowing the young mum flexible working hours to accommodate school runs and Saturday morning activities.

“In the six years I hosted Sportsworld [Johanna joined the Melbourne-based live sports show in 2001], I’d do the kids’ sports in the mornings, get them sorted and then bowl off to the airport and stay up all night catching up on the sport of the week,” she says of those whirlwind days. “I’d host the show the next day, then fly straight back to Sydney and pick up the kids. It became a routine. I’d take them to the movies and I would almost tie us all together because I would literally fall asleep and wake up at the end of the movie, just so I’d have enough energy to get through to the Sunday night. You find ways of coping.”

Love makes a splash

Johanna had re-entered the dating pool after her breakup with Gary, but then her brother introduced her to a friend, building foreman Todd Huggins, and love swiftly followed. The boys were seven and eight when Johanna left the country to host the Winter Olympics, but Todd’s visits to her sons didn’t stop. And it sealed the deal on what was already a heady romance.

“He would turn up every day and either kick a footie, do their homework with them or hang with them and watch TV,” Johanna recalls. “That was such a monumental thing to do. He’s never tried to be the boys’ dad because they have a dad but he is 100 per cent a person who influences them, who they still go to. They just adore him. I’m still giddily in love with Todd and I can’t rave enough about him as a person, his values and how he lives his life.”

In 2006, the pair married in a small, private ceremony. Today, they run a construction company together, renovating houses of their own. Keeping things family-first has remained their priority. “We’re probably a bit more relaxed on that now that the boys are adults because it was actually more about them,” Johanna says of why they try to stay out of the public eye. “But also it’s that thing of how you start is how you finish. They know that when we go out, I will get stopped but that’s a beautiful thing and it’s why I still have a job, because people are still engaging with me. None of them can resent that because we’ve got a great life. But when we’re home, when we close the door, it’s just about the family unit.”

It’s meant her boys – despite having two famous parents – have had a regular upbringing with all the ups and downs that come with growing up. “I made lots of mistakes as a parent, they made lots of mistakes as kids, but they were able to do that out of the public eye because the lines were never blurred,” says Johanna.

In March 2018, that family unit expanded as her son Joe and his then-partner Katie Buttel welcomed their son – and Joanna’s first grandchild – Jax.

“That baby is the happiest, most chilled, extraordinary little boy,” Johanna gushes. “Joe and Katie are doing a fabulous job of co-parenting. Both families, right from the go, said, ‘He’s going to be loved in any direction he looks in’ – and he really is. Todd says to me all the time, ‘I can’t believe you can love this way – it’s a different love that I even have for you.’”

Having a grandson in his life is, says Johanna, a special moment for Todd who was as devastated as her, when after several unsuccessful rounds of IVF, doctors told the pair they were among the small percentage the procedure would never work for.

They looked into adoption, reveals Johanna, but a mix-up saw their paperwork missing a deadline by just 12 hours and they were told to start over. “I said to Todd, ‘What do you

reckon?’ and he said, ‘I think it’s the universe telling us just to stop. It’s not going to happen for us’.”

Today though, there are no regrets. “There was a New Year’s Eve one year when we were watching the fireworks and Todd said: ‘These are the moments that are hard,’” Johanna recalls. “I looked around and, dead set, we had sat between 10 people holding newborns. I said, ‘Oh, babe, I’m so sorry.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s only a moment and it will pass.’ We are lucky, we have an amazing life. We have a farm that is 100 per cent our happy place and feeds our soul. We have a life away from work where we are edging closer to living off the grid. We don’t spend a lot of time going, ‘woe is us’. We just kind of accepted it and moved on. ”

Accepting it’s okay if your ultimate life plan doesn’t work out is something Johanna learnt all those years ago when her swimming career was cut short. And she continues to impart that nugget of wisdom, both to her own children, and to the young athletes and aspiring TV presenters she meets along the way.

“There are so many options and when you’re young you think you have got to have all those decisions made,” she explains. “At 46, I’m still figuring it out. You don’t have to always be this picture-perfect success. Life’s about ups and downs and it makes you appreciate the good bits.”

House Rules airs Sunday at 7pm, and Monday to Wednesday at 7.30pm, on the Seven Network.

“At 46, I’m still figuring it out.”