An enduring LOVE
When Australia’s fastest man met an entrepreneurial novelist-to-be, the pair took off running. Matt and Jessica Shirvington tell Tiffany Dunk how they turned their love story into an epic marathon, despite the hurdles in their way.
Matt Shirvington felt as if he was sticking out like a sore thumb in the backyard of a rowdy house party on Sydney’s lower North Shore. At 17, he’d recently qualified for the World Juniors, already on people’s radar as the Australian next big thing in athletics. And his hectic training schedule meant that he was tonight’s – indeed, every night’s – designated driver.
Still, he perked up as a willowy brunette wove her way through the bustling crowd to introduce herself. Little did he know this moment would kickstart an incredible relationship that now sees the pair preparing to celebrate 20 years of marriage and two award-winning careers, whilst also parenting three children, two of whom are now teenagers themselves.
“I spotted him and had just enough Dutch courage to go over and say hello,” Jessica Shirvington – then also 17 years old – tells The Weekly of her first encounter with the golden-haired athlete. “I was smitten from the beginning. Of course, he adored me too and wanted to see me again, but then I got chicken pox, and it took him about a month to come near me, he was so scared of getting it.”
“I didn’t want to not be able to train,” Matt, who still holds the record as the second fastest Australian sprinter of all time, explains with a laugh. “I was just kicking off my career and that’s what the focus was at the time.”
So he waited, but not for long. Jessica’s spots had barely cleared when the two became inseparable, snatching moments to spend together despite equally hectic schedules.
Jessica – who today is an acclaimed young-adult author – spent late nights and weekends working for super-chef Neil Perry’s Rockpool group in events and hospitality. Matt was doing gruelling early morning training sessions in his quest for Olympic glory.
Matt would pick Jessica up when she finished work at 2am, the two roaring off in his battered 1976 Saab to grab breakfast before he hit the running track.
The following year, Jessica began working at her parents’ hospitality business, which at the time included Surry Hills hot spot MG Garage. Matt willingly became her unpaid assistant on Sunday mornings, ironing tablecloths and polishing cutlery.
“Matt and I used to always say we wished we’d met each other when we were older because we knew from the beginning that we were each other’s person,” Jess says with a smile. “It was sort of inconvenient to be 17 and 18 while all your friends were doing all this 17-year-old and 18-year-old stuff, knowing you had a relationship you were trying to protect. But Matt’s athletics was taking off and I was working and earning so we had freedom. We had a bit of money coming in and we were able to make choices other people probably weren’t able to make because they were more focused on longer term studies. We both chose a slightly different way.”
That different way included moving in with each other when Jessica was 18, Matt barely 19. To their surprise, their families were fine with the news. Matt’s coach, however, was less impressed.
“He said, ‘Hey, Jessica, what you do?’,” Matt recounts, adopting a thick Russian accent. “‘You are going to be the brick wall to his success. He stay at home, he get cooked for, he gets his laundry done. What are you going to do? Cook for him?’”
“I gave him a key,” Jessica says with a laugh. “I said,
‘You cook for him’. And then I went outside and cried. He was quite intimidating to me at that time.”
Setting up house was exciting for the pair. But their happiness was punctuated by the inevitable clashes that came with the close quarters – along with a healthy dose of ambition on both sides. “We definitely got in each other’s way,” Jessica explains.
A short split occurred, during which they followed their own passions. At 20, Matt ran 10.03 seconds at the 1998 Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games 100m sprint – breaking the national record. Jessica, meanwhile, was managing a successful Surry Hills bistro named Fuel, aged just 19, and contemplating an overseas adventure.
But the separation didn’t last.
“We gave ourselves all the excuses for it not to work,” Matt says with a shrug. “Like, we’re too young, we can’t be living away from home. We’re both working on our careers. All of that. But in the end I think we both knew that if we weren’t together, we would regret it.”
So Matt proposed in March 2000, in the lead-up to the Sydney Olympic Games. And Jess was in the crowd watching as he prepared to race in the semi-finals of the 100m sprint.
“There were 111,000 people in that stadium and 110,000 of those were chanting, ‘Shirvo, Shirvo,’ as he walked onto the track,” she recalls. “Maurice Greene – the world record holder who went on to win – said later there was only one person people wanted to be out there. It was deafening. It was huge. It was quite daunting.”
“I struggled with the pressure, I really did,” Matt says now of how he felt lining up. “I look at some of those prominent athletes now and some have struggled. You look at Ian Thorpe, Grant Hackett, Geoff Huegill – they all struggled for a little bit and I think it’s because there was so much invested pressure, whether it be corporate, sporting, fans, the country. But I just loved competing, and I find a lot of ➝
“If we weren’t together, we would regret it.”
pride in knowing that I represented my country as well as I could.”
While his good looks and aweinspiring talent had already made Matt a local hero, the Olympics shot him to a level of celebrity he’d never expected – and that too took a heavy toll.
“I love being on TV now,” the seasoned Seven reporter and presenter says. “But all I remember thinking is, ‘I’ve got to get out of the public eye’.”
So, shortly after their wedding on March 30, 2001, the newlyweds chose to decamp to London – both to escape the media glare and to be closer to Europe. There Matt spent the next several years chasing his athletic dreams, travelling so much he ran out of pages on his passport. It was then, too, that he started his TV career, a job he now does full-time both as a sports reporter and presenter of Seven’s two new, shiny shows, Holey Moley and the soon-to-launch Ultimate Tag. Jess, meanwhile, set up a fine food import business which also thrived. “We loved it. We flew our dog over and we had a real life, a proper life. It was only when (our oldest), Sienna, was born in 2006 that we thought about coming home,” Matt says of what brought them full circle.
Jessica was pregnant with their second child, Winnie (she arrived in 2008), when the trio headed back home to be closer to their extended family, wanting the kids to really know their grandparents and cousins. They set up home once more on Sydney’s North Shore – the place they’d both grown up, products of Catholic parents who firmly believe in the sanctity of marriage and family.
Jessica’s parents recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary; Matt’s parents are about to do the same. And they joke that while they haven’t kept up the Catholic part of the bargain as much, those traditional values remain very much at the core of their partnership.
“I’ll never forget the priest who married us, Father Peter Quinn,” says Matt. “He’d married thousands of couples but he gave us his success rate and it was ridiculous – like, 99 per cent stay together. Whether he used that as a tactic so you take pride in staying together or not, I don’t know.
But we’ve always carried that value of the relationship, of the marriage, of family and of tradition.”
And that included having a big brood. Four was the magic number of children they hoped for but the compounded impact of a rough first pregnancy and endometriosis appeared to put paid to that. They tried a round of IVF, which failed, and instead decided to focus on the two children they did have – whilst also birthing a creation of another kind.
With two small children and, “a bit of the baby blues,” for the first time since she was a teenager, Jessica found herself not working insanely long hours. She’d taken to reading copious amounts (“There was a time you went to the bookshop and found nothing left to read,” jokes Matt) and one night as the girls slept she put pen to paper herself.
“I knew Jess was writing a book but she was kind of doing it quietly on a laptop between ad breaks of whatever show we were watching at the time,” says Matt. “About six weeks after she started, she put it in front of me and said, ‘I think I’ve written a book’.”
That book was Embrace – a YA blockbuster, the first in a series of five, and it went on to have the television rights picked up by Steven Spielberg.
“It was the right book at the right time,” Jessica shrugs modestly. “But it got a lot of traction.”
Jessica continued to write. But in 2017 the couple received the news they’d barely dared to hope for – she was pregnant.
“The support and inspiration is mutual.”
“The two main questions I seem to get,” says Matt, “is, ‘Same wife?’ The second is, ‘Mistake?’ Because there’s such a gap, there’s this assumption.”
The couple’s joy turned to fear shortly into the pregnancy, however. Jessica was suffering with kidney stones, and was suffering such excruciating pain that it put both her life and the baby’s at risk.
In her later stages, she went under anaesthesia to have a stent implanted and the couple were forced to have a sobering talk about the choice Matt would have to make should it come to it – save his wife or save their baby.
“I was not in good shape,” Jessica says. “But it was important to have the discussion because if he had to make a decision, he knew in his heart what I wanted – the baby – but being forcibly instructed as well, there would be no other way to go.”
One month early via an emergency C-section, Lincoln, now three, entered their lives. Parenting the third time around, the couple both say, has taught them to slow down and let go of the perfectionism they practised when the girls were small.
“I think we were rushing the milestones – when are they going to eat, talk, walk?” Matt says.
“And we definitely don’t go out with a perfectly packed nappy bag – now you head out with a nappy in your back pocket and hope you don’t need two! And the girls have been really great at helping out, too.”
If you’re wondering why there are no pictures of the children within these pages, the reason is a sobering one. The pair decided not to share images of their kids publicly after phone call from a stranger one evening when the girls were small and Matt was travelling. Jessica was home alone.
“He was telling me which child he was going to take,” Jessica says with a shudder, recalling how the stranger revealed he knew exactly where they were and what they were doing. “He was putting on a voice, a girl’s voice. I said, ‘Oh okay, if you know so much, tell me where we live and then we’ll be scared. And he started describing the jacaranda tree out the front of the house. It was enough to know that it’s not our choice how exposed they are.”
But while they won’t share pictures, they happily dole out anecdotes. Sienna is 14 and “has this unique maturity and understanding of life,” says Matt. She also loves the TV series Modern Family and when Matt got the job on Holey Moley opposite Rob Riggle, she was, for the first time, impressed with her father, he laughs. Winnie is 12, an aspiring athlete who hopes to go to college in America to take advantage of their giant stadiums. “Tennis is the main sport but she loves athletics, loves team sports like volley and basketball and loves trying new sports, too,” Matt says.
Lincoln is dinosaur obsessed. “We go to the park a lot, go to the beach, Lincoln’s now also at an age where he’s enjoying playing independently with his stuff too,” smiles Jessica.
Today Jessica is penning a new book, which she’s reading chapter by chapter to the girls, as well as managing iconic venue Balmoral Bathers’ Pavilion.
Matt, meanwhile is swamped with TV work. But, just like in their teenage years, they find time to blend their hectic schedules. Rather than polishing cutlery, Matt designs the Bathers’ playlist.
And rather than sitting at stadiums, now Jessica is cheering on at the Ultimate Tag set. “The support and inspiration is mutual,” Matt says, reaching out to hold his wife’s hand.
“We get stronger every year,” Jessica adds, smiling into the eyes of the man she’s loved for over two decades and counting. “I always think we couldn’t get any stronger but we just do, through time and the love of our kids.” AWW