Shock confession STARVING TO WIN
Lani Pallister was told she needed to lose 4kg to make the Olympic team. What happened next is a cautionary tale for any elite athlete, writes
Tears well in Janelle Pallister’s eyes as she recalls the nagging feeling something just wasn’t right with her daughter – emerging swim star Lani. She could see the signs – the extreme weight loss, the sparkle missing from the eyes in the gaunt face, the lustre gone from hair and nails.
In hindsight, it was clearly evident the then 19-year-old was in the grips of an eating disorder.
“At the back of my mind, I had a feeling something was going on and I kept on saying: ‘Lani, I don’t think you’re eating enough’,” Janelle said.
“It wasn’t just that she was losing the weight, you could see it in the hair, you could see it in the face, you could see it in the eyes, nails.
“I had an idea that something wasn’t right.”
But it wasn’t until after Lani’s 2021 Olympic dreams unravelled as her now frail body failed her that daughter revealed to mum the true horror of her ordeal.
How she’d starved herself day after day in the pursuit of a 4kg weight-loss target set by highperformance staff – because that is when she swam her fastest, as a 17year-old girl.
How living out of home she managed to skip breakfast daily, survive off two scarce meals and several coffees a day.
How she would weigh herself three times daily and put up with feeling nauseous “all the time” because she had become fixated on a number on a scale that had become impossible to reach, even with 17 training sessions a week.
“Willing to do anything and everything to make that Olympic team”, Lani would eventually reduce her body fat to just 7 per cent after stripping essential calories and nutrients from her diet and failing to fuel her body for competition.
“I never want to feel that way again. There’s almost no words to describe how rocky my life was at that point,” she said.
“I didn’t really see an end to the torment I was going through with the health conditions and the mental health problems as well.”
MOTHER’S INSTINCT
An Olympian and Commonwealth Games gold medallist in her own right, Janelle knows what it takes to fuel a body in full training and despite her daughter’s denials and assurances, had her doubts.
Only after Lani’s Olympic dreams unravelled could Janelle interpret the signs and put the pieces together.
She “put my foot down” after Lani missed the team for Tokyo, bombing out at trials, knowing in her gut something was wrong.
Blood tests revealed Lani had had glandular fever and was low in iron, as well as experiencing post-viral fatigue. A visit to a dermatologist diagnosed a skin condition.
“There were a lot of things that came out because I kept pushing her for more investigation and I think that’s where ‘mum’ came out rather than the coach,” Janelle said.
But it was only after Lani decided to make a submission to Swimming Australia’s review into the experiences of women and girls within the sport that Janelle fully understood what her daughter had been through.
“I thought maybe I should make a submission about the way that being told that I needed to be the same weight I was when I was 17 actually had an impact on me,” Lani said. “I’d never talked to my mum about it and I sent her the paragraph to proofread … and she walked out of her bedroom and was like, ‘What do you mean?’ ”
Anger would seem a reasonable response from Janelle but she says laying blame will help no one.
Given she’s in the elite coaching space herself, working alongside esteemed Olympic coach Michael Bohl on the Gold Coast, education is what she hopes for.
“This should never happen again. Body composition is a very big thing but you can (discuss) it in such a safe environment with the experts, the nutritionists,” she said.
“You’ve got to move past anger.”
THE TRIGGER
The two male members of Swimming Australia’s high-performance team who made the suggestion undoubtedly had Lani’s best interests at heart.
If the scales read the same as they did when she won three gold medals at world juniors aged just 17, they reasoned results would follow.
“In my head, I was like, ‘oh, that makes sense. If I’m going to be the same weight, then the force output is going to be similar, so it’s only right’,” she said.
The flawed logic failed to take into account the fact that she had since started a gym program, was almost two years older and had started to mature as a woman.
It also didn’t take into account what the athlete heard.
To Lani, their message simply screamed she was overweight.
Her drastic measures started yielding dire results but Lani became defensive when friends and family asked if she was all right.
“In a way, you know you’re doing the wrong thing but once you’re in that mindset, it’s so hard to get out of it,” she said.
While her body fat fell to 7 per cent, she eased her own concerns with the fact she had not lost her menstrual cycle and had achieved the ripped image that she saw in the mirror.
I didn’t really see an end to the torment I was going through
Lani Pallister
THE RECOVERY
Eventually her body broke down under the stress.
Lani has taken the lead in her own recovery, organising many of the specialist personnel she worked with on what was an at-times painstakingly slow journey to recovery.
With the post-viral fatigue ruling out any training for almost four months, she soon put on the weight she had lost, partly under the watchful eye of her parents after moving back home.
But the mental scars of the “toughest year of my life” would last longer.
“I get sad looking at the photos more than anything just because I couldn’t believe what I put myself through,” she said.
“My face looked gaunt, I just looked tired. I guess that’s a good thing for me now looking at it.
“If I still have like the intrusive thoughts, it’s something that I look back at and think, I can’t let myself get back to that place.
“If you are going through something similar, speaking out, finding someone that you really trust in and having a support network that’s there to help you be the best you that you can be outside of sport (is crucial).”
MOVING FORWARD
Lani eventually made her ordeal public – but not until she had made that senior Australian team. Now a world titles and Commonwealth Games medallist and four-time world shortcourse champion after heroic swims in Melbourne last December, she hopes her candour will help others.
Janelle has seen her daughter blossom, although not without pain.
“Sometimes something so devastating really allows the butterfly to blossom. But she had to go into that cocoon, find out what she really wanted to do,” she said.
Lani knows that her own weight and eating is something she’s likely to struggle with for the rest of her life but is adamant she will never let herself return to the horrors of two years ago. “Everything I’ve been through has been the best thing for me in terms of athletic development. And having gone through that I don’t see myself slipping again.”