Sadly, few of Tracey Wickham’s fellow ex-swimmers were surprised to learn yesterday that the former great is down to her last dollar and threatened with eviction from her Gold Coast flat.
Several years ago Wickham suffered the heartbreak of losing her daughter Hannah to leukaemia. If that wasn’t sufficiently life altering, she’d long ago donated several allocations of normal human vitality to the training pool with nothing but a pool exit sign to tell her where to find the rest of her life.
She is in fact part of a lost generation of swimmers who sacrificed an education to train like pros and get nothing back. Recent funding largesse which gave Ian Thorpe $100,000 while he prevaricated over a comeback wasn’t even a piggy bank’s wink back then.
Did I say Wickham received nothing in return? Make that less than nothing, because when she was thrashing the world by a good several body lengths in her pet distances of 400m and 800m freestyle, she did her patriotic duty and boycotted the Moscow Olympics.
That was two certain gold medals gone forever. Wickham took to heart the loud exhortations to boycott, even though the Malcolm Fraser government infamously left it up to the athletes themselves. Her perennial bridesmaid, Michelle Ford, who was perhaps advised by a more enlightened realpolitik, went to Moscow and came back with a gold medal.
Should any reader suspect that claims of monstrous miles in the pool are always overcooked, consider the following. Wickham is still the holder of a world record of sorts – for completing the most hellish training set ever devised by a coach to torture a swimmer.
Laurie Lawrence once set her 13 one-kilometre swims to do. Each one had to be completed under 12 minutes and she had to leave for the next one with just one minute’s rest. In case your jaw hasn’t bounced back off the floor yet to reboot your brain, that’s a 13-kilometre training session, not counting warm up and warm down, which, knowing Laurie, could have added several more kilometres. And then there were 10 more sessions left do that week.
That’s an important bit of trivia to prevent you trivialising Wickham’s sacrifices. It’s not like a potential Olympic rowing recruit where a coach wanders into a bar, sees a strong wench pulling a beer and leaves her his card for a tryout. Or a kayaker who begins swinging a paddle several times a week at age 14 to represent their country two years later.
No, swimmers are always the real deal. They start earlier and go harder and longer than anyone out there. That’s why no institute apparatchik has ever been able to wander into a school with a bunch of callipers and a head full of key performance indicators and walk out with a swimmer: it’s just too late for talent to make a difference.
And Wickham fell hook, line and sinker for Lawrence’s thunderous edicts to swim hard or go home, or whatever he said back then to make kids believe his words that they could go straight to sporting nirvana forever.
Under such a regime it must have been tempting to switch your day to idle and save the juice for training. But that’s what the best have always done. It’s called vitality prioritising. Wickham could do it better than anyone, that’s all. And there was only ever one priority.
Swimming Australia has a vested obligation to help Wickham, although she isn’t the only one of her peers to have fallen on hard times.
Tracey Wickham is a fighter and is still saying things like ‘I’ll get through this – I’m not a quitter’. But there’s a limit to all gutsy rhetoric and she shouldn’t have to go anywhere near hers.
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