Late September, 2000.
Sydney Aquatic Centre, Homebush. A 15 year old Queenslander wins an Olympic silver
medal in the breaststroke and suddenly everyone in Australia – perhaps the
world - knows that girl Leisel Jones.
I remember with striking detail this victory of Leisel’s.
Mostly because I could scarcely believe someone just a year older than myself
at the time was swimming at the Olympics and had just become enormously famous
because she’d won a medal.
If you’ve read my past entries you’ll know I’m a bit of an
Olympic nut, and that too is part of the reason I remember Leisel winning that
day. I can recall most of the Australian medal winners and their events from
those Games actually. I can even recall some of the lines spoken by Bruce McAvaney
and Dennis Cometti in their commentary of these wins (“Jumping Jai it’s time to
fly!” anybody?). If that doesn’t tell you I’m a passionate Aussie who loves
getting into the Olympics then I don’t know what does.
Fifteen years later and during a layover at Brisbane airport
after a fun five days in Cairns with a girlfriend of mine, I headed eagerly to
the closest WH Smith, because I knew Leisel Jones’ book had just come out. A
sporting biography of a great Australian? You didn’t have to ask me twice to
read it.
And now, three months after I bought the book and devoured
it over the course of less than two weeks, I am sitting on a plane, blessed to
be seated in business class, but raucously tired after just having crewed a 16
hour flight from Dallas. I am on my way home to Perth, gratefully, and when I
stepped on board and saw the lie flat beds in business I felt instant happiness
(even more happiness than I already feel at the end of a Dallas to Sydney
sector I’ve just worked) and couldn’t wait to lie my head down and have a
snooze all the way home.
But alas, my neighbour seated next to me had the same plans,
and just as I nodded off so did he, and his loud snoring way too close to my
ear began. And the thought came to my mind that if I couldn’t be sleeping right
now (which I definitely cannot with that racket!) I only wished to be caught up
in a book like Body Lengths, by Leisel Jones.
Straight off the blocks (ha ha get it?) Body Lengths is
bloody good. Let that be all the recommendation you need to go out and get
yourself a copy this Christmas. It would be the perfect companion for lazy late
December and early January days in the sun by the pool as you slowly digest your
Christmas lunch and all that champers.
A friend of mine read Body Lengths before me, finishing it
in just a few days, and she warned me that Leisel names names in this book and
that the fact she did that made it even more awesome. I kind of shrugged it
off, remembering my Dad telling me about how a few Christmases ago he was given
Molly Meldrum’s biography and spent the whole time trying to guess who Molly
was referring to in each chapter, because Molly annoyingly (although perhaps
couldn’t legally) did not name and shame all the characters that had made up
his life and its stories. I too experienced this when reading all of Roxy
Jacenko’s books – though they were ‘fiction’ they so obviously contained characters
that were 100% real people in Roxy’s real life that she had dealt with, just
with their names changed (and sometimes not even changed that much – example:
pretty sure the character of Belle Single, a bikini model from the Shire was
definitely Lara Bingle). They were so closely based on people I knew I knew,
that the whole time their real life names were on the tip of my tongue, but
frustratingly, I could never quite pin point them for sure. I had what I am
pretty sure were very good, close guesses of who they were, but I just wanted
Roxy (or perhaps some speculation on an internet forum from other frustrated
and intrigued readers) to tell me if that character actually was Lara Bingle or
Ros Reines or Shane Watson. I know my Dad felt the same about Molly’s tome.
Anyway, I expected much the same from Leisel Jones. Surely
one would have some fun telling her readers all the horrible or ridiculous or
crazy times she had with teammates and celebs throughout her life but would
never actually print their names.
Oh but Leisel does. Instant brownie points from me for that
babe! This book just got whole lot more interesting. I am still shocked to the
extent with which she named names actually, even now after having finished the
book – Leisel doesn’t hold back, and I do wonder if those explicitly written
about have now stopped talking to her or no longer consider her a friend because
they were publicly shamed within the pages of Body Lengths.
But damn, it makes for great reading. Who would’ve thought
you’d ever read about how Kieran Perkins, a swimmer with surely as nationally a
recognisable name as Dawn Fraser, had barked at and ferociously denied kid swimmer Leisel when she
shyly asked for him to autograph her swimming cap at a comp?
Who would’ve thought Stephanie Rice could be written about
so beautifully by Leisel, describing how welcoming the fellow Queensland swimmer
was when Leisel joined her swimming club and then flipped completely over and
written about so damningly, making you only sympathise with Leisel, when Rice
began spreading rumours and bad mouthing an out of form, struggling Jones.
But written about it all is, plus so much more. Leisel’s
spray at the alpha males of the Australian swim team – James Magnussen and
Eamon Sullivan to name just a few – is epic and lengthy. But rightly so when
these guys practically bought the proud Dolphins squad to their embarrassed
knees, not a single gold medal won by the men in London 2012 and stuck so deep
in a bullying culture within the team that it has taken years of work since
London and the help of a new leader in John Bertrand of Australia II fame, to
bring the team back to its former glory that Australia can once again get
behind and feel so proud of.
Every coach she has ever swum under also gets a no holds
barred description in Body Lengths – a fascinating insight really into the way
elite sporting coaches work and how extraordinarily different they can be from
local, small time coaches, such as Leisel’s first, who coached his little team
in a backyard pool and rewarded them with Mars Bars and fun Friday night
competitions where the whole family and a barbeque was always part of the deal.
But perhaps what a lot of readers of Body Lengths will be
eager to read about when they first open up this page turner, is if Leisel
writes anything about the drug culture entrenched in the Dolphins post 2008. You
won’t be disappointed. She does. And it’s not an outsider looking in review of
the ugly situation – oh no, Leisel makes no attempts to hide the fact that she
too took Stilnox, that she too felt crazy on it, that it too lead her to devastating
lows and serious mental health issues. You cannot put this book down.
A few weeks before Body Lengths was released I read an
excerpt in The Australian – a small part of a chapter, but probably the most
powerful in the entire book. A scene taking you into one of the swimmer’s
lowest points, where she had formulated a plan to steal a knife from the hotel
kitchen where she was staying for a training camp, and knew exactly where and
how deep she would draw it across her wrists and thighs to ensure she died that
day in the en suite bathroom in her hotel room. Her descriptions were so vivid
– even in that excerpt, where I had read nothing else of her book, where I knew
no back story apart from what I had read in the media and seen on TV ever since
that day in 2000 at Homebush (which, let’s face it, until you read someone’s
autobiography you don’t really realise how little you knew about them) – and so
hauntingly sad that I felt like I was sitting on the edge of the bathtub beside
her, yet invisible to her in her sadness, unable to stop her from ending her
life.
When I got to that chapter in the actual book it was
frightening – frightening to read everything that lead up to that moment,
caused that moment, made her want to get a knife in that moment.
I suppose many might read Body Lengths and just shake their
heads and feel their previous feelings only reinforced that Leisel Jones is
just a bit of a typical selfish, only child, high achieving swimmer who is a
stubborn perfectionist to the bitter end. And certainly I had flickers of that
when reading the book. But they are overcome quite easily when you read
everything else you didn’t know about Leisel Jones, the former teenage wonder
kid. How she was paying the mortgage for her and her mother with the money she
got from winning swim meets. How she fought so hard against the all too common
crushing come down when elite athletes retire from their sport. How she fell in
love with a sport and a team that she will remain immensely proud to have been
a part of for the rest of her life.
Read Body Lengths because it isn’t some sugar coated, 99%
ghost written account of a one hit wonder athlete. It’s a gritty, ugly,
fascinating, no holding back account of life from backyard swimmer in suburban Brisbane
to four time Olympian – something no other Australian Olympic swimmer can claim
as their title.
Hats off to you Leisel Jones, for telling it like it is.
Your sporting biography lover,
Jorgs
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