SWIMMING: It was a line that said it all. From a man who has done it all.
“This is a chapter of your life, but not life or death,” said John Bertrand, AO, president of Swimming Australia, America’s Cup legendary victor and Olympian, to the 2016 Rio swim team, their coaches, support staff and families.
And this is the photo that says the rest.
It shows Belinda Hocking with her younger brother Rob, together, after he travelled to Rio to see her in international competition for the first time.
Theirs is a special bond. And appropriate to what you are about to read.
Combined with Bertrand’s words, they put Olympic competition and all the expectations, hype, analysis and hero-worshipping within such a sporting nation as ours, into perspective.
Belinda and Rob have both represented Australia overseas – ‘Bindy’ in the pool and ‘little Robbie’ as she calls her kid brother, when deployed in the Afghanistan war zone.
When Rob left home at age 17 to go into the Army, a possible step towards potentially going to war, Belinda broke down. She begged her parents to talk him out of it.
“When he first went in I sort of cracked it,” she recalled.
“I said to mum and dad ‘he is too young and doesn’t know what he is getting himself into’ but it was just was what he wanted to do and they had to get that across to me.”
She came to the realisation that her brother was destined for Army life. It was what he wanted to do, just like she wanted to swim for her country.
When he was 20, Rob announced he was going to Afghanistan for 10 months.
That was a realisation Belinda wasn’t quite ready for.
“In 2013 and we found he was going to be deployed the next year for 10 months in Afghanistan and I broke down; I was a complete mess,” she says.
“It was like ‘no, I don’t want my brother going; for him it is life and death, going to a country like that fighting a war’.
“It was really hard for me having discussions with him and I said ‘Rob, I don’t want you to go’.
“He sat me down and said: ‘Bindy, it would be like you training for the Olympics for four years, making the team and not going. This is what I have trained for; I need to go and do my job’.”
When Bindy Hocking won gold in the 200m backstroke at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Rob was in the war zone as a foot soldier.
It was the pinnacle of her swim career, and in her post-race interview she gave a shout out to her brother and all those overseas serving their country.
Belinda returned to Australia thinking her life was going to be suddenly elevated. She had no idea how or why, but that somehow it would.
Yet little changed.
You see, many people had pumped into her to chase her goals and swimming dreams, but once she had the Commonwealth Games gold medal tucked away, no one had prepared her for what happens after they had been realised.
So Hocking went through her own battles. She wrote her car off, suffered second degree burns from a candle, suffered a mental over-cook and walked away from her sport. In that period, she also became engaged to the love of her life Max Ireland.
If Rob’s tour of duty, he returned to his Townsville base safely, was not enough to put her life in a bubble that is typical of the elite in perhaps the loneliest of sports, Belinda returning to the reality of a ‘normal’ life did.
She went back to university to study to be a primary school teacher, with her Swimming Australia funding suspended she took a part-time job in a physiotherapy practice, and she and Max bought a house.
After so long, from being on the elite swimming radar at 15 and going to the 2008 and 2012 Olympic Games, Belinda realised that while she was defined as Belinda Hocking the swimmer when she needed to find Belinda Hocking the person.
“I don’t know what it is like in other sports but in swimming you get very much caught up in a bubble,” she says.
“We’ve got our trials each year, you go to the major meet, we have two weeks off and we start training again and then we go to short course and we have trials again. It is a continuous circle you get caught up in.
“It is not until something sort of electrocutes you or catapults you whether it’s good, bad or ugly and you start thinking ‘is this what I really want to do’ because there is more to life and you have to recognise that.
“Once I came to that realisation that nothing was going to change [after winning gold in Glasgow] and that, nevertheless, I was really happy with my life, only then I could move forward and, no matter what the result, be happy.
“You’re going to go home and drive the same car, live in the same house and swim in the same pool.”
She returned to the pool after a six-month break because she now truly knew she had some unfulfilled goals – going to a third Olympic Games at the top of the list. She had to fight her way back onto the team first.
Now we move to Rio, August 2016.
And the Australian swim team that had such high hopes, and such external expectations, gathered at The Edge, the Australian team’s ‘great escape’ as a halfway house to mix away the village. They are mingling with family who had come halfway across the world after years of support and sacrifice to get their siblings to this pinnacle sporting festival.
The emotions varied from disappointment, deep retrospect and even regret, elation for the medallists and those who had had recorded a PB, to Kyle Chalmers taking it all in his stride as he had done since touching down in Brazil.
Hocking had her best Olympic performance third time around a month short of her 26th birthday, a fifth place in the 200m backstroke final with just under half a second between her and a medal.
Then she disappeared into the stands, and a tear came to her eye when she saw parents Ian and Jenny, Rob and an aunty and cousin who travelled with them (older sister Lucy couldn’t make it). For Rob to finally see inside her world abroad meant a lot to her.
“But to see where I am now compared to 12 months ago, I’m really proud of myself,” Hocking said.
“This is a lifetime experience to be at an Olympic Games, it’s great to represent your country – a privilege - and the atmosphere is great. But to put it in perspective, we’ll go back to Australia and have the welcome home ceremonies and in six months it will be forgotten. And that’s fine.
“Even though I’m a little upset at the result that I got because I really wanted to get on the podium, regardless of whether I brought that medal home or not, my finance will be waiting for me, my house will still be there, and my dog will still love me and that’s what’s important.
“You don’t want your life determined by your results in sport.
“I’m really happy with my life. And it’s so good to be able to say that.”
And great to hear, because it’s an example to all athletes here in Rio about something that can be lost … perspective.
Neil Cadigan
olympics.com.au
