I swam up to 15 km a day, six days a week, 50 weeks a year, for over a decade. Through serious hard work, determination, and unshakable faith in my ability, I achieved my childhood dream, becoming a three-time Olympic Gold medallist and five-time World Record holder. My sporting accomplishments earned me the prestigious Order of Australia Medal (OAM) and inductions into both the Sports Australia Hall of Fame and the International Swimming Hall of Fame.

I had a champion's mindset. I was resilient, committed, consistent, and I excelled in high-pressure situations. The bigger the competition, the better I performed. In fact, you didn’t want to waste your time watching me race at a low-level meet, because I could never get excited enough to perform well, because the result didn’t count for much there. But when it did, when it was the pinnacle of what I’d been training for all year, then I was the athlete you’d bet on, because I had this innate ability to rise to the occasion.

This is what happened when I made my first Olympic team at the age of 19. On the first night of the Australian Olympic trails, I did a 10sec PB (almost unheard of) and broke my first World Record. The footage of that race, and my reaction, showed you I was more surprised than everyone else. I had always hoped one day to break a World Record, but I absolutely had no clue it would happen so early on in my career. I’ll never forget my coach’s response when I ran over to him after my race, beaming with excitement. He told me it was an incredible race but followed it by saying “I told you not to break a world record.” In my typical fashion, I told him, “who cares, this is the best day of my life!” It might have seemed like a harsh thing for him to say, but a few days later, I understood why.
I was entering my first Olympics as the one-to-beat…and that was a lot of pressure for a 19yr old who had never competed on a stage like that before.
But in Gods abundant grace, a few months later, on the first night of the Olympic Games, I won the gold medal in the 400 individual medley, broking the world record again and becoming the first Australian at the Beijing Olympics to win gold. Three days later, I won the 200 individual medley and broke my own world record, and the day after I won my third gold medal as a part of the 4 x 200 freestyle relay for Australia, again, breaking the world record.
It was in essence, the perfect competition. I was entered in three races, I won three gold medals, and broke three world records.

Overnight I had become a household name. I was on the cover of newspapers and magazines, with brands in bidding wars to sign me as the face of their marketing campaigns. This was what I had always dreamed about. But what I didn’t realise was underneath all of that external validation and success, I was still that shy, insecure girl who just wanted to be loved and accepted. So being catapulted into national and international media attention, not being able to go to the grocery store without being recognised, was a big shift, and one I wasn’t capable of handling.

I was given a platform with a substantial level of influence, but at 20yrs old, I lacked the maturity & skill to handle such a great weight of responsibility.

After the Beijing Olympics, overnight, I now had two full-time jobs: one as a professional athlete and one as a celebrity. Any spare time I had outside of the seven hours a day I devoted to training was consumed by media interviews, photoshoots, flying to sponsor meet-and-greets and business meetings with the new team I had to bring on to manage this new aspect of my life …it was exhausting. I was constantly adapting my training schedule to accommodate the sponsorship commitments or rescheduling the sponsorship commitments to ensure I was still maintaining all my training regimes. It felt like I was constantly letting someone down no matter how hard I tried to keep everyone happy.

The four years following my success at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 were incredibly challenging. I pushed myself so hard trying to do it all, that I was continually getting sick. I was diagnosed with adrenal fatigue, had glandular fever relapses, underwent three shoulder surgeries, one of which was 6-months out of the London 2012 Olympics. On top of the health challenges I faced, I suffered through the most intense media scrutiny and public hatred. So by the time the next Olympics came around, I was both emotionally and physically exhausted. I placed 4th and 6th in my races, which was a testament to my sheer determination, as my preparation was far from sufficient to warrant such results. I left those Olympics feeling incredibly disappointed, questioning why life had thrown these curveballs at me at such a time as this, and yearning to understand why—why me, why now.