Australian swimming legend Leisel Jones has opened up about battling mental health throughout her swimming career, including how a simple knock on her hotel room door saved her life.
The four-time Olympian had a glittering career that began at the Sydney Games at the tender age of just 15, scoring three golds and nine medals in total.
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But after peaking at her first and only individual Olympic gold medal at the 2008 Olympics, Jones revealed on the LiSTNR podcast a life of greatness she went into a spiral.
Publicly, Jones had been a mainstay on the Australian swim team, world record holder, and world champion many times.
But privately she was fighting demons.
Near the end of her swimming career, she retired after the ill-fated London 2012 Olympics — Jones revealed that he was struggling to find who he was outside of the pool.
“(My fight for mental health) was very much wrapped up in identity,” Jones said.
“My whole identity, my self-esteem, everything I believed in was wrapped up in swimming, and once I achieved the gold medal that I’ve craved for my entire career, I really questioned ‘well, who am I without swimming?’
“I was ready to retire, I wanted to move on, but I couldn’t because I didn’t have anything else. He didn’t have a life outside of swimming. I had not studied anything. I didn’t know what I liked to do every day.
“Once I was asked a question and it was like, ‘Well, if you don’t swim, what are you going to do?’ When I didn’t get an answer, I was like, ‘I don’t know. Like, I don’t know what to do. I really don’t want to train anymore. I have achieved everything I wanted, what am I supposed to do now?
“When I didn’t have an answer for what I loved to do, I just got stuck in this loop of well, I need to keep swimming because I don’t have anything else, what else am I going to do? I couldn’t even contemplate leaving because there was nothing. I couldn’t work because I had no work experience. I didn’t know what to do with myself every day of waking up and not doing any training.”
Jones wanted to be the first Australian swimmer to compete in four Olympic Games, but said, “My heart wasn’t really into it, I just didn’t care.”
His mental health decline began as he didn’t want to be in training and “everything started to fall apart.”
“I thought well, there were no other options for me, there was no work or study or anything like that. That I just didn’t see a way out,” she added.
Jones admitted that his thoughts became so dark that he was contemplating taking his own life.
Although he has spoken about his mental health battles in the past, most notably in his memoir. body lengthsJones revealed how he saved himself at the lowest point of his life during a training camp in Spain in 2011.
He arrived when an anonymous trainer knocked on his door.
“It’s one of those sliding door moments where you can’t believe the moment he came and knocked on my door right then and there,” Jones said. a life of greatness.
“He knew I was struggling, but probably not to the extent that I really felt because I just didn’t let anyone see that side of me.
“So, he knocked on the door when I was at my lowest point and I thought, ‘I just want to get out of here away from all of this and I need to make this go away right now.’
“For him to knock on the door, he was crying his eyes out and he gave me the biggest hug and he said ‘we have to get you out of here’ and then he started the process right then and there.
“It’s one of those things where you say, I have no idea who sent you or I have no idea how you knew to knock on the door at that time. But you did and that was a pivotal moment in my healing where you can point out that the lowest point of my entire life was right there in that instant. Those two seconds right before I knocked on the door was the lowest point of my entire life.
“It’s almost like when he opened the door, like he just reached out and then took that hand and then started the journey up. It’s so amazing to look back at that moment and go, I can actually point to a two-second frame in my life that was the lowest and his hand was the one that got me out.”
Jones had qualified for both the 100m breaststroke and the 4x100m medley relay, finishing fifth and second respectively to earn a ninth Olympic medal.
But the Games, which are best remembered for Australia’s Stillnox scandal, also saw Jones embarrassed in a newspaper article on the eve of the games.
“It affected me tremendously and that was a big part of my mental health journey,” Jones said.
“The year before, I had had a lot of mental health issues, I was considering taking my own life, I was desperate right now, so low and never been this low before or ever again and I just needed so much. lots of psychological help. And I took antidepressants, which made me fat.
“So for someone to comment on my personal appearance and things that have absolutely nothing to do with my performance at the time, of course criticizing my performance, it’s not a problem and if I didn’t exceed expectations, but I was on my fourth Games Olympians, I had this mental health test the year before and I was just trying to get through that.
“But no one asked those questions and no one bothered to come back and say what was really going on.”
‘So brave’: Jones backs Chalmers’ stance
Jones compared his treatment to that suffered by Australian superfish Kyle Chalmers during the Australian swimming championships and the Commonwealth Games.
Having previously dated Australian swimming queen Emma McKeon, Chalmers written in a love triangle with her new boyfriend and national team teammate Cody Simpson, a claim all three flatly denied.
Chalmers called out the media for his questioning and said he wanted to leave the Commonwealth Gamesspeaking openly about his mental health battles during the match.
However, Jones backed Chalmers’ stance, saying “he’s brave enough to stand up and say ‘please stop.'”
“Saying this is distracting and hurtful, and saying ‘I’m not going to continue if you keep writing headlines like this,’ I love that he said that because I would have given anything to have a voice like that back. then,” Jones said.
“This is the good side of social networks. This is where Instagram is so great because then you can post a post and say, ‘I won’t stand for this and I don’t appreciate it and for my sanity, you need to stop.'”
“When I competed, everything was very filtered by the media. We only had small opportunities to talk to the press when it was after a competition or after a swim, which I didn’t get that opportunity and to be honest it’s too distracting. So I had to let it go, suck it up, get on with the job, try to forget it as much as possible and just squash it and say ‘I’m not talking about this right now, I have a job to do. do’. And then I had to process it on my own when I got home.”
“The great side of social media is that you could have made a big statement and said, ‘This is disgraceful journalism. This is not what we tolerate. This is harmful not only for women, but also for men, girls, boys… no matter who you’re affecting, you can’t make headlines about appearance because it has nothing to do with it.
“If I had done that, I don’t know… but it would have been really nice to have that voice or that platform to say how I really felt at that moment.
“Maybe I would have done something like Kyle just to throw out a big warning to say, ‘You have to stop. Drop the headlines, that’s enough.’”
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