It’s the baroque jewel in Rome’s architectural crown, the place where wishes are made with closed eyes and open hearts.

Since 1762, millions of people have travelled to Rome’s Trevi Fountain to toss a coin into its turquoise waters and, in August this year, Australian Olympic swimmer Shayna Jack was one of them.

After a late-night dinner with her long-term partner, Joel Rintala, 28, the couple strolled to the famous fountain to make their own wishes.

Jack, 25, smiles. “Joel and I went there at about half past 10, to avoid the crowds, so it was much quieter than usual and really lovely.

I tossed my coin in and Joel said, ‘What did you wish for?’ And I said I couldn’t tell him or it wouldn’t come true, but he persisted and said ‘Come on, tell me,’ so I answered, ‘Well, obviously a life spent with you’ – and that’s when he pulled out the ring and said, ‘Will you spend the rest of your life with me?’”

And Jack says that it was in that moment, amid all the other dreamers tossing their coins into the fountain, she realised that all her wishes – after years of struggles, setbacks and heartbreak – had indeed come true.

THE DOPING SCANDAL

Rewind to June, 2019, and Jack, then at a training camp for the July World Swimming Championships with the Australian swim team in Nagaoka, Japan, received a phone call informing her that a banned substance, Ligandrol, had been found in her system during a random drug test.

From that moment on, Jack – who has always denied deliberately ingesting any prohibited substance – would fight to clear her name.

She would fight to be allowed to rejoin her teammates at Brisbane’s St Peters Western club for training. And she would fight to return to competitive swimming after Sport Integrity Australia (SIA) initially handed her a four-year ban, later reduced to two. Along the way there would be investigations by the SIA, appeals by Jack’s team, counter appeals by the SIA and the World Anti-Doping Agency, and mountains of legal work.

Jack would also fight a powerful, inner battle not to succumb to the black dog of depression shadowing her every step, and thoughts of taking her own life.

Even after the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) lifted her ban in September 2021, Jack still had to contend with relentless online trolling.

And even after the CAS also accepted Jack’s submissions that she had not intentionally consumed the banned substance, she knew that in some quarters she would always be branded a drug cheat.

As a journalist covering Jack’s return to competitive swimming, I spent time with her for a feature in this magazine in 2021. It was a long interview, at times punctuated by tears, and underlined with a deep sadness. And something else too. Defiance.

Consider this quote from that story: “I have been angry, I have been sad, depressed, traumatised, lonely, shunned and ostracised, but I never gave up the fight.”

Asked at the conclusion of that interview what she wanted to do next, Jack simply answered “swim”. Specifically, swim for Australia at the 2024 Paris Olympics, the previous ban meaning she lost her chance to compete at the Tokyo Games in 2021. And that is why Jack felt like all her wishes had come true at the Trevi Fountain that night.

Because not only was she engaged to the love of her life, but she was also on a post-Paris Olympics holiday.

An Olympics where she had won two gold medals.

It was, she says, redemption.

OLYMPIC REDEMPTION

Jack’s gold medals from Paris were in the 4x100m and 4x200m women’s freestyle relays. In her individual events, the 100m and 50m freestyle, Jack missed out on medals, hitting the wall in fifth and eighth place respectively. No matter, Jack says, winning an individual medal was never her sole focus.

“For me, making the team was the big goal, the big redemption arc,” she reflects from her home in South Brisbane, which she shares with Rintala and their two dogs, Hugo and Willa.

“That was it for me. Once I made the team I let everything else go. I felt making the Australian team spoke volumes to all the people who tried to silence me and I didn’t have to say a word. I felt the message was: ‘Look at me, you are not going to stop me, and you did not break me’.”

After that, she says, “It was far less about proving myself and far more about living in the moment.

“I had the mindset of absolutely savouring my time in Paris, because it took so much to get there.

“I did not want to waste a second on not just being absolutely delighted to be there.”

Winning two gold medals, however, she concedes “was pretty good too”.

“But you know, a lot of people have held my gold medal and said, ‘Does this mean everything to you?’, but honestly I look at it and see what it means to other people.

“When I look at the medal I see all the people who believed me from day one, I see how happy they are for me, and that just means everything.”

SHAYNA AND THE SUPERCOACH

One of those people is St Peters coach, DeanBoxall. It was Boxall, Jack says, who told her to savour every Parisian moment.

“We had spoken countless times about athletes not having the race they wanted. Of training so hard and then maybe their race doesn’t go their way and they are just devastated. But Dean said to go in with the attitude of ‘I’m going to give it everything I’ve got’, which means I can never look back and regret, and I absolutely don’t.”

Jack – like teammates Mollie O’Callaghan and Ariarne Titmus – listens to Boxall. She believes in him completely, she says, because he has always believed in her.

Boxall was the first person Jack asked to see in Japan after being told a prohibited substance had been found in her system.

Speaking to Qweekend in 2021, she described it like this: “Everything stopped. I couldn’t stand up. I could not control my body. I could not control the amount of shock I was feeling. I could not control my shaking. I could not breathe properly. I could not speak, and I felt my heart break.”

When Boxall arrived at her room shortly afterwards, his first words were, “Shayna, don’t worry, this is a mistake and we are going to get through this.” At the time, his immediate, rock solid belief in her innocence meant everything to her. It still does. “He is family,” she says.

Another person who has long believed in Jack is, of course, Rintala. Shayna Jack was 17 when they first met, and nearly nine years, two dogs, and one particularly beautiful engagement ring later, she says she finds it hard to adequately describe how her fiance, an Australian hockey player and carpenter, has supported her.

“When I was having to put all my money into fighting my case, we were struggling to pay our rent,” she says. “Joel worked extra hours to keep us afloat.

“But outside of that, when I was really struggling to leave the house, trying to get the courage to walk out our front door because of what had happened, and what went with it – the public scrutiny, the media attention, the trolling – well, he got me outside that front door.”

And when injury ruled out Rintala’s inclusion in the Australian men’s hockey team and therefore his own tilt at the Paris Olympics, he did not, Jack says, “for one moment let his own disappointment overshadow my selection.

Joel was living in Perth at the time, and when he didn’t make the Australian team, he came home for my trials to support me and to wish me off when I left with the team for Paris.

“Then at the Games, he was up in the stands cheering me on all the way.

“It was so hard for him to not make the team because he’d been training for four years, and then a couple of weeks out of selection, he injured himself.

“But he’s back training, he absolutely loves hockey and he is by no means giving up. Joel has taught me a lot about that, too.”

Rintala was also by her side when the trolls kept coming for Jack during the Paris Olympics. Controversy broke out over a misunderstanding between Australian swimmer Kyle Chalmers and China’s Pan Zhanle after the Chinese swimmer edged out Chalmers to win the 100m freestyle by a body length.

A swim coach and two-time Australian Olympian Brett Hawke later called Zhanle’s time of 46.40 “humanly impossible”.

Despite Chalmers himself saying “I trust that Pan deserves that gold medal”, Zhanle would later tell Chinese media that Chalmers had “snubbed” him earlier in the meet.

It was not true, Chalmers said, and the two swimmers made their peace, but either way, it was bad news for Jack.

“There was a miscommunication between Kyle and Pan, those comments by that coach (Hawke), well you just can’t say that without evidence. I know Kyle copped it online.”

So did Jack.

“I think I was naive. I didn’t think about the Olympics with regards to trolls, I didn’t think they would come after me again, so I hadn’t prepared myself emotionally.”

There is a long pause as Jack exhales.

“So they were sending me emojis of syringes and saying in my medal photos that I’m a cheat, and it made me realise that no matter what, no matter what I achieve, if anything happens with regards to doping, my name will come up.”

So Jack has responded by continuing to train, continuing her swimming career, and continuing to achieve, trolls be damned.

A NEW SHAYNA POST-OLYMPICS

Post Paris, Jack has been popping up in all sorts of places.

On the catwalk, where she recently appeared on the runway at the Brisbane Fashion Festival in a showstopping gold swimsuit and a custom made Driza-Bone, and in the design studio of the wildly popular sportswear firm, LSKD.

Jack has collaborated with the company to produce six pieces of sportswear/leisurewear, called LSKD x Shayna Jack, including sports bras, T-shirts and lounge shorts.

“I’ve been part of their athlete team since 2022 and I was really excited to work on this line with them. It was new for me, really exploring my creative side, and it definitely took me out of my comfort zone,” Jack says.

Which was, she says, why she did it.

“Because I know how quickly opportunities can be taken away from you, now I say ‘yes’ to everything because there was a time when I didn’t have anything to say yes to.”

Opportunities dried up for Jack during her ban from swimming, and her once-busy phone lay mostly silent. Through it all, she says she was “just trying to get through day-by-day”. Which is why it’s surprising, when asked if she could turn back time and change the last five years of her life, she answers with an emphatic “no”.

“I have thought about this, whether I would go back and change any of it, and I’ve realised that, as horrible as it was, and it was really, really horrible, I would not be the athlete I am today, and more importantly I would not be the human I am today if it hadn’t happened,” Jack says.

“I am a woman who will not be silenced. I used to be a pushover and do what I was told but now I know that everything gets better when you speak up for yourself. And I want to be an advocate to encourage others to speak up.”

Jack started seeing a psychiatrist regularly during her ban from swimming, and still goes once a month “to check in on my mental health”.

“I want to let people know it’s okay to seek professional help. I want to tell people who are struggling and in danger of really going under to put their hand up.”

Jack says her experiences have led her to come up with a three-point plan for getting through the dark times.

“For me, it was journaling. Putting all my thoughts – good and bad – on paper, letting it all out. Then it was acknowledging the problem – when you voice it, the less power you give it. And lastly it’s asking the question: who can I speak to? For me it was Joel, my family and my coach, but look around, who can you talk to? A teacher? A friend?

“I hope people, young people, older people, athletes, non-athletes saw me at the Olympics and know my story and know that I made it through and that they can too.”

Jack says that a few weeks ago, she and Rintala were at home, “just sitting around, not doing much. We looked at each other and had this moment of ‘Wow, look how far we’ve come, look how things have completely turned around for us’ – and I want someone else to have that moment too.”