Emily Seebohm and Mitch Larkin on love, life and swimming

QUEENSLAND swimming champions Emily Seebohm and Mitch Larkin speak openly with U on Sunday about love, life and competing against the world’s best.

Emily Seebohm and Mitch Larkin sat down with U on Sunday, the Sunday Mail’s new Queensland lifestyle magazine. Picture: NIGEL HALLETT

Swimming champions Emily Seebohm and Mitch Larkin have been together for 2½ years, but it might as well have been a lifetime.

They finish each other’s sentences, they talk about each other with affection and respect, and, at times, no words are needed at all. They just get each other.

Theirs is a relationship that is “so easy”, Larkin says as the loved-up couple prepare to trial for the Australian team ahead of the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast in April. It is not, however, without its challenges.

After spectacular mirror-image performances at the FINA World Championships in Kazan, Russia, in August 2015, Seebohm and Larkin realised they had more in common than medals.

Growing up in Brisbane’s elite swimming circle alongside fellow Olympians Bronte and Cate Campbell, the pair pulled off the unthinkable – dual wins in their respective men’s and women’s 100m and 200m backstroke races.

“We were both world champions in the same events,” Larkin, 24, says while sipping chilled water in the kitchen of the Balinese-inspired home they bought last year in Hendra, in Brisbane’s north.

Adds Seebohm: “We actually equalled everything (at) that meet because we also both got fourth in the 50m back, and silver in the relay, so it was pretty weird.”

Snap! Parity on the podium prompted a deeper level of conversation.

“We’d always liked each other, but we were more open and honest and everything clicked,” she says.

“We’ve known each other for most of our lives,” says Larkin. “We were always at Chandler (Brisbane Aquatic Centre) racing together. You couldn’t count the number of days we’ve spent together. But Em’s a year older and she made the senior (national) team before I did. She was always that level above – the superstar.”

This would be the Emily Seebohm who, at 14, won the 100m backstroke at the 2007 Australian championships, a gold medal in the 4x100m medley relay at the world championships, and then a repeat gold at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

But come August 2016, the superstar whom Larkin had fallen in love with a year earlier was under fire for failing to meet expectations at the Olympics in Rio. While both were favourites for their races, Seebohm finished a shock seventh in the 100m backstroke and failed to qualify for the 200m final, sparking speculation that she had cracked under pressure.

Emily and Mitch with Emily's horse Platinum. Picture: Claudia Baxter

The truth was she was grappling with chronic back pain, fatigue and “terribly low iron levels”.

Seebohm was told she could have endometriosis but would need surgery to confirm the diagnosis. Surgery would mean quitting the swimming season, so she hung on and cheered Larkin as he won silver in the 200m men’s backstroke and placed fourth in the 100m.

Endometriosis affects one in 10 women of reproductive age, and in Seebohm’s case, tissue similar to the lining of the womb is growing on her right ovary, which could make conceiving very difficult.

“When the doctor told me, I started crying because I was like, ‘I don’t want to have to spend my whole life swimming and not have that chance for kids after swimming’.”

On Boxing Day 2016, two days after returning to Australia, she had the tissue

(which “looks like blood blisters attaching to everything”) removed but, with every menstrual cycle since, it begins to grow again and the pain accelerates.

“This has put a lot more pressure on Em,” says Larkin, “because she could probably swim past Tokyo (Olympic Games in 2020), she’s good enough, but then there’s the question of babies.

“How do you balance starting a family? If she’s going to struggle, is it better to start earlier? A lot of these questions come up, and it’s challenging. It has upset Em because she’s always dreamt of having a family, and I say, whatever happens, we’ll cross that path when we get there.”

Seebohm hated swimming as a child. Her mother, Karen, was – and still is – a learn-to-swim teacher, so the Seebohm siblings – Tom, now 30 and running a nutrition business in Sydney, Jack, 26, a photographer in Brisbane, and Will, 19, who is also trialling for the 2018 Commonwealth Games swimming team – had no choice but to be in the pool.

“We’d be there every afternoon having lessons, and I just hated getting wet, hated getting in the water,” recalls Seebohm, who was raised in Bracken Ridge in Brisbane’s outer north.

“I just wanted to play with my friends and run around.”

But when her mother and father, John Seebohm, a former AFL player for Adelaide’s Glenelg Tigers, insisted their children join Nippers so they knew how to swim in the surf, Seebohm came to favour the reliability of the pool over the unpredictability of the ocean.

She’d be up against a current or a wave and, despite being the fastest swimmer in the pack, failed to win events.

This did not sit well. Coming from a competitive family – “especially being the only girl, where you don’t want to lose to the boys and the boys don’t want to get beaten by a girl” – she became “really annoyed”.

Sharing their love on Instagram.

Her parents gave her an ultimatum – theocean or the pool. While attending St John Fisher Catholic girls’ high school, Seebohm began training at Nudgee College pool at Boondall with coach Matt Brown, but when their 13-year partnership ended after Brown moved to Melbourne in 2015, she started at Brisbane Grammar School’s pool, where she has been coached by David Lush ever since.

Rallying after Rio, Seebohm won a second world title in the 200m backstroke, and bronze in the 100m in Budapest last July, prompting Lush to praise her “mental resolve” and “always giving 110 per cent”.

Seebohm has come to love racing, but not only in the pool. Three times a week, she gallops on her beloved horse, Platinum, a chestnut gelding stabled on acreage at Albany Creek.

“I’ve had him since 2013. I grew up watching The Saddle Club on TV and fell in love with horses. I begged my parents for my 16th birthday to get me lessons.

“I needed something outside my swimming, and I still do.”

For Larkin, his distraction is university, and potentially property development. This year he will begin a bachelor of property economics at Queensland University of Technology after two years of part-time engineering study.

“It’s good to have something to escape the swimming, swimming, swimming,” he says. “You see people do it (exclusively) but it eats them away, and if you can kind of escape with a hobby or with study, it’s nice.”

Like Seebohm, Larkin wasn’t drawn to the pool. “I wasn’t really into swimming. I was doing learn to swim, but I wasn’t an overly great swimmer. My grade 2 teacher (Ron Hall at Wishart State School in Brisbane’s south) was the (Wishart Sharks) swim club president and he asked me to join.”

As a seven-year-old, Larkin broke records in backstroke and, never forgetting where it all began, returns to the club often to encourage young swimmers, including some who have eclipsed his early times.

“It’s great to know they are swimming faster than I did – the future is in good hands,” he says.

By the time Larkin started at Mansfield High School, he had caught the attention of Dean Pugh, then director of swimming at Brisbane Grammar School. A scholarship to the private school followed, and Larkin stayed until the end of Year 10, when Pugh also left.

Completing his senior years at John Paul College in Daisy Hill, Larkin began training under Michael Bohl at St Peters Western Swim Club in Indooroopilly. While in Year 12, he and his family – father Peter, a financial planner, mother Judy, a former bank teller, and older sister Ashleigh, now 27 and a lawyer and academic at QUT – relocated to Chelmer, close to the Brisbane River.

That year, Larkin narrowly missed making the 2010 Commonwealth Games team.

“They picked Cate Campbell over me, which I was a bit upset about at the time,” he says.

Emily and Mitch at home. Picture: Nigel Hallett

Nature had bigger problems in store for the Larkins. The bottom level of their home was wiped out in the January 2011 floods, and Larkin remembers taking a jetski through the street “as if it were a car”. January was peak swimming preparation time, though, so he moved in with his coach so that training could continue unhindered while his family rebuilt. That year, he made the national team.

Seebohm and Larkin are poised for a big 2018. After the Commonwealth Games in April, they will be preparing for the Pan Pacs in Tokyo in August and the FINA World Championships in Hangzhou in December.

Larkin trains nine times a week (for up to 30 hours) with coach Dean Boxall at St Peters, and Seebohm eight times at Brisbane Grammar with Lush.

What little free time they have is spent together and with family.

Seebohm’s parents and maternal grandmother, Margaret Fryer, live in the same street, which is no accident, as Margaret found the house while talking to the former owners, who were having a garage sale.

“She said ‘my granddaughter is looking for a house’, and that was that. We came through with our parents and Mitch and I bought it within a week – without the home being listed,” says Seebohm.

The four-bedroom, three-bathroom home, reported to have cost $1.375 million, came fully furnished and has a 9m pool and a large barbecue area.

Being at home is a luxury, a retreat from the racing, the training and the pressure they place on themselves to excel.

“Mitch doesn’t get home until 8 so I do all the cooking and cleaning up,” says Seebohm, “and it takes so much time and energy, especially after training.”

“Yeah, she gets pretty mad about that,” laughs Larkin.

“So on weekends we chill,” she says. “We get takeout, watch a movie.”

“It’s perfect,” he says. “It’s always been a challenge finding a partner who truly accepts that you have to say no to certain things, like late nights, parties and drinking.

“Especially at this time of year, we really lock down and focus on what’s coming up. Training is the number one focus, and to have a partner who is with you on this is amazing.” ■