Why SAS Australia star Melissa Wu kept her eight-year romance private

SAS contestant Melissa Wu is one of Australia’s top Olympic athletes, but very little is known about her private life. Here’s why.

There is good reason you don’t see much of Olympic diver Melissa Wu’s personal life on social media.

It is a choice the star sportswoman made long ago but it may not always be that way for the SAS Australia contestant.

“I keep my private life quite private actually, it is quite hard to find information,” Wu, who turns 30 in May, told Confidential.

“I have a partner, we have been together for eight years new which is a long time.”

Olympic diver Melissa Wu is a contestant on the 2022 season of SAS Australia. Picture: Supplied

Wu, who runs numerous businesses, does not post images of her partner on social media with the last media article referring to her relationship status being in 2012 with reports she was engaged to Sydney muso Brendan Jacquet.

“Once things are out there, it is out there and so I just like to keep parts of my life personal,” she said. “Also, with relationships and that kind of thing, because they are special, I like to hold a bit of that private as well but I think when I transition out of diving, that probably might change.”

Wu is one of the few left standing in the gruelling competition.

She became engaged to singer Brendan Jacquet in London in 2012.

Wu is one of eight recruits remaining on top reality show SAS Australia as it gets towards the pointy end of the competition.

Tuesday night’s episode featured a confronting tear gas challenge in which Wu passed out and fell face first into the ground.

Among those also still competing are Anna Heinrich, Geoff Huegill and Darius Boyd.

Wu, 29, spoke to Confidential at the beginning of the season, detailing a painful back injury that could end her diving career.

She spent months after filming the show trying to get better ahead of the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham in July.

“I am managing it the best I can and push forward with diving but I have to be really careful about not pushing it too hard because then I’ll go backwards,” Wu said at the time. “It is a fine line with how much I can push it so I am taking it day by day. I am not hugely confident that it will get better because it has been five months now. It is a physical issue but if it doesn’t get better, it becomes a mental challenge to try and overcome that.”

The Olympian has won bronze and silver medals, and is one of Australia’s most prominent hopefuls for the Commonwealth Games. Picture: Toby Zerna

Wu recalled clearly the exact moment she hurt her back.

It was during one of the brutal “beastings” where contestants on the reality show face “the imposition of arduous physical exercises for training or punishment, aimed at breaking or making the recruits”.

“It is something that just happened that you couldn’t have predicted,” she said.

“It is all part of it. When you sign up for SAS, you know there is a risk you may be injured. There is a lot going on and everyone is fatigued and tired, doing everything under stress and exhaustion.”

A brutal ‘beasting’ on the show left her with a back injury she’s struggling to recover from. Picture: Supplied

Wu is one of our top athletes going into this year’s Commonwealth Games.

She won a bronze medal in the 10m platform dive in Tokyo last year and silver in the 10m synchronised platform in Beijing in 2008.

At the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in 2018, Wu won gold in the 10m individual platform and eight years earlier in Delhi, gold in the 10m synchronised platform.

As for her back, she is realistic about her chances of healing the injury as she’s been doing weekly physio sessions.

“I’ve had disc problems in the past and so I think it is that but it has flared up a lot more than it normally does,” she said. “I am trying to manage it the best I can. It has been trial and error with things that do and don’t work. The frustrating part is we are treating it the way we have in the past but it isn’t responding well so I am not really sure what will happen.”

She added: “At this point I am just taking it one step at a time. For the first time in my life I am focusing on short term and going from there.”