Water polo captain Rowie Webster says Tokyo Olympics ‘might’ proceed
Our athletes will submit to three Covid tests in 96 hours before Tokyo and tested every day upon arrival. But if they fail, their Olympic dreams are over.
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Rowie Webster is one of our Olympians we will be cheering for in Tokyo.
She is one of the best water polo players in the world, loves her footy and has never been more in love with the sport she’ll be competing at in Japan.
Her team will have three Covid tests in 96 hours before boarding the plane, and once landing in Tokyo, be tested every day and immediately disqualified from the Olympic Games if one person returns a positive result.
HM: Who’s the captain of the Australian women’s water polo team?
RW: That’d be me, Hame, Rowie Webster! It’s cool saying that – I don’t get sick of hearing it, what a privilege!
HM: How many Victorians have been captain of the Australian water polo team?
RW: Zero … up until now. I’m the first!
HM: Why have Victorians been so poorly represented at the national level?
RW: Victorians in the Australian Water Polo teams are a rare species! There’s only been three females to ever represent the country at the Olympic Games. One is a gold medallist, and two are bronze medallists. We are few and far between! I think we lose a lot of athletes to swimming.
HM: Three-time Olympians are rare too — how worried were you that Tokyo 2020 wasn’t going to be rescheduled after it was postponed?
RW: In short, very! There was a lot of time where it was all so uncertain. I’d be lying if I told you I wasn’t worried that my career might have come to an end.
HM: Who gave you some degree of confidence that the restrictions would ease and Tokyo was a possibly?
RW: Ian Chesterman, the team’s Chef de Mission, assured us that people, including himself, would be doing everything in their power to get us to Tokyo. It seems like it will go ahead.
HM: If it does, it’ll be so different as a participant, family member, and casual viewer!
RW: It will, but that’s so special in itself I reckon, Hame. It will look very different. Masks, no family, no support network over there, and essentially a prisoner in your room until you train or play games. To get through 2020 and embrace a five-year cycle, I think it’s really impressive for us just to get there. I’m really looking forward to it. I’m thrilled that it’s going ahead … well, I am bloody thrilled it might still go ahead!
HM: As an aspiring Olympian, your life is centred around these small windows and four year cycles. How has the last 15 months since postponement, taken its toll on you?
RW: We came out of a 3-month residential camp at the AIS, and we were all ready to go. We were all living together, and then the decision was made by our medical team - “You all need to go home!”. There was no grey, no wriggle room, so I left Sydney, and drove back home thinking it would be a short affair, and it would all end quickly. Seven months on, I was still away from my team.
HM: How did your leadership get tested? Did you change your role?
RW: Yeah, absolutely, I felt there was a huge shift. I feel the pivot was from leading project “get to the Olympics”, to project “humanise and survive”. I’m not sure I saw it coming, but I took on a motherly role, where I just wanted to make sure everyone in my team was OK, mentally. There were so many unknowns. The team hadn’t been selected yet, we had girls all around Australia living completely different lives, some of us were locked down in Melbourne. But in the darkest of times, it seems like communities come together.
HM: Solo training tricky?
RW: Finding new ways to stay motivated and training with purpose every day was hard. We didn’t have access to a pool so I was swimming in the ocean in the middle of Melbourne’s winter. I’d ride my bike down to Brighton beach, swim 4km and battle potential hypothermia as it was five degrees overhead, and nine degrees in the water. I’d come home and see on social media that my teammates around the country were living a lifestyle where it didn’t seem like Covid existed. You can’t be angry, upset or jealous of that.
HM: Were there any positives?
RW: Certainly. Our team is collectively, so much more united, than pre-Covid. Nothing surer.
HM: I assume you’re a big part of that decision making process. Do we travel overseas and compete, or do we stay here, stay safe, and not play at all.
RW: Our medical team always has our best interests at heart. There was definitely anxiety within the playing group by staying, and equally, around travelling abroad. We had made decisions the whole way through that to put our safety as the priority. We were never going to change it, and we made a unanimous, united decision to stay on home soil, and live the hub life. We will be the only country that hasn’t played an international game in 17 months. Our first game at the Olympics against Canada will be our first rodeo for a while. We will be tested, that’s for sure!
HM: Your last international meet was?
RW: January 2020, against the US. We hosted them in Brisbane, and we got a win. It’s the first time this whole cycle that they’ve been beaten.
HM: You haven’t lost a player through it all have you?
RW: We’ve held on to everyone, which is a really good reflection of the unity and what competing at the highest level actually does to your soul. It ignites you. It shows how connected we are as a playing group, and how much we want to bring back a gold medal for this country in the most extraordinary of circumstances.
HM: When you think of competing in Tokyo, what do you see in the stands?
RW: I see quiet crowds, I see strangers, I see people that don’t know our sport. I see a vision of our team being OK with being out there alone, knowing that we have the support of the nation behind us, but just not physically there. It’s disappointing for our friends and family that they can’t get there to witness our emotion live, and our efforts live, but at the end of the day, the pool hasn’t changed. The minutes that we play haven’t changed, our tactics won’t change, the twelve other girls lining up next to me won’t change, our national anthem won’t change. Having a crowd there is amazing, and it makes the atmosphere even more incredible, but we were never going to just compete against a crowd! We’re going to live out our childhood dreams of chasing this needle in a haystack - a gold medal!
HM: Give me the day to day in Tokyo.
RW: We don’t know exactly what it looks like because our third playbook for the Olympic Games hasn’t come out. What we do know is we leave from a hub style facility within Australia, and we get on a chartered flight with other Olympic athletes into the village five days prior to our event starting. We have three tests in 96 hours before we board that plane, and once we land in Tokyo, we get a test every single day. We have to put up a negative result, and if we don’t, our team is disqualified from the Olympic Games.
HM: Nerve wracking!
RW: Yep! We go to training, we wear masks, we sit on a bus, we have team meetings – we don’t mingle with any other Olympic athletes in the village, let alone the Australian Olympic athletes. With a bit of luck, we win all our games, come back, and leave within 48 hours of our last event. We don’t get to hang around for the closing ceremony, we get a chartered flight home with the athletes that are left in the village. Water polo is one of the longest sports in the Olympics, so there won’t be many athletes left. We go straight into hotel quarantine for 14 days, and then we get to see our friends and family. There’s definitely a lot ahead for us, but we will endeavour to take it one step at a time. The benefit is we’ve been here before, we know what it feels like to be locked down, and every country will be in the same situation.
HM: The reality is a bit like the AFL grand final last year. No one, in my view, with 2020, says there’s an asterisk. It’s just – “Who won the premiership in 2020?” It’ll be the same “Who won the gold in women’s water polo in Tokyo in 2021? You have to compartmentalise all the challenges and be the ones that win the gold medal game.
RW: Absolutely. Nothing’s changed! Everything around us has changed with this pandemic, sure, but the goal has stayed the same. We are a year on, but a year doesn’t matter when you’re chasing a dream of trying to do your best and represent your country at the Olympic Games. If they’d postponed it for two years, we’d still be having the same conversation. Let’s just get ready, we’ve got a job to do, let’s get over there and showcase our skills and enjoy the process. We do it because we love it, we are all amateurs at the Olympics, so every single athlete there is fighting for the same dream, which is to bring home that gold medal. We can sit here and say it’s been harder for some countries, but it’ll be the best team that’s the most resilient, the most consistent, and can deal with the challenges and compartmentalise everything and stay focused on the task at hand. That’s what we’re going to try and do.
HM: To football – does your Demon fanaticism still run deep?
RW: 9 and 1 at the time of speaking Hame. Ron Barassi was coach the last time we were 9 and 0. Our best is good enough – for sure. It’s very, very exciting!
HM: Give me the perfect scenario, 5.30pm on grand final day.
RW: Well, I am there, a guest of the AFL as captain of the Australian Olympic Water Polo team that won gold in Tokyo. We will be a part of a parade that respects the many gold medallists from the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. The Dees have a four-goal lead with three minutes to play, and we win the grand final without too many horrific moments late. It would be the perfect trifecta – a gold medal, an MCG parade and a Dees premiership. That would be incredible. I feel it’s our time.
HM: What feels different?
RW: We’ve got a great, deep list with a real hunger and belief. And our culture is in a good spot. It takes a long time to build, it hasn’t changed overnight, but it has changed. We’ve been building for a while, and the boys are doing an awesome job. The women did an exceptional job too. The fans are happy and right behind them. It’s been amazing to sing the song so often.
HM: Are you still kicking the footy around?
RW: I am. I always have one with me. I was lucky enough to speak to Daisy and a few of the Melbourne girls the other day. Whenever we can get the ball out, we have a kick around. The Victorian Institute of Sport has a footy there all the time, and we are definitely Melburnians through and through.
HM: Are you, on the back of not competing, in love with water polo more than ever before?
RW: I am. A blessing from Covid was you were forced to stop playing a sport and work out whether you wanted to play on or not. The lockdown gave me the opportunity to miss the sport that I loved playing, and that I loved playing for so long. The fire in me is burning fiercer than ever before, and I’m desperate to get to Paris too.
HM: It is odd. You’re sitting here, Tokyo’s two months away, and Paris is three years away.
RW: It’s a quick turnaround! We’ll have a break, come back, hit the ground running with the world championships early 2022, and then you get your big major tournament done. Next is Comm Games, and then before we know it, we’re two years out from the next Olympics. It’s all full steam ahead!
HM: What are you most looking forward to?
RW: Competing. I love the competition, the challenge, it’s what you train 15 times a week for, that one hour with your cap on in bathers that are extremely tight, wrestling grizzly bears up and down the pool. Who wouldn’t want to do that on the world’s biggest stage?
HM: Michael Jordan and Ky Hurst were your idols as a kid – now?
RW: They’ll never be replaced, but I think we’ve all learnt we can be our own heroes. That’s something that I’m pushing for, for this team of strong females. You can be your own hero - you don’t need any others!
HM: Solid. Last time you performed the worm at a wedding?
RW: It’s been a while. The backs a little bit old these days. Let’s just say I’m much more civilised and mature now.
HM: As the Australian captain, you’ve got to be capable of worming when you need to poolside.
RW: Absolutely. We’ll save the worm for grand final day when the Dees win.
HM: We spoke before Rio. You were very keen to meet Roger.
RW: I didn’t get to. I met Serena, a powerhouse. I met Novak. No Roger.
HM: Maybe in Tokyo. Are you still collecting Olympic and sporting pins?
RW: I am, and I will come back a chance at being the Pin Collecting World Champion. Covid will not stop me! I will disinfect those pins and they’ll be coming home with me.
HM: Thank you and good luck in Tokyo.
RW: Thanks, Hame, and go Dees.
Follow the Aussie team’s Olympic preparations:
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/olympics
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