Sam Fricker: Australian diver heading for Tokyo Olympics
Not content with being a TikTok star, Sam Fricker has booked his seat for Tokyo as part of the diving team for the Olympics. He explains how it all started with a girl crush...
St George Shire Standard
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Sam Fricker has harboured an Olympic dream since he was a kid.
Fresh from high school, the TikTok-famous teen diver from Sydney is headed to Tokyo to represent Australia in an epic realisation of something he has worked for almost his entire life.
“Ever since I was a kid I can just remember having a dream of making the Olympic team,” Fricker said.
“I didn’t know how but I just knew that I would get there.”
Fricker once thought gymnastics and trampolining would take him to the games – but his heart led him to the springboard instead.
“I started diving because a girl that I liked was doing it,” Fricker laughed.
“It was always cold, 6am starts, it wasn’t fun – but she was there so I would go.”
His first big break was making a school-aged nationals team while he was at Trinity Grammar School.
“It’s the lowest national event in the country and I thought that was so cool,” Fricker recalled.
“I thought, I could really go somewhere with this.”
Fricker was raised in Mereweather near Newcastle and now resides in Greenhills Beach in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire.
He was preparing to juggle his HSC studies with his Olympic bid in 2020 until the global Covid-19 pandemic scuppered the Tokyo games.
“It actually turned out to be a positive thing, and probably a lot of young athletes can relate – we had an extra year to train and perfect those skills,” Fricker said.
“It was probably a harder deal for more experienced athletes who might have been more likely to be dealing with injuries – but it gave us a better shot.
“In hindsight it wasn’t a bad thing for me, it worked out in my favour.”
In mid-June, Fricker realised his long-held dreams of making the Olympics when he qualified for the Australian team bound for Tokyo in the rescheduled 2021 Games.
“When I was younger I was introduced to a NSW Institute of Sport coach Joel Rodriguez, and he was telling me that he made the Olympics,” Fricker said.
“I told him that one day I would too, and the NSWIS took an interest in me so when I qualified there were definitely some emotions there.”
Social media fans around the world have taken a particular interest in Fricker’s high diving exploits, with almost 490,000 TikTok followers tuning into his videos.
“I was making YouTube videos first, some Instagram videos here and there but my sister told me about TikTok and I said nah, that’s for kids, it’s rubbish,” Fricker laughed.
“All of us were the same but once you get on, it’s so addictive.”
Fricker and his sister made some videos together – which she would edit because he did not know how to use the app – when a diving video suddenly took off on his page.
“There were 100,000 views – I’d never got that many views ever and I was shocked that people were interested in diving,” Fricker said.
“I started posting other videos and they started getting up to a million views.”
Fricker’s most watched TikTok – a close-up video of him performing a dive from the 10m platform – has now racked up more than 3 million views.
The ocean enthusiast is a man of many passions – and in his spare time he also runs Tsarian, an environmentally friendly single-use-straw business.
“I was inspired by that viral video of the turtle with the straw up its nose, you can see the pain in that turtle’s eyes,” Fricker said.
“It was so sad, and I’ve always been inspired by ocean conservation so I was looking for a solution for single use straws.”
Fricker said a range of options were discarded – “paper’s s***, it falls apart, bamboo’s too expensive for single use, pasta goes slimy” – before they landed on wheat stems.
“It’s literally the stem of the plant,” Fricker said.
“They are even gluten free because the gluten is in the grain of the wheat plan, and we use the stem so there’s no gluten – we have had them tested just to be safe.”
The latest Sydney Covid-19 outbreak and lockdown has presented a new challenge – though nothing the determined athlete cannot overcome.
“It’s insane, it’s happened just when I thought we were out of this rubbish,” Fricker said.
”There’s been so much s*** that happened over the year, all these little things – this is just a road bump.”
The 2021 Tokyo Olympic Games begin on July 23.
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