Springboard diver Maddison Keeney shares her two-year mental health struggle
Maddison Keeney was miserable and she had no idea why – the diver has opened up about her fight to get back on the Olympic team.
Olympics
Don't miss out on the headlines from Olympics. Followed categories will be added to My News.
Maddison Keeney stood on top of the podium at the Commonwealth Games, her big smile for the camera concealing the struggles she had spent two years battling.
Keeney, 27, was no stranger to competing on the world stage – she won a bronze medal at the Rio 2016 Games in the 3m springboard synchronised event and was dubbed a World Champion in 2019.
But it all unravelled in 2020 – when the Covid-19 pandemic forced the Tokyo Olympics to be pushed back a year.
Keeney had been on a high – was in prime condition and had been working towards defending her bronze medal for four years.
She had pushed through the pain of a chronic knee and shoulder injury. But with the Games postponed Keeney couldn’t put surgery off any longer.
The rehab was tough and long – by the time the trials for the 2021 Games came around she had only just got back in the pool.
Going into the selection Keeney knew she wasn’t in her best physical or mental condition.
“It would have been easy to just say I’m not going to do the trials because I don’t want to put myself in a position where I could lose,” Keeney said.
“I did my best competing, I didn’t do badly but the other girls in my event were really strong.
“I had a really good year in 2019, I was raring to go for the 2020 Olympics and then Covid happened and I had surgery and I went from a high to scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Keeney didn’t make the team. Instead she watched the Games from her couch and cried through the entire competition.
“Not qualifying was almost liberating, obviously it was extremely disappointing, but I think if I had gone there I wouldn’t have been able to have the performance that I knew I could have had due to my fitness and mental state,” Keeney said.
It was her mental health that was hampering her ability to get her top physical form back.
Keeney didn’t miss a single training session but she wasn’t really there.
“It’s not that it was too hard, I was just miserable,” Keeney said.
“I didn’t want to be miserable. I’m putting so many hours a week into this and it was supposed to be the sport that I love but I was just so miserable and I couldn’t understand why.
“I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t control it.
“Sometimes you just don’t know how you end up down there.”
On top of that Keeney had developed a fear of diving – not in general just one particular dive.
It had been one of her favourites before her surgery.
Having had the shoulder injury for so long, without realising Keeney had adapted the dive to make it less painful.
She had to change her technique and in turn became terrified of the dive.
“I was coming to training dreading doing this specific dive because I had mental blocks on it,” Keeney said.
“I was scared of it and I didn’t know why and it really affected my training.”
In 2021 Keeney didn’t qualify for the individual 3m springboard event for World Championships but did make the team for synchro.
“I still wasn’t in a good space physically or mentally,” she said.
Keeney continued to train and work with her sports psychologist.
Everything just seemed to click at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Keeney won gold in the 3m individual and 3m synchronised with Rio Olympics partner Anabelle Smith and silver in the mixed synchro with Shixin Li.
“It was like I could breathe again. I felt like I hadn’t been able to breathe for a while,” Keeney said.
“Behind the scenes I’d really been struggling that year, with the mental side. I was finally able to take a deep breath and realise I had nothing to worry about.
“It’s been a lot of hard work with my psychologist, a lot of work just trying to get through those couple of years of training and surviving.”
Keeney has celebrated success, after success since Birmingham. Taking a world title in the mixed 3m synchro event and just a couple of weeks ago she finished second in the 3m individual springboard event at the recent Diving World Cup event in Berlin.
Next week Keeney will head to China to compete in the World Cup Super Final. One of her last international competitions before the Olympic selection trials in June.
Keeney knows she will be going into these trials with a completely different attitude to 2021.
“In the grand scheme of things it has not been that long since Tokyo, but I’ve got such a different outlook now,” Keeney said.
“I’m happy now. I’m enjoying training, enjoying working hard trying to get to the peak of where I want to be at the moment physically and mentally.
“I think I’m in a strong place mentally because of what I went through.”
More Coverage
Originally published as Springboard diver Maddison Keeney shares her two-year mental health struggle
Why super-fast Australian crew still underdogs in Youth America’s Cup
They are sailing faster than they have ever done but a quartet of Australian sailing rising stars still enter the Youth Americas Cup as rank underdogs thanks to a strange rule.
New coaches to lead rowing into future after Paris disaster
Rowing Australia has installed new men’s and women’s head coaches to lead its program to the LA and Brisbane Games after its worst Olympic return in more than 30 years.