Max Holmes — once ‘too short and too slow’ for the AFL, now leads Geelong’s premiership charge
Max Holmes grew up sharing a Cathy Freeman jumpsuit with his siblings and having an Olympic dream. How he ended up leading Geelong’s flag assault is a tale of numerous sliding doors moments.
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It was the favourite dress-up item in the Holmes household, one of Cathy Freeman’s famous jumpsuits from the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
Max and his two younger siblings would take it in turns to put it on because “Mum had one hanging around at home”. Mum was Freeman’s Australian teammate at two Olympic Games, fellow 400m runner Lee Naylor.
“It was just normal, let’s dress up in that because it’s there not because Mum went to the Olympics,” Holmes explains. “At first we didn’t appreciate the fact of what it was at all. It was strange because having spoken to Cathy numerous times and as kids seeing these people as normal people, it’s kind of weird I guess.”
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How Holmes went from hanging out with Australian sporting royalty as a kid to being one of the best players in the AFL is a tale of numerous sliding doors moments.
Let’s start with athletics and setting the record straight. As his Geelong teammate Mark Blicavs’ career took off, so did the legend about his running with some commentators having him challenging for medals in the steeplechase at Olympic Games.
That wasn’t quite the case but it was a good story. Holmes won his last ever competitive race, the U/18 400m hurdles final at the Australian championships. He also finished third in the 400m behind a kid named Reece Holder.
Last year Holder ran fifth in the semi-finals of the 400m at the Paris Olympics and is the second-faster ever over the distance in Australian history behind Darren Clark.
“That was really cool watching him (Holder) last year,” Holmes says. “He was running in Paris and I was going around showing the boys the difference between us, I was getting up the video of the 400 saying look how far behind I was from this Olympian.
“They thought I was carrying on because I was going to be two metres behind him but I’m actually off the screen when he finishes.”
Could he have made it to the Olympics?
“It’s hard to know, not in the 400, I was a better hurdler,” Holmes says. “I didn’t grow until I was 15 or 16. I wanted to make the school athletics team but I couldn’t make it in the 100 or 200 as I wasn’t strong enough or fast enough so I learnt how to hurdle because who knows how to hurdle?
“I learnt how to hurdle to get in the team essentially, then I grew and I was a good 400 runner so then it made sense to do the 400 hurdles and I was pretty good at it. Who knows if I could have gone anywhere.
“I do think about it. If I had chosen athletics way back then it would have been 2019 so at Paris 2024 I would have been 22 and those Olympics would have been the ones I was going for. It was weird to see Reece running and Adam Spencer (1500m) there too who I was friends with as he went to Wesley College.
“So it was like, Wow, would I have been there? It’s just hard but what led to my decision was you have to be in the top 30 in the world to get there or with football you just have to be in the top 800 in Australia.”
Even that was far from a certainty with Holmes’ junior football career a sparse and spasmodic one. At 15 he was part of the Sandringham Dragons program when he was told he was “too short and too slow to be drafted”.
“I was like, alright screw you, I’m just going to do athletics then so I kind of dialled into athletics there for a while and didn’t worry about footy as much which is why I kind of fell off the radar because I wasn’t in any of the programs,” he says.
Fortunately in the next couple of years he grew 20cm and found some leg speed so at the start of 2019, Holmes made a decision.
“I just thought to myself I am going to give myself a year where I won’t do athletics, just give myself a year to do footy and if I am good enough I will get drafted,” he said.
“If I’m not, I’ll just go back to athletics. I would have missed a year of training but that’s fine.”
The bottom line was he thought he could potentially be a better footballer than runner.
“I always loved both but from my view footy was easier,” Holmes explains. “This might be a bit harsh but I had seen Mum who was an amazing, amazing runner for 10 years, she ran in the semi-finals of the Olympics which is amazing.
“But she just made a semi-final, what if I just made the heats at the Olympics. Other than just recently not many Australians go that well.”
What he wasn’t factoring in was the worldwide Covid pandemic. Holmes had played just three school games with Melbourne Grammar in 2019 and two practice games with the Sandringham Dragons in early 2020 before everything was shut down.
That wasn’t exactly a big body of work to impress AFL clubs. Fast forward to November that year and Holmes was getting himself ready to resume his athletics career. He’d spoken to a couple of clubs but his confidence levels weren’t high going into the national draft.
As it turned out it was one of those school games the previous year against Geelong Grammar which captured the eye of Geelong recruiting guru Stephen Wells. On draft night the Cats made a deal with Richmond to move into the first round and at No. 20 they surprised many by punting on the son of a former Olympian who’d barely played any footy.
MAX’S MOMENT OF CLARITY
Holmes remembers the moment clearly. It was Round 3, 2022, he was sitting on the bench as Collingwood were serving it up to the Cats at the MCG. It was his 15th game and he was thinking he wouldn’t be playing many more for a while.
“I’m sitting there thinking I need a run in the twos here, I’m struggling,” he recalls. “Then I had the best quarter of my career to that stage in the last quarter and from there it was like, ‘OK keep playing those quarters, play like that’.”
Geelong kicked seven goals to one point in the last quarter for an incredible victory but even more importantly the penny had finally dropped for No. 9.
“The coaches always said just run but I didn’t have the confidence yet to take someone on,” Holmes explains. “I was still in the mindset of I would line-up on a player from the opposition, I would be like kind of ‘Oh this guy is a really good player’ and not acknowledge that I was in the same position as them.
“I would put them higher than me and kind of play a bit safer on them. It took me a while to get out of that,
“It’s quite funny looking at it now. I took 20 bounces in my first three years, then took 60 last year and I’m probably going to take the same this year.
“What was I doing for those three years? I was probably faster back then because I had a bit less weight on me. It’s funny that it did take a while for me to get the confidence to play my game.
“Now I have the mantra that if someone is 30 centimetres behind me they’re not going to get me. It certainly makes it a bit easier when you’ve got that confidence. I haven’t been run down badly yet, touch wood now that I have said that I’ll be part of a horror chasedown soon.
“But it’s been nice playing like that I guess.”
Holmes is close to captain Patrick Dangerfield who took him under his wing early days and put the youngster on everyone’s radar when he compared him to Brownlow Medallist Chris Judd.
“I text him saying, ‘Why would you do this to me?’,” Holmes said. “He said Judd-like traits and I’m like now people are going to say Dangerfield compared Max to Chris Judd and Max is nowhere near Chris Judd so he sucks.
“I hadn’t really broken through too much at that stage so it was a nice thing to hear from him then.”
The next sliding doors moment came in the 2022 preliminary final against the Brisbane Lions when Holmes twinged his hamstring late in the game.
For the next week he spent every minute working on the hamstring, at 10pm he would be at the club running in a whirlpool and then bathing in Epsom salts. At the captain’s run before the Grand Final Holmes passed the fitness test and had been given the all clear by the medical staff to play in the Grand Final against Sydney.
But coach Chris Scott had other ideas, making the tough call not to go with the 20-year-old the following day.
“It didn’t make sense why I wasn’t playing because I’d done all the work, I was able to play,” Holmes says. “But now I see how it made sense from Scotty’s point not to play me.
“Now that I have become a better player and in a higher up position than what I was then I can see why. I can see if we were in the Grand Final this year and there was this young kid in the exact same position, he’s been good all year but isn’t necessarily a key cog, and there is potential that he can blow his hammy in the first minute.
“I wouldn’t necessarily want him to play, which is harsh to say.”
Holmes went away to Bali to escape the premiership celebrations and slowly came to peace with what had happened. “If this is the worst thing that has happened to me I’ve lived a pretty good life,” he says.
Fast forward two years and there was a case of deja vu for Holmes, another preliminary final injury scare. The midfield star had been sick all week in the lead-up to the game against the Lions and at half-time almost subbed himself off.
“I was cooked but I kept going because I’d got a fair bit of the ball then in the third quarter I did the weirdest action where I overstretched my hammy. You know when you’re crook you feel weak everywhere and I was just feeling so weak and then the hammy was a little sore.
“They actually said I could go back on but I wasn’t in the right headspace to keep going. I would have played the next week but unfortunately we didn’t get there.”
Holmes was rewarded for a brilliant season by being a runaway winner of the Carji Greeves Medal which further fuelled his confidence before an off-season curveball.
Bailey Smith had been a running machine at the Western Bulldogs before he blew out his knee and missed the 2024 season. He was now becoming a Cat and Holmes admits he was unsure how the pair would work in the same midfield.
“When he came to the club, because we are similar players I was like, ‘Will this work? Will this just make both of us worse? What will happen? I didn’t know,” Holmes said.
“But it’s worked out great. It takes the pressure off both of us at times, having him means I don’t have to run from X to Z because he’s there. The same goes for him, I will get there when he is cooked.
“I think it works in tandem pretty well.”
The pair have blown up the stats sheet with Holmes and Smith combining for 1291 metres per match this season – the highest combination ever.
Holmes is the highest rated Geelong player for the season, inside the top 20 of the competition and rated No. 5 in Jay Clark’s Herald Sun mid-season Top 50.
His game against Essendon in Round 14 – 36 possessions, eight clearances, 873 metres gained and one goal – is the highest rated game by any player this year. Smith got 41 possessions on the same day.
Off the field they’re very different. Holmes lives by himself with his cavoodle Barney who features regularly on his Instagram page, is slowly working through a uni degree and buys a crossword book at the airport before every interstate trip.
He is contracted until the end of 2028 and has just changed management, joining Lucy Cammiss, who was the first ever female AFL accredited agent back in 2005 and is the long-time manager of Sydney great Adam Goodes.
His younger brother Hunter is a potential draftee this year, playing with the Oakleigh Chargers with the Cats “keeping their cards close to their chest” about a family reunion at GMHBA Stadium.
“They told my manager when I was 18 that they didn’t like me and then they picked me up,” he joked. “So it’s impossible to know with them.”
Predicting the future is something Holmes has long given up trying to do. He knows he could have gone down many different paths and still shakes his head that he’s now regarded as one of the best players in the AFL.
“I hoped to be a decent winger that was reliable enough, was an OK player, that is what I thought I would be,” he says. “I’d scrap through maybe as a winger at AFL, be lucky to play 100 games which is super strange because I could play 100 games this year.
“Me five years ago wouldn’t have thought that would be realistic so it’s pretty funny looking at it like that. It has been a good ride.”
Originally published as Max Holmes — once ‘too short and too slow’ for the AFL, now leads Geelong’s premiership charge
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