The swimmer on the blocks at this week’s Commonwealth Games trials at the Gold Coast will look like the old Cate Campbell. She’ll talk like the old Cate, smile like the old Cate and swim like the old Cate too, except probably faster. She’s not the old Cate though. She’s different. She’s in love. With swimming.

Turn back the clock to the days, weeks and months after the 2016 Rio Olympics and Campbell was in a dark place. World record holder in the 100 metres freestyle, the 25-year-old Queenslander was expected to leave rivals in her wake as she won gold and glory for herself and Australia. Instead, she suffered, in her own words, “the greatest choke in history”, finishing sixth in her pet event and fifth in the 50m freestyle, although she did win gold and silver medals in relays.

Simon Cusack, 41, her coach at Commercial Swimming Club based at Chandler in Brisbane’s south, feared she would never return to competitive swimming. “I didn’t expect her to be back after Rio, to be honest,” he says. “I thought she would be lost to the sport. She would come to training but it was almost more for a visit than anything else. She came in to have a conversation and a debrief. She’d have a bit of a swim and say, ‘see you when I see you’. Sometimes it might be a week before I’d see her again, sometimes longer, and then one day she just didn’t come back.”

It was the start of a sabbatical during which Campbell did something she’d never done before: nothing. She dropped out of training, ruled herself out of selection for the Australian team to compete at the World Championships in Budapest last July, and caught up on 16 years of lost sleep. “It was the first time I’d had a real break from training since I was nine years old. Basically me and the sport needed some time apart,” she says. “It gave me the chance to do some things I’ve always wanted to do. I actually got some hobbies.”

Such as? “Sleeping, for one. And hiking, and doing crosswords. On a good week I’m completing one cryptic and one quick quiz. They might sound like normal things for other people, but they weren’t for me. It was hard to get my head around at first. I’d see the clock tick over to double digits and think, uh oh, I should be in bed, and then I’d remember, I don’t have to. I can stay up.

“I got to support local acts, go to gigs, do the things that other 25-year-olds do. If I wanted to have a swim I could, but I didn’t have to be 100 per cent. I didn’t have to be perfect. It was a pretty strange thing. I knew Cate Campbell the swimmer, but I didn’t know Cate Campbell the person. Now I know there is another side of life and when the time comes, I can make that transition. I don’t have to be resentful when I hear about other people going for a hike or listening to a band, because I’ve done it. It’s given me a whole new perspective, a more holistic view of life.”

CAMPBELL, WHO LIVES IN THE HOUSE SHE BOUGHT LAST YEAR at Morningside in Brisbane’s inner east, didn’t swim at all for three months – her longest break from the sport before that had been three weeks – and gradually found herself missing the buzz of competition. “I went to the World Championships in Budapest as a spectator. I was in the stands for every heat and every final. It made me realise, ‘this is why people watch swimming’. It reignited my passion for the sport.”

That, and the fact that the Commonwealth Games was coming to the Gold Coast in April. “It is every athlete’s dream to have a home Games, and this one is literally down the road,” she says. “To have all my family and friends there cheering the team on will be incredible.”

There’s a bonus. Also competing in the Commonwealth Games will be Penny Oleksiak, the Canadian who won the Olympic 100m freestyle final in Rio for which Campbell was favourite. “A rematch,” she says. “What more could I ask for?” A win over Oleksiak on the Gold Coast won’t erase the bad memories of Rio but, according to Cusack, it will be a start.

“(Cate) needed to put Rio behind her and that’s what she is doing,” he says. “There were a lot of factors behind what happened there. People talk about the pressure, and there was plenty of that because she was the outright favourite, but there was more to it. She had sleep deprivation, and she’s hopeless when she doesn’t get her sleep, plus she felt she had to defend the team when some of the others had fallen over. On top of that she had ongoing injuries. She was basically held together with wire going into that meet.

“She had a hernia operation after the 2015 World Championships in Kazan (Russia), and she had an ongoing whiplash injury to her neck from 2007 when she was training for Beijing (2008). She was practising her starts and the top of the block came away. It was treated over the years but it got progressively worse. A lot of effort kept her on the road to Rio but she had referred pain from her neck giving her bad headaches. She needed intense rehab, and it’s only now that she’s been able to get that without the constraints of deadlines.

“I think what Cate has done in getting away from the sport for a while is something a lot of elite athletes should try. Cate is a real pleaser. She always puts other things ahead of her own needs so she doesn’t let anyone down, whether it’s continuing to train and compete when she is injured, or opting out of fun activities.

“Now she has come back after the break feeling more balanced in her life. She has fallen in love with swimming again and it has been lovely to watch.”

NOT THAT IT WAS INITIALLY EASY TO GET BACK INTO the swing of training. At first Campbell wondered whether she should have stuck to bushwalking. “I went from eight weeks of doing absolutely nothing to gradually getting back to three sessions a week, building up to six sessions of full training.”

For Campbell, a week of full training adds up to nine swim sessions – plus three in the gym, two of pilates, and two of spin bike. “For the first three weeks of full training I thought, what have I done? This is worse than I remembered. My body can’t do this. After the third week, all those years of training kicked in and then I was swimming better than I ever have. The time out means I’m better physically and in a much better state mentally than before Rio.”

Cusack describes the new-look Campbell as “a racing car that has been completely rebuilt from the CV joints up”. “These older athletes like Cate are like finely tuned machines,” he says. “You don’t have to bash them up with endurance training to get them back into shape. They can go away and when they come back their body remembers what it’s supposed to do. I think it was an awakening for her to see how quickly she got back to her best.”

Better than her best, in fact. Campbell’s first competitive meet after returning to full
training was the Australian Short Course Championships in Adelaide last October. On the opening night she broke the world record for the 100m, her time of 50.25 seconds eclipsing the previous mark held by Swedish superstar Sarah Sjostrom by .33 of a second. The headline on the website of international swimming magazine SwimSwam said it all: “She’s Back!”
If Campbell needed any confirmation that she had done the right thing, this was it.

“I feel like I know myself better now,” she says. “I have a new love for swimming; a new hunger. Now I feel like I can knuckle down and be the best that I can be.”

Campbell has set herself a gruelling schedule for the Commonwealth Games, beginning with the trials starting Wednesday. She expects to swim the 100m and 50m freestyle, 4 x 100m freestyle relay, probably the 4 x 100m medley relay, and has added another event to her repertoire. “I thought I’d try for the 50m butterfly,” she says. When asked how she could even consider attempting what, to non-swimmers, appears the most painful of all strokes, she laughs. “It’s only one lap. How hard can it be?”

To the new Cate Campbell, obviously not too hard. Her first hit-out in the event was last month. In order to record a qualifying time needed for entry into the Commonwealth Games trials, she entered the 50m butterfly at the NSW Championships. With no history in the event she was placed in the first heat, against three 14-year-olds. She won in the fastest time of the heats. It was hard to know who was more excited, Campbell or the three girls who seemed more interested in getting selfies with her after the race than checking their own times.

She then went on to win the final in 25.68 seconds, just .2 seconds outside the Australian record set by former short course world record-holder Marieke Guehrer (now D’Cruz) in 2009. It all adds up to the rejuvenated Campbell riding the crest of a wave which she hopes will take her all the way to the Tokyo Olympics.

Two years after contemplating retirement following the heartbreak of Rio, she says she is now “90 per cent certain” she will compete in 2020. “If I can maintain the balance that I now have in my life, I can see myself going to Tokyo and then retiring. My first Australian team was to the Beijing Olympics; it would be nice to bookend my career with my last Australian team being at the Olympics.”

Those sentiments are music to the ears of Cusack, who has his star pupil back, fitter, fresher and happier than at any time since the day her mother Jenny brought her to his swim school at Indooroopilly, in Brisbane’s west, as a nine-year old. “I think she’s even surprising herself,” he says. “I’ve got Australian team swimmers at training and she is slaughtering them session after session. One day she got out of the pool and said to me, ‘Gee, I really am good at this aren’t I?’ and I said, ‘Yes, Cate. You really are good’.”

WHEN TO WATCH

The Australian Swimming Trials for the Commonwealth Games will be held at Gold Coast Aquatic Centre, Marine Pde, Southport, from February 28-March 3.

FINALS HIGHLIGHTS:

Wednesday, February 28

Emma McKeon and Ariarne Titmus (200m freestyle); Emily Seebohm, Madi Wilson, Sian Whittaker and Minna Atherton (100m backstroke); Cam McEvoy, Kyle Chalmers and Mack Horton (200m freestyle)

Thursday, March 1

Cate and Bronte Campbell, Emma McKeon, Brit Elmslie and Shayna Jack (100m freestyle); Kyle Chalmers, Cam McEvoy, James Magnussen and James Roberts
(100m freestyle)

Friday, March 2

Emma McKeon and Maddie Groves (100m butterfly); Mitch Larkin and Josh Beaver (200m backstroke); Jess Ashwood and Ariarne Titmus (800m freestyle)

Saturday, March 3

Cate and Bronte Campbell, Brit Elmslie and Shayna Jack (50m freestyle); Kyle Chalmers, Cam McEvoy, James Magnussen and James Roberts (50m freestyle); Mack Horton (1500m freestyle)

Adult tickets for heats start from $25; family tickets from $49

The Commonwealth Games swimming program runs from April 5-10 at the Gold Coast Aquatic Centre with tickets for the heats starting at $40 for adults and $20 for children. Heats start from 11am to 1pm daily and finals run from 7.15pm until 10pm. Book now at: swimming.org.au