‘Trainwreck’: Australia’s Olympic golden boy danced with darkness
An Olympic gold medal has changed Zac Stubblety-Cook’s life forever — but only after a doctor’s diagnosis did the same three years earlier.
Mack Horton did warn his Olympics room-mate. He did predict that gold would change Zac Stubblety-Cook‘s life forever. And if the memorably named Queenslander was not necessarily prepared for what was to come post-Tokyo, he is certain that his greatest moment could only have come after experiencing his lowest.
Rewind to 2018. To what Stubblety-Cook’s coach Vince Raleigh describes as a “trainwreck”; his disastrous heat swim on his major international debut at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.
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As a teenager he had invested everything into his swimming after a successful return from surgery in 2015 that removed a benign golf ball-sized tumour from his shoulder. Making a fifth-place finish in his pet event, the 200m freestyle, in a time (2:15.71) seven seconds outside his best, all the tougher to swallow.
In the three months afterwards, the high achiever who describes himself as a “process driven obsessionist” and a perfectionist “somewhat partial to overthinking”, was diagnosed with clinical depression and sought psychological help that would transform his life and career.
“I guess I was dancing with that darkness before. The Comm Games was the trigger but there were quite a few underlying issues,” Stubblety-Cook says.
“The Comm Games really shifted my perspective on swimming and really shifted the way I trained, and the way I worked. Then three months later, I went seven seconds faster than that heat swim; so it was a big learning curve those three months, a big shift in mentality, a big shift in attitude and everything in between.
“It probably comes down to the perfectionism and always thinking I’m not quite good enough in whatever walks of life, but that’s something I’ve had to work on and it’s something I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of. It’s probably within me and something that I can use to my advantage sometimes, but also being very wary of it in terms of knowing when to hold and when to fold.”
And also when balance is required, for the black line can be a fine one sometimes. Hence Stubblety-Cook’s commitment to not just swim and train for around 35 hours a week, but work (part-time for the Australian Olympic Committee) and study (for a double degree in psychology and business).
It’s about learning to prioritise, with perspective a valued instructor. Having watched the excellent series The Test last year, Stubblety-Cook was struck by Australian cricket coach Justin Langer’s declaration that you can’t fully appreciate the good times until experiencing the very bad.
From gloom to gold
While it took Stubblety-Cook about two years to plant the, well, SEEDS (study, social, education, exercise, diet, sleep) of his new life, the swimming results sprouted sooner. Following that silver (2:07.89) at the 2018 Pan Pacs in May came a fourth (2:07.36) at the 2019 world championships in South Korea.
His Commonwealth record (2:06.28) at this year’s Olympic trials remains the second fastest time ever swum and propelled him into the Tokyo Games as the No.1-ranked 200m breaststroker. There, as the fastest qualifier for a final Stubblety-Cook insisted he was happy just to reach, Raleigh knew there was still something left in reserve.
The swimmer, meanwhile, had switched off from social media, embraced the Dolphins’ new culture of “person first, performance second” – which he admits is as counterintuitive to an Olympian as it was important to his results – and restricted his outside contact to mum Julie and partner Ella in Brisbane.
“So I knew I had the support I needed and they’d love me the same no matter what,” he says.
By now considering himself capable of a podium finish, although not imagining it would be on the top step, the Australian was sixth at the first turn after Dutchman Arno Kamminga set a blistering pace, but determinedly followed his race plan and, yes, process, before a trademark last-50 surge in a barnstorming 32.21 set an Olympic record of 2:06.38.
When his mum Julie complains lightheartedly about the stress brought on by leave-it-til-late tactics befitting a Bart Cummings two-miler, her son jokes that it’s his duty to entertain.
Winning helps, too. Always.
“The feeling was complete disbelief but also relief, that after all those self-doubts and everything, that you finally achieved something that you kind of thought may never happen,” Stubblety-Cook says.
“You always have that dream but as you get older, you become a bit more of a realist and I’m very honest with myself … so it was one of those moments where you’re just like, ‘Wow. I’ve proved to myself that I can do something, and I can get the best out of myself under pressure’. But it’s still very, very, very surreal.’’
While crowning a new male star of a pool awash with the multiple triumphs of superwomen Emma, Arianne and Kaylee, Australian sport also learned an unusual new name. For its owner, there have been chuckles at the references to gobbledygook, while Google fields questions about what Stubblety cooks. Shame about the pronunciation though; we’ve all been saying it the wrong way. Stubb-lety is the right one, if not quite as much fun.
Zac (far easier) appreciates that it was not just his swim that was an attention-grabber. “Absolutely. [The name], it’s one that’s hard to forget. That’s why I’m not too bothered when people just have a go and try and pronounce it,” he says, while warning against expectations of further hyphens in Z-C land. “My partner’s name is Martinkovic, so I don’t think we’re gonna go for a triple last name.”
Stubblety-Cook is instead determined to contribute at his alma mater, Brisbane’s Anglican Church Grammar School, having addressed a whole school assembly and then a smaller group of 30 or so final-year students since returning home. Even before the complications of Covid-19, he had first-hand knowledge of how it feels to leave a super supportive cocoon and not succeed immediately, while also sharing the sequel to a Comm Games flop that became more than a silver lining.
“I guess that’s why I’m interested in that age group and that transition, because I had trouble having failure straight from high school when you’ve kind of been, not ‘babied’ but really helped along the way,’’ he says.
“Whereas once you hit real life it’s like, ‘Oh, well’. If you fall back, there are people around you and you have your core support system but you don’t realise how important that is until you have those down times.
“I was at the point where I was starting uni and I was like, ‘I’d made my first senior team, is that it? Is that all I’m capable of?’ And all that self-doubt and all those questions come up when you don’t necessarily perform the way you think you can perform and the way that you’ve been training. But as my coach pointed out to me on that day at Comm Games, ‘Well, it’s just swimming, it’s not life or death, the sun will come up tomorrow.’ So having that mentality as well.”
‘Your life’s about to change’
Six weeks after returning from Tokyo as Australia’s sole individual men’s swimming gold medallist, Stubblety-Cook slipped back into the quiet normality of Brisbane’s Chandler pool and found respite from the chaos and noise.
“It was like ‘Wow, I didn’t know this many people were watching or this many people cared. I thought it was just swimming!’’’ he says.
“In quarantine it all kind of hit me, and getting back to friends and family and things like that was a bit of a task. It was all quite overwhelming. So when I got back into training, it was so nice to just – and it sounds weird – go up and down the pool again.”
Horton had warned him, of course, but there was more to that “your life’s about to change” message, which prompted Stubblety-Cook to ask whether it would be for better or worse. “That’s up to you,” said Horton, the much respected 400m freestyle champion from the Rio Games.
And the answer, a few months on? “I mean, you can’t complain, right?” Stubblety-Cook laughs.
“But it’s been a lot. I’ve got to make sure I’ve got time for myself. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind and I’m still trying to work out which way is up and that’s something I’ll continue to work on, and I’m starting to build back my life again.” Which means: a return to those SEEDS. Re-sown.
Yet what resonated even more was Horton’s answer to his younger friend’s question about what, with the benefit of hindsight, he’d like to have done differently after his own golden moment.
“He said, ‘I wish I’d remembered more’,” says Stubblety-Cook. “So for me, I’ve been definitely trying to reflect and pull out as much of the experience as I can and write it down, so I can look back at that hopefully in 10 years’ time when I’m out of the sport and getting on with my life and going, ‘Wow, what an experience that was’.” And what a result. The first win by an Australian man in that event since Ian O’Brien at the last Tokyo Olympics, in 1964.
So how best for an obsessive-perfectionist to remember? The, yes, process started at the pre-Olympics camp in Cairns, where a reflective Stubblety-Cook acquired a portable Polaroid printer and indulged his love of writing – the old school pen and paper variety – with extended captions for a variety of photos. As a vehicle to park emotion, as much as a souvenir. It continued in the months that followed.
Through to, and beyond, that July 28 night, when Kyle Chalmers won silver behind Caleb Dressel and our 4x200m women’s freestyle relay team claimed bronze, leaving the kid with the funny name as the only Aussie on that top step.
So surely not much to find fault with, and he doesn’t – “Yeah, pretty close, but the perfect race for me is more than that” – while being excited by what can still get better. Starts. Turns. Front-end speed. The 4x100m medley relays helped with his confidence in the latter, as well as earning the Queenslander a bronze in the mixed.
As always, there is a bigger-picture view of what lies ahead, and Raleigh believes it starts with resting, resetting and retaining the same hunger and desire as before. “It is difficult and that’s why only the very good ones like Grant Hackett, Kieren Perkins, Dawn Fraser … these are the superstars of our sport, they have repeated,” the coach says.
“Anybody who wins a gold medal is a superstar and your life changes because of that, but the ones who leave a long-term legacy in swimming are the ones who repeat that effort.” Is Zac capable? “We’ll see. We hope so but we’ll see.”
Stubblety-Cook returned to competition over the weekend, winning the Queensland title in his pet event on Sunday night. He clocked 2:07.00, less than a second off the world record, and beat his nearest rival by more than nine seconds.
Next year is a big one: the world championships in Fukuoka, Japan, in May, and the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics and then a Stubblety-Cook reassessment. Having so quotably said in Tokyo that an athlete can only be the underdog once, he had the higher profile Matt Welsh as an attention deflector in Tokyo and will now graduate from the chaser to the hotly pursued.
“Everybody studies who’s the best, so they’ll be devising plans, I ’spose, to race and beat Zac and we just have to train as if we’re No.2 and keep going forward,” Raleigh reasons. “That’s the only way about it.”
“I mean it’s definitely an interesting shift in mindset,” adds Stubblety-Cook, while stressing how much more there is to give. “It’s not like I am done and it’s not like I think I’ve peaked. I definitely had that thought, like, ‘Oh, s**t, is that it? That could be the peak of my athletic career. That could be it’. Then I’m like, ‘No, no no, you can’t think like that!’ You have to deal with that pretty quickly because I definitely can’t be thinking like that into the future. But, yeah, I’m excited for the future.”
Stubblety-Cook is educated and strengthened by the events of the recent past as well. Back in the Chandler pool and early in his next Olympic cycle, he retreats from the noise and reflects quietly on what he’s already achieved, as not just a name to remember but a swimmer with much still ahead.
Originally published as ‘Trainwreck’: Australia’s Olympic golden boy danced with darkness
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