This was published 3 months ago
She’ll face the GOAT and a very fast upstart. Can Ariarne Titmus beat them?
The women’s 400m freestyle will be remembered as one of the great races of the Paris Olympics. We have republished this Good Weekend interview with world-record holder Ariarne Titmus after her incredible win.
“I was never the most talented athlete,” says double Olympic gold medallist Ariarne Titmus. “I just always have loved swimming.”Credit: Courtesy of Harvey Norman
Wednesday May 1, 2024, 2pm
Interview: Sydney and Brisbane, via zoom link
87 days till the Women’s 400m Freestyle final, Day 1 of competition, Paris Olympics
At every Olympic Games, there are a handful of moments that are, really, the point of the whole thing. Moments that force us away from the TV to walk around the house, put the kettle on, do the washing up – because the tension of witnessing an athlete funnel a lifetime of desire into a performance decided by a fraction of a second is almost too thrilling, and too awful, to bear. Watching Ariarne Titmus get up on the blocks before the 400 metres women’s freestyle final (provided, god willing, she makes it that far) will be such a moment.
“There are just not enough superlatives in the world to describe that race,” says Tom Decent, swimming writer with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. “It’ll be three women, all world champions, all world record holders in various events, all potential winners. It’s the race of the Games. And on the first night of the Games, too. Right there, day one, bang.”
The three women (again, fingers crossed) will be Katie Ledecky, 27, of the US, arguably the greatest middle-distance swimmer in history, male or female, with seven Olympic gold medals across three Games and four distances to her name, plus 21 world championship titles and 16 world records (including the current 800-metre and 1500-metre record). There will be Canadian Summer McIntosh, just 17, who set a new 400m freestyle world record in March last year, and broke her own 400m individual medley world record just last month. And there will be Ariarne Titmus, 23, the slim, blonde giant-killer who broke Ledecky’s decade of dominance at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. She won gold in the 200-metre and 400m freestyle, and is the current world-record holder in both. She’s the girl from Launceston, great swimming capital of Australia (not), never the most talented kid in the pool, always the most dogged.
When I interview Titmus, 87 days before the 400m Olympic final, she’s sitting deep in a pale sofa at home in Brisbane, wearing a hoodie with the sleeves pulled down round her knuckles. She’s in heavy training: morning and evening, 40 hours a week, no taper in sight. “I’ve got my cousin staying,” she explains. “And she said to me yesterday, ‘My god, you just look buggered.’ ”
She does indeed look buggered. Buggered with an undertow of something else. Something that involves not dreading, but actually counting down the days, weeks, and minutes until she can face an Olympic split-second again.
Thursday September 7, 2000, 2.50am
Queen Victoria Maternity Unit,
Launceston General Hospital
8724 days until day one, Paris Olympics
Ariarne Titmus has always understood that some moments count more than others. Her parents, Steve and Robyn Titmus, had planned to go to the Sydney Olympics in 2000; when Robyn found out she was pregnant, she remembers thinking, “Well, we won’t be doing that.” As it turned out, Ariarne was born three weeks early, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck. She wasn’t breathing, and it seemed, for a panic-stricken few minutes, that she might not make it. Her father was filming her birth and, in true journalistic style (he’s a long-time newsreader for the Seven Network), he kept rolling as the medics worked over the baby. Seeing that footage, the limbo lasts long enough to make your teeth clench: the tiny limp body, the little face with its eyes and lips folded closed. But then, finally, her first breath came.
Robyn remembers bringing Ariarne home after her first few weeks in hospital, and breastfeeding while watching Ian Thorpe swimming to gold in Sydney. “We do think that that problem she had at birth, that really set her up as a fighter,” says Steve now. “She always had a wisdom and a determination beyond her years, whatever she did.”
Young Ariarne grew up on an acreage near Launceston, Tasmania, where pony club and swimming were early interests.Credit: Courtesy of Ariarne Titmus
As a kid, Ariarne did a lot: Christmas carols with the choir, pony club (the Titmus family had 6.5 hectares outside Launceston, including a heated indoor pool and space for horses), dancing, dressing up as a fairy with her younger sister Mia. Swimming was just another fun thing to do – at first. “She joined a little swimming club to learn technique and mix with other children at racing club nights,” Robyn recalls. “She started racing and enjoyed it, and she did win a couple of little awards. But she was always very finely built, so against some of the other swimmers, the girls who were more mature physically, she didn’t really have a lot of hope.”
Titmus agrees. “I was never the most talented athlete. I was never winning everything.” But something was happening between the small blonde girl and the eight blue lanes. “I just always have loved swimming. Even to this day, in the pool, if we have a long aerobic session where we have to swim, like, three Ks straight, most people find that very mind-numbing, boring.”
She laughs. “And I do too, but I also don’t mind it. It’s quite therapeutic. You’re just at one with yourself, just focusing on your stroke. And I think maybe that was the first drawcard. I just always loved the sport, even when I was really, really young.”
She decided to join a squad, and recruited Steve as chauffeur. “We had a deal that I had to go and tap him on the shoulder and wake him up,” she explains, “and if I didn’t wake up, or if I slept through my alarm, I just wouldn’t go to training. It was my fault if I missed, and I never missed. Not once in my entire swimming career.”
Steve remembers it well. “Four-thirty in the morning, every morning,” he says wryly. “I remember watching her from the car, and she’d walk off into the dark – freezing cold – and I’d hear her feet crunching over the frost on the grass. She said, very early on, that she wanted to be an Olympian. And you know, children say that, and you go, ‘Yeah, OK.’ I didn’t think she’d be an Olympian! But I did think I had an obligation to help her chase her dreams.”
“She was setting high expectations for herself,” says Robyn. “Actually, as parents we probably didn’t understand to what extent that was happening: she had this real inward willingness to set herself high targets and do well.”
When she was 13, training mostly with boys because few girls were swimming middle distance in Launceston, she competed at the Australian Age Championships in Sydney. The family travelled up to watch her, and she made the final of the 200m freestyle.
“We thought, well, you know, this is extraordinary,” recalls Steve: “To make that final: we were very proud of her. And then in that race, it got down to the last 15 metres, and it looked like she was going to win. I remember specifically that I got the shakes.” He pauses, his voice thickening. “I still get very emotional,” he says, laughing. “We were sitting on these plastic chairs, and I stood up on my chair and sat on the back of it. And she won. It was a great moment, great. And there were some children in front of us from Victoria. And they turned around, and I remember one of them said, ‘Tasmanians aren’t supposed to win.’ ”
Titmus, 14, with her family (from left: sister Mia, dad Steve and mum Robyn) at the 2015 Age Nationals in Sydney, having won golds in the 200m, 400m and 800m freestyle fi nals.Credit: Courtesy of Ariarne Titmus
Friday August 28, 2015, 12:23pm (400m heat), and Sunday August 30, 2015, 12:59pm (200m heat)
FINA World Junior Swimming Championships, Singapore
3256/3254 days until day one, Paris Olympics
In 2015, still only 14, Titmus swam again at the Age Championships and won three gold medals (in the 200m, 400m and 800 metres). As a result, she was one of the youngest swimmers selected for the Australian World Juniors team in Singapore. “We were faced with a dilemma,” explains Robyn. “The World Juniors were in August, and she didn’t have a coach.”
Titmus’ then coach, Peter Gartrell, had just left Launceston – so for six weeks, twice a day, she went to the local pool and paid the entry fee to train in a public lane. She swam around old ladies and little kids and people doing their laps. She had no one timing her, no one offering her swimming advice or support, no one giving her any idea how she was going.
Robyn and Steve, meanwhile, were trying to decide what to do. They knew that for Titmus to progress in the long term, she’d have to move to the mainland and get into a proper program. And in the short term, given the upcoming championships, they needed to act fast. As Steve puts it: “We knew we needed to eat this elephant, and we needed to do it one bite.”
And so they took the plunge. At the start of June, the family packed the car, caught the ferry to Melbourne and drove north to Brisbane, stopping en route for Titmus to train in the pool at Albury. “Robyn [who works in recruitment, and had organised a job in Brisbane] and the girls set up house in this tiny apartment in Nundah,” says Steve. “I stayed for two weeks, then I flew back to Tasmania, packed up our house and property, put it on the market and sold it. That took six months; I arrived in Brisbane on Christmas Eve.”
It took five years, Steve explains cheerfully, for him to get a full-time gig in Queensland (he’s now co-anchor of the Channel 7 Gold Coast news bulletin).
The whole family missed the space of Tassie, and their animals, and Robyn remembers how much Mia, especially, missed her friends. All this for Titmus and her Olympic dream. “But the last thing we wanted was for her to feel pressure about the move,” says Robyn, “that, you know, we expected results. So we made a very conscious decision to say that we were up for a sea change. And I had always felt that at some point in my life I would like to live outside of Tassie. We’d done our research swimming-wise, and we knew south-east Queensland was a great choice. So then, I suppose, we camouflaged it as a family adventure.”
Titmus didn’t make the final in either the 200m or 400m in Singapore. But it didn’t matter. She returned to Brisbane, resumed her training and never looked back. “I have a wonderful family,” she says now. “And I think if you’ve been gifted with a great family, talent, and an ability to push yourself, and you get the opportunity, you should use it to the best of your ability. You owe it to yourself, and to them.”
September 6, 2015, sometime before the first
night of competition
Commonwealth Youth Games, Samoa
3247 days until day one, Paris Olympics
It’s a truth generally acknowledged that every great athlete needs a great coach. Few, however, have coaches quite like the bleached-surfer’s-hair figure of Dean Boxall, who shot to fame after his wild celebration in Tokyo following Titmus’ 400m gold-medal swim, when he nearly wrenched the railing out of the floor of a spectator stand at Tokyo Aquatics Centre. He received a lot of stick for this celebration, which does look pretty crazy until you realise, as he’s explained several times, that he was imitating the victory dance of his childhood wrestling hero, the Ultimate Warrior. And after all, his reaction was based not only on the four minutes of that final, but also the five years preceding it, during which he’d been there – usually literally there, poolside – for every metre Titmus had swum.
Titmus’ coach Dean Boxall’s infamous Tokyo celebration, channelling a wrestlerCredit: Google Image
“I met him at the Youth Commonwealth Games in 2015,” Titmus recalls. “He was a coach on the junior Australian team, and I remember he was giving us this speech before the first night of competition, and I just thought, ‘This guy is nuts. There is no way he’s ever coaching me. No way!’
“A year later, we decided to go and meet him as a potential coach in Brisbane. I went with Mum, and I remember that everything he said, I just aligned with. I got in the car with Mum afterwards, and I was like, ‘We’re not even talking to any other coaches.’ I love his passion,” she says, grinning. “A lot of people are afraid to show who they really are, but he’s not.”
The pair has since become one of swimming’s great double-acts: the sunny, blue-eyed Titmus and the wild-haired, wildly passionate Boxall. Boxall hasn’t given any interviews to the swimming media for some time, but he’s awesome to talk to, because he only has one way of communicating: intensely. He must be a brilliant contrast to the monotony of swimming: there you are, slogging through some unfeasible number of laps with nothing to see, nothing to hear, and no one to talk to, and suddenly Boxall’s leaning over the edge of the pool, stopwatch raised, jaw clenched, telling you your cossie is “like the Batsuit”, or that “no one on the chain-gang wears silk pyjamas”, or that “pressure is a privilege”. Half the time you can’t understand what the hell he’s talking about, but he inspires you all the same.
“I knew Arnie wanted to swim at the Olympics,” he recalls now. “You’re coming into this program, you want to go to the Olympics. It’s my job to hold her accountable to that dream.” A dream which, as Boxall is fond of pointing out, is a bit like climbing Everest, but harder. Almost 7000 people have reached the top of the world’s highest peak, after all, but only 22 – including Titmus – have won an Olympic gold in the 400m.
Added to which, at the beginning of her career, her particular events – 200m, 400m, 800m – were utterly dominated by the undisputed GOAT, American Katie Ledecky. “When I met Arnie she was 16 seconds behind Katie’s time,” Boxall says: so far behind they may as well have been swimming different races. “But Katie’s the benchmark. So that’s what you aim for.”
Titmus (right) with her rival, US middle-distance GOAT Katie Ledecky (left).Credit: Getty Images
The pair began chipping away. “The thing about Arnie is that she works her backside off,” says Boxall. Talking to ex-Olympian and podcaster Brett Hawke after the Tokyo Games, he explained, “If I’d said, ’Arnie, go to that gum tree outside the pool, do the do-si-do round [it], then grab some bark and eat it, ’cause I think that’s going to help you,’ she’d have done it.”
In their early years pursuing the crème de la crème of world swimming, one major challenge was that during races, Titmus’ second half wasn’t as strong as her first. “I was never as fast as these girls that I was competing against,” says Titmus. “I’d take out my races way faster than them, then fade in the backend.”
This was seen by the international swimming community as hubris – how dare this kid try to challenge the big stars when she couldn’t follow through?
Boxall in particular remembers a moment in a courtesy bus during a meet in 2019, when famous American coach Ray Looze was talking to world champion breaststroker Lilly King. “I was sitting right behind them,” he explained to Hawke. “And they were talking, and Ray says, ‘Did you see that young jackass in the 200 free, going out too fast?’ And that jackass was my swimmer!”
Titmus laughs as she talks about those days now. “People were really critical. But I was trying to practise it so that then, as I got better, I wouldn’t be afraid to take it to the big girls. And in time, the back half of my race got faster.”
This is an understatement. While writing this story, I watched the replays of her two Tokyo Olympic finals. In the 400m – her first Olympic final – she’s still half a body length behind Ledecky with 100 metres to go. The camera pans to Boxall in the stands. You can see him drop his head, staring at the ground; he may as well have a thought bubble above his head: “This is it. Go now, Arnie, go now.” And down in the pool, she goes. You can see her stretching longer and longer, getting faster and faster. Ledecky fights like a demon; Titmus mows her down. A perfect plan, executed perfectly.
The 200m is the same story. Titmus isn’t fast out – she’s in fifth place at the first turn – but then, in the agonising third 50, when, as she describes it, your lungs are burning and you can’t feel your legs, she begins to move. In the final lap, as Hong Kong’s Siobhan Haughey fades, you can see Titmus call on untapped reserves of power – power built patiently, session after session, year after year, with Boxall. She slices past Haughey in the final 15 metres, winning the gold in an Olympic record time of 1.53:50. As one commentator said, “Gee, she times it well, doesn’t she?”
After Tokyo, Titmus got the word “Fearless” tattooed on her right foot – the foot that’s the last thing she sees when she dives. She wanted a reminder, she says, that she – and Boxall – had been right all along. “If we’d listened to those people,” she says, “I don’t know whether I’d be in this position now.”
Boxall with Titmus after her 200m freestyle gold in Tokyo.Credit: Getty Images
Sunday July 23, 2023, 9.32pm
World Aquatics Championships,
Fukuoka Convention Centre, Japan
370 days until day one, Paris Olympics
Since the Olympics, both Titmus and Boxall have become, in their own ways, celebrities. Titmus is a regular on TV and radio and is all over Instagram, often cheerfully spruiking the Victorian Racing Carnival or the joys of a gluten-free diet, but just as often grinning in jewel-coloured party dresses or raising cocktails amid a bevy of girlfriends. She’s been romantically linked (in the press, at least), with fellow-swimmer Kyle Niesler and Melbourne Storm fullback Ryan Papenhuyzen, but her strongest focus seems to have been on enjoying – like any sensible 20-something – the status and social life that comes with being a double-gold Olympian.
Less enjoyably, she’s also had to navigate the controversy surrounding swimming sponsor Gina Rinehart’s brouhaha with the National Gallery of Australia. Last month, Rinehart called on support from Swimming Queensland to ask for the removal of two portraits of her by Indigenous artist Vincent Namatjira. Swimming Queensland duly sent a letter to the gallery, supported by several elite swimmers. The gallery refused to remove the portraits, and the upshot was that they were seen by millions of Australians who would otherwise have never laid eyes on them.
The Rinehart PR debacle illustrates, perhaps, both the potential for those with money to unduly influence cultural and sporting decisions in this country, and also the reality that for a sport without a professional competition or a regular fan base, sponsorship matters. Titmus, say insiders, is no different from other swimmers – including Kyle Chalmers, Shayna Jack and Cate and Bronte Campbell – in being grateful for Rinehart’s support. “We couldn’t do this without you,” she told the mining magnate at a gala last year, as reported in The Sydney Morning Herald. “It’s very tough to prioritise training, and your financial support means we can do that.”
Dean Boxall, meanwhile, has been doing his usual, unconventional thing. He may have as many as 10 swimmers in Paris, which would be the most of any Australian coach. Among his Olympic hopefuls is 20-year-old Queenslander Mollie O’Callaghan; a standout prospect for the 200m in Paris since the World Championships last year, where she beat Titmus and set a new world record – a record, mind you, that Titmus beat at last week’s Olympic trials.
O’Callaghan, who came second last week by 0.25 seconds, is also trained by Boxall, as were three other swimmers in the trials race. Having direct competitors in the same squad might sound odd, but as Boxall has explained of his top pair: “Mollie knows that Arnie’s the benchmark. And Arnie knows that Mollie is hunting. So it’s simple. I mean [in the 200m at the Olympics], Katie [Ledecky] is going to come back stronger; you’ve got McIntosh, who’s going to be unbelievable; you’ve got [fellow Canadian] Penny [Oleksiak], who’s just a warrior when it comes to the big meets; you’ve got the Chinese … and you’ve got Siobhan [Haughey], she is unbelievable. If you can’t hold your ground in your [home training] environment, how are you going to hold it there?”
In Titmus’ case, he also wants to make sure she doesn’t fall into the trap of being a “Cheshire cat” – sated by her Tokyo victories. So what’s he using to keep her hungry this second time round? “Defending her titles,” he says promptly. If Titmus can win either the 200m or 400m in Paris, she’ll be the only Australian female to win back-to-back golds in an individual event for more than 60 years, since Dawn Fraser. If she wins both, she’ll be the only Australian woman ever to do so.
And though, in the past few years, there have been moments when Titmus’ social, happy-go-lucky nature has made Boxall’s hair stand (even more) on end, he admits it helps her shrug off the stress that comes with Olympic preparation. “One of her greatest attributes is that she’s a self-cleaning rug,” he says. Pressure, criticism, tension, “she can just shake it off and move on. I’ve just got to make sure sometimes she understands that the rug was dirty!”
Certainly, the day I interview her, there seems little sign of either wild socialising or pre-Olympic nerves: she’s home alone making slow-roast pork and feeling excited about having a friend round to dinner. “I know at this point it’s all about not doing anything to derail my training,” she says. Getting sick now, for instance, would be a disaster. “So it’s making decisions like not going to a family lunch; not going out where there are heaps of people; wearing a mask on planes.” She laughs. “Last Saturday night, I was catching up with friends, and I was like, ‘Can we go out for dinner? And can the booking be at five, so I can go home to bed?’”
Occasionally, of course, things do worry her: even self-cleaning rugs have their dreadful days. Last year, she had benign tumours removed from her right ovary, a procedure she publicised against her will after medical staff (in a breach of professionalism she later called out) wanted selfies and autographs from her.
“I think going through that really put into perspective what’s important in life,” she says, “and for me, swimming is definitely a massive part of who I am and a huge part of my life, but it’s not everything. If I walked away from the sport right now, I’ve achieved everything I ever dreamt of. As I always say to myself, ‘I want to be an athlete that turns over every stone; that tries to do everything I possibly can to win.’ And I do that, I think.”
Titmus with training partner Mollie O’Callaghan (middle) and Canadian gun Summer McIntosh (right), all pictured at the 2023 World Championships.Credit: Getty Images
Sometimes, if you’re really talented and really lucky, doing everything you can means doing more than anyone has ever done before. Like smashing the 200m world record when you haven’t even started your taper, as she did against O’Callaghan last week. Or retaking your 400m record from a teenage wunderkind, as she did in July, when she beat Summer McIntosh at the World Championships in Japan. She dominated from the start: ahead by a nose at 75 metres, a body length at 200 metres, and more than two body lengths at the finish. Her time – 3:55:38 – was an emphatic new world record. McIntosh finished fourth, a full 4.5 seconds off the pace. After the race, in an unusual gesture for her, Titmus smashed her fist into the water in victory.
“I remember on the sixth lap, I saw how far ahead I was,” she recalls, grinning. “Typically, you feel horrendous at that point – the piano has fallen on the back, it’s the worst. But sometimes you just get this boost: it’s like this whole new level of energy comes into your body. You cannot replicate it in anything else in the world.” That day, she confesses, “coming home in the last lap I was so far ahead I couldn’t see them”. She laughs. “There’s no better feeling.”
Saturday July 27, 2024, 8.55pm
Paris La Défense Arena, Nanterre, France
0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes, 0 seconds till Women’s 400m freestyle final, day one, Paris Olympics
Who will be on the blocks for the 400m final on the first evening of the Games of the 33rd Olympiad? At this stage, nobody knows. Anything from niggling injury to wild inspiration might influence the final eight. But you’ve got to expect Ledecky, McIntosh and Titmus to be there. And at 8.30pm, the eight finalists – whoever they are – will have to do surely the most terrifying thing for any Olympic swimmer: go into a marshalling room with all the other competitors, then be called onto the pool deck to strip off their national tracksuits, put on their goggles, and get up on the blocks.
This is the moment that makes me leave the TV room during every successive Olympics. I can hardly bear to even think about it. “We speak about that exact moment all the time!” cries Boxall. “Because when you, as a coach, leave them to go into the marshalling area, you can look into their eyes, and you can tell if they’re on, or if something’s a bit shaky. And you know they’re by themselves.” He pauses, trying to think of a way to express the tension, the fear, the hope. “And you just hope that they hold their ground. You hope they’ve got steel inside them.”
There is no doubting, he concludes, what Ariarne Titmus is made of. “She thrives in that environment. That’s where she gets the best out of herself.” And so, once again, the not-the-best swimmer from the non-swimming state will take up the challenge of an Olympic split-second, and face the triumph or disaster it delivers.
To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.