Olympic Games Paris 2024: Australian gymnast Shaun Swadling’s journey

Olympic Games Paris 2024: Australian gymnast Shaun Swadling’s journey
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Sucking in deep breaths with a scared look and a reflective gaze, Shaun Swadling recalls a very public nervous breakdown, a suicide attempt and running away to become a circus performer on a cruise ship.

Five years after the Australian gymnast’s dream of becoming an Olympian at the Tokyo Games ended in mental ruins, the trampoline athlete is back in the sport and eyeing Paris.

But on the cusp of a Paris 2024 qualifying tournament in Germany, taking place in the city of Cottbus on the weekend, he’s at peace with the prospect of again failing to reach the Olympics.

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He’s no longer chasing his ambition in the way that nearly led to tragedy in 2019, just over a year out from when the Tokyo Games were originally scheduled to take place, and he marvels at how 10 months on the cruise ship, getting married and welcoming his first child changed his life.

“I think the time away from the sport for me made me realise, ‘Yeah, the Olympics are cool, but your limelight is over in two weeks’, and I had attached too much of my self-worth to this one event,” Swadling tells Wide World of Sports.

“I had it in my head that if I wasn’t an Olympian I was a failure, which was the completely wrong mindset.”

Swadling was a reserve athlete for the London 2012 and Rio 2016 Olympics.

Desperate to become an Olympian on his third attempt, he attacked his Tokyo Games dream with a self-destroying obsession.

In Melbourne in May 2019, moments after stepping off the team bus at Gymnastics Australia’s national championships, he broke.

“I had my headphones on, got off the bus with the team, walking into the venue … and I just froze and completely broke. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t talk. I just stood there crying … I was standing there bawling my eyes out,” says the 31-year-old from Newcastle.

“I didn’t know at the moment that it was a nervous breakdown; I didn’t have that language and I didn’t have the skillset to deal with it. My whole family was there and going, ‘Holy shit. What’s going on, Shaun?’, and I’m like, ‘I don’t know’.

“My team made the call and I didn’t even make it in the doors that night. They took me back to the hotel and that was the start of the journey. It was like, ‘The person’s broken. The athlete’s not even on the radar at the moment. We need to get the person fixed’.”

Swadling tried to end his life within a couple of weeks of suffering the nervous breakdown.

A few months later, he was training to become an acrobat on Royal Caribbean’s Spectrum of the Seas.

“I just built up the pressure of the Games too much for myself and before we even got to the Olympic trials I was done. I was cooked mentally … The whole idea of the Olympics and the sport had just become too much for me,” Swadling says.

“My whole identity had been based off the Olympics and my life had got a bit out of balance.

“It actually took my coach, Brett Austine, to say to me, ‘You’re done, you’re not getting picked for the Games, we need to get you better as a person’, which was a hard pill to swallow at the time.

“I thought at the time I was doing everything right. My strength and conditioning was on point, I was seeing the sports psych, I was counting calories, I was watching film from every training session, I was studying scores from other competitors around the world.

“It was completely back-firing … and that mental load that I had put on myself had become too much … I was done.”

Swadling initially spent six weeks with Royal Caribbean in Miami, learning the acrobatics required to be a circus performer on a cruise ship.

He then spent about eight months touring around Asia, wowing the masses as he clung to silks, leapt, flipped and twirled.

“It took some weight off me and let me live my early 20s that I had missed because of sport,” he says.

“There was a bit of fun, a bit of partying, a bit of lifestyle happening … It definitely played a huge role in my healing and being ready to come back, open up my relationship with my wife and start a family.”

He was forced to return to Australia when the pandemic struck.

It wasn’t his plan to return to gymnastics, but his coach secretly signed him up for a local competition. Refreshed by life at sea as an acrobat, he fronted up and got it done.

A little further down the track, his mojo was back and his sights set on Paris.

Last year was magical. He and a woman he met after returning from sea, Laura, eloped and had their first child, their beloved girl Andi.

Swadling earns his dough as a primary school teacher in Newcastle.

“I’m married, I have a beautiful six-month-old baby and my career as a school teacher is going up and up,” he says.

“So for me trampolining is no longer priority number one, which is a much healthier approach for me. My family obviously comes first, my career comes second and trampolining, at best, is priority three or four.

“I’ve still got the potential to qualify for the Games, but it’s not the be-all and end-all.”

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