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Probably the one thing that I’m really happy, I made myself extremely busy post-sport. There
were a few things I identified that I really wanted to do and I was always conscious of
those and tried to set those up as best as I could throughout my career. But being just
really busy, just not even giving yourself time to think about the ‘what ifs’ with
sport. I mean, for me, I walked away from an Olympic games where I was half a second
away from winning a third gold medal in a row, which meant a lot to me. But I haven’t
really had time to look back on that and be depressed about it or think, “What if? I
wish I saw him out there a few hundred metres earlier rather than at the end of the race.”
Those sort of things I’ve thought about briefly, but I haven’t really let them get
me down or worry me. So I guess one of the things that has really stood out for me is
that I’ve just made myself so busy and really occupied my time with the other ambitions
that I had outside of sport, that I haven’t thought about some of the failures or personal
failures to me or things that I didn’t achieve. And I think that’s why a lot of people can
come out of retirement in sport, because they can sit around and think about those things
and think, “I really want to come back and rectify those situations.” So I think if
you have something that’s permanent and full-time that you can really get stuck into
that you’re passionate about. And so that’s probably been the biggest thing that I’ve
found that’s been good for me post-sport.
I’ve always been conscious of it from day one, because as an athlete, you never know
when you can break a leg, get a shoulder injury and be forced into retirement. It’s not
necessarily up to you a lot of the time. For most athletes, it’s probably not. It’s
probably wear and tear on the body that actually forces you out of sport earlier than you probably
saw yourself. For me, as soon as I left high school, I made sure I was in university. I
made sure I could chip away at my degree there and educate myself in the meantime, and know
that any sort of money that I was making I was investing. I wasn’t necessarily going
out and spending it. I was having a lifestyle, but I was keeping everything in check and
balance to make sure that I was conscious of that at any stage, that tomorrow, something
could really go wrong. There could be a bad performance and your financial support mightn’t
be there. So I was always conscious of that throughout my career, but I was pretty fortunate
that I got to go out on my own terms. Probably two years before 2008, I was thinking, “Yeah,
I most likely will retire after this Olympic games. I might go another year or two onwards.
Most definitely won’t go up to the age of 32 to London.” And so I was trying to put
things in place then that could allow me to step into, fortunately I always wanted to
go into banking, so I fortunately got to go into that, and TV presenting. Neither of those
were absolutely concrete, but I was just making the awareness and putting things in place
where I could have the opportunities to perhaps pursue those.
Well, I guess I was probably just on holiday, and then I realised, “Yep, that was it.”
Straight after the Olympics, within those first few days, I just wanted to compete to
London more than anything because I missed my desired result by such a small margin.
And then I think you have to wait until the dust settles and then reflect on your whole
career. And once I got an opportunity to do that, I did have those opportunities come
to me in terms of the presenting on telly and an opportunity within the world of finance.
And I thought these passions are actually starting to overgrow the passion of what I
wanted to achieve in swimming. I was always passionate about sport. I still am. But those
passions outgrew that. And I thought, “Well, I’ve got a couple of great opportunities
there. I feel like I’ve done the best I could in the sport,” so it was time to move
on. So yeah, it was probably only a month or two after the Olympics where I really knew.
Oh once the dust had settled, it was very easy. I knew what I wanted to do and what
path I wanted to take. But yeah, once I actually got to the point of actually shutting that
book, it was easier to put it down and to move on to the next one.
There’s nothing I regret, but there are a few things I would most certainly do differently.
I’d be a bit more conscious of my health when I was training and probably not pushed
myself as much. My shoulder injury, I probably would have given that a little bit more time
before I went to surgery. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I wish I was more aware of the guy
out in lane seven in my final race. So there are all these sorts of things you’d do differently.
But as a whole, in general terms, not at all. I felt like I did the absolute best I could
and I committed myself 100% to my sport, into my preparation and into my execution of competition.
So as a whole, no.
I think just the raw ingredients of success. I think those fundamental things I will certainly
take. Working together as a team, the leadership qualities I had in being captain of my team,
and probably the personal leadership qualities I had in achieving my own goals. All those
sorts of raw ingredients that I guess that gave me the ability to have success within
my sport, or set me up to have success in my sport. And goal setting is one of those
very basic ones that I will just take into my business career outside of sport, and use
those tools to be able to foresee or … I guess get to the point where I achieve the
ambitions that I have outside of those things and within my professional career now. And
there are pages of those that are often, they’re quite easy to articulate, but they’re terms
that are thrown around all the time. But to actually put into practice and have a background
of constantly putting those into to practise every day is something that those tools are
going to be fantastic moving forward.