When Ariarne Titmus stretched into the blue for that unfathomably long, lithe, final stroke in the pool in Tokyo, winning the 400-metre freestyle crown from five-time Olympic gold medallist Katie Ledecky, it was hard to know where to look.
Was it at Ariarne, emerging from the pool, composed, barely breathless, to graciously thank her rival. “I wouldn’t be here without her,” she said. “She set the standard.” Or at the antics of her instantly, famously kooky coach, Dean Boxall, in the stands. Or at the live cross on our telly screens to the Gold Coast, where her dad Steve, mum Robyn, little sister Mia and grandparents Sandra and Kevin hugged and kissed, hoarse from cheering, in a rush of adrenaline, laughter and tears.
It took Steve back to the first national championship race Ariarne – or Arnie as her family affectionately calls her – won, at 13, representing her home state of Tasmania.
“I remember when Arnie touched the wall,” he tells The Weekly, “we were going nuts cheering, and these Victorian kids sitting in the stands in front of us turned around and looked at us as if to say, ‘What? A Tasmanian’s not meant to win. This is crazy’.”
There was a collective double-take. “No one knew who I was,” Ariarne admits. Now, at 21, she’d beaten the best in the world. And this time everyone knew her name.
Ariarne first captured global attention at the 2019 World Championships, when she beat Katie (a 15-time world champ) to the 400-metre freestyle gold. Next came the Tokyo victories, usurping the American star again in both the 400 and 200-metre events.
And finally, Ariarne broke Katie’s 400-metre freestyle world record at the Australian championships this May, cementing one of swimming’s great friendly rivalries, and fulfilling a childhood dream – not necessarily to be the best in the world, but to be the best swimmer she could be, which right now is pretty much the same thing.
“No one knew who I was,” Ariarne tells The Weekly, recalling her first ever national championship win.
(Image: Peter Brew-Bevan)Today, Ariarne, Robyn, Steve, Mia and the family pooch, Lucy, have gathered on the back porch of their Brisbane home to chat with The Weekly, and as so often happens when families come together, that starts with some reminiscing. Although her family has put down roots in the sunshine state now, Ariarne is proud of the fact she’s made it all the way to the top of her game from the tiny town of Launceston in northern Tasmania.
“I feel like we were very fortunate to grow up there,” she begins, conjuring images of the big bush block where her parents built a family home on the outskirts of town. “Mia and I had such freedom. When we were small, we used to dress up in our fairy dresses and run off to the bush. We had a driveway up to another block of land above our house. We’d take our pillows, find a little possie and be like princesses in the bush.
“We had ponies out the front. We first started riding horses when I was about four or five. Mia and I shared our first pony – his name was Tiko – and we started to get into riding more and more, and we got more horses and Mum got horses. It’s pretty crazy to think that our front yard was a paddock full of animals.”
They were a sporty family, too. Robyn’s background was in athletics; Steve had played volleyball for Tasmania and had been a club cricketer. Both Ariarne and Mia (who is two-and-a-half years her junior) were keen to sample just about anything from the sporting smorgasbord their parents offered.
In the end though, Mia’s main games were athletics (where she was a regional record holder) and dance, mostly because the training was later in the day. “Ariarne and Dad are the early risers,” she chuckles. “Mum and I, and my Pa, we could sleep for days.”
Ariarne was not only up at sparrows, she seemed at home, from day one, in the pool. “I still remember her first swimming lesson,” Steve chuckles, “at a tiny indoor pool in suburban Launceston. Ariarne kept putting her head under the water. The instructor got really annoyed, and kept saying, ‘Ariarne, stop putting your head under the water, we’ll get to that shortly’.
“I remember it as if it were yesterday because it was one of those light-bulb moments. You knew that Arnie loved being in the water, so her early swimming lessons were quite a joy.”
Ariarne’s parents took notice of her swimming ability from an early age.
(Image: Peter Brew-Bevan)Steve and Robyn built a family home with an indoor pool alongside the kitchen, and a picture window through which they could watch the kids swim while they made dinner.
“Ariarne had this natural breaststroke,” Robyn recalls. “Mia was better with freestyle in those days but Ariarne would glide though the water. I’d look at her and say to Steve, ‘Gee, Ariarne has a good breaststroke for a five-year-old. Who taught her how to do that?’ No one had. It just came naturally.
So, then we started to take a bit of notice of both girls’ swimming. And Steve said to them, ‘Did you know there’s a little swimming squad down the road? Do you want to suss it out?’ And that’s what they did. Both of them got involved in this little squad and they’d go a couple of times a week after school and learn the technique.”
Ariarne has nothing but happy memories of those early squad days, and they are archetypal Aussie childhood memories, too. “We used to do club trips to Hobart for competitions,” she says. “My first main competition was called the medley pentathlon and I was in the eight and under. I got third in that. I got this little trophy and that’s probably my first swimming trophy. I’ve got all my medals from when I was seven up in my room. And I remember, on the bus trip home, we’d stop at the Maccas just outside Hobart and everyone would go in and it’d be the highlight of the day.”
There were weekends when the family would scoot back and forth across the state to get to swimming comps and athletics meets and to ferry the girls and their horses to gymkhanas. And everything we did, Robyn says, “we did it as a family”.
Which was why, when it became evident Ariarne needed to leave Tassie if she was going to take her swimming to the next level, it was a family decision and a whole-family move.
At first, Ariarne was reluctant to go. “I was so content with my friends and my school, and I didn’t want to leave,” she says. But then, at 14, she won three gold medals at the National Championships and was selected for the Junior World Championships team.
Meanwhile, her coach, Peter Gartrell (who Robyn had cunningly recruited to Launceston), decided to move back to the mainland. He agreed to send Ariarne daily session plans and she trained religiously “in a public lane in the local pool, swimming around the old people on my own with no coach,” she adds.
It couldn’t go on forever, and Peter told her parents: “If Ariarne wants to pursue this idea of swimming for Australia, it’s going to be massively difficult to do it from Tasmania.”
There was never a moment’s thought that Ariarne might go to boarding school. “Knowing how close we all are, we didn’t think we would survive that,” Robyn says emphatically. But there were deeper concerns too.
“When things are going well and you’re concentrating on school and training, it’s all fine,” Robyn says. “But when they get sick or things don’t go to plan, you can’t be there for them.”
And while they’ve never had any immediate concerns about Ariarne, both Robyn and Steve were aware of reports of physical and emotional abuse right across the sporting arena.
“As parents,” Robyn says, “you need to do your due diligence … And you need to be that supportive parent and create an environment where, if anything were to happen that they weren’t comfortable with, they’d talk to you. I think that’s really important.”
For all those reasons, the family decided, “if one goes, we all go. We were united on that,” Robyn says. And in 2015, the Titmus clan travelled north on what they were determined would be an epic adventure. It took time, but both parents reignited their careers in Brisbane (Steve in TV news and Robyn in recruitment), the girls started at new schools and Ariarne began training at St Peters Western Swim Club in Indooroopilly, with coach Dean Boxall, setting her heart on the Olympics.
In 2015, the Titmus clan travelled north for Ariarne to devote herself to her swimming.
(Image: Instagram)Ariarne’s life has changed incomparably since that breathtaking swim in Tokyo, and the 21-year-old is taking those changes with a large dose of good-natured commonsense.
“In terms of my swimming life,” she says, “nothing’s changed. My routine is exactly the same. But one big change is how well known I am now … I meet people and sometimes they tell me where they were when they saw me race at the Olympics, and that’s really special, so I love that part of it.”
Not always quite so welcome has been the sudden erosion of her privacy. In the immediate aftermath of the Olympics, Ariarne was captured by paparazzi out and about with then boyfriend and fellow swimmer Kyle Niesler, and the internet went wild. There have been other instances of unwanted attention, too.
“When I got home from the Olympics I knew my life would change but I don’t think I knew how drastically and how soon,” she says.
“Paparazzi followed me to the beach. There were paparazzi outside the house. They could find me wherever I was. It was quite scary when it first started happening, but now I’m used to it.
“People are paying more attention to what happens in my life now. I never thought that me getting COVID would make the national news, but it did. People want to know more about me personally, which I’m fine with. I’m not shy about saying I’m a huge fan of [Canadian singer] Shawn Mendes and I want to know what’s going on in his life. But I can understand now that you do want to keep some things private.”
Ariarne’s dad, Steve, mum, Robyn, little sister, Mia, are the swimmer’s biggest supporters.
(Image: Peter Brew-Bevan)Ariarne has managed to meet another of her idols, the Spanish tennis star Rafael Nadal, whose career she’s followed since she was 14. She was invited into his box at this year’s Australian Open and, like any other fan, says: “It was probably one of the highlights of my life. It was crazy but it was also great because his whole family was there, and they reminded me of my family. He’s just a normal guy who still lives in the same village he grew up in, comes from a normal family and just has a massive passion for his sport.”
As the afternoon draws on, Ariarne wanders into the kitchen, pulls out a chopping board and begins slicing pumpkin. She has a friend coming for dinner. We carry on chatting as she busies herself with pots and pans.
“She’s a fabulous cook,” says her dad. “Ariarne often cooks dinner for us all.”
“She cooks our family Christmas and Easter dinners, and for birthdays,” adds Mia. Family favourites include roast pork with crackling, lamb shanks, pavlova, and a whole host of curries. It all started on sleepovers with her grandmother when Ariarne was three years old.
“I used to sit up in bed with my nanna and watch The Iron Chef,” she explains. “Then we’d cook. That was our thing. We used to make this ciabatta bread and we’d leave it to prove overnight, and I was fascinated by the bubbles in the yeast. That’s where my cooking started.”
I suggest someone needs to alert Celebrity MasterChef and Ariarne is all for it. “I would love to go on MasterChef,” she says, glugging olive oil into a hot pan. “I reckon I could actually do quite well. Though I don’t often follow recipes. I wing it.”
Finding time for a stint on TV between here and the Paris Olympics could, however, be a challenge. As we go to press, Ariarne has had a phenomenal Commonwealth Games, becoming the first woman to win the 200m, 400m and 800m freestyle since fellow Aussie Karen Moras-Stephenson set the pace 52 years ago. Ariarne also set a Commonwealth Games record in the 400m and swum the fastest split of all time in the 4x200m relay, clinching her team’s world record.
After Birmingham, she has a dream European holiday planned with her close friend, Elly, and that will be her last major break before the next Olympics.
Since Katie Ledecky picked up a swag of medals at the World Championships this year (which Ariarne chose not to contest), she’ll have her rival in her sights all the way to Paris 2024.
But what would happen, one wonders, if Ariarne trained her heart out and Katie pipped her at the post? It was always said of Ash Barty that she was as gracious in defeat as in victory. Is it hard to have that sort of equanimity when you lose?
Ariarne gives this some thought before she answers. “It’s different in every situation,” she ventures. “If I went to the Olympics and didn’t win gold in the 400 but I swam the time that I did, I would’ve still been happy because I would have swum the best that I could – it just hadn’t been enough on the day. But if I’d gone to the Olympics and not swum what I thought I was capable of, I think that’s a different scenario. I wouldn’t say I’d be a sore loser but I’d be disappointed in myself … I’d like to think, though, that I’m gracious in defeat.”
Like all of us, Ariarne hopes Paris will be another star season for our Aussie women in the pool and we won’t have to worry about too many defeats.
“It’s great to be part of this new golden era of swimming,” she says.
Ariarne poses with her Gold Medal after winning the 200m Freestyle Final in the Tokyo Olympics.
(Image: Getty)“I feel like I’ve been really lucky and I’m in an era where the team culture is the best it’s ever been. At the Olympics, we were so happy for each other. I remember, on the last day of finals, I got to watch from the stands. Emma [McKeon] won her gold in the 50 free’ and the girls won the medley relay.
“I was just so happy and one of my friends said, ‘This is what it was like when you won’ … Later, I saw Emma and she had done her massive record haul of medals and we just hugged and cried because we were so proud of each other. We’re all just such great teammates and I’m so lucky to be in a sport where that’s the case, and I don’t think it’s like that everywhere.”
It seems the happiness in the team is rubbing off on the rest of Ariarne’s life too. This afternoon, she’s on the tail end of that bout of COVID and still fighting off fatigue, but even so, she rarely stops smiling.
“I just feel quite content in my life,” she confesses, popping a tray of veggies into the oven to roast. “Often my coach has said to me that being content is bad because it means you’re not going to get the best out of yourself in the pool, but at the moment, I’m enjoying life.
“Prior to the Olympics, I was so adamant about doing well that I put everything else on the backburner. Now I’ve got some balance in my life and that’s made me really happy. And I’m enjoying training more than ever too. I’ve achieved what I wanted to achieve and now I’m swimming to see what more I can do. I’m swimming to see how much better I can get, and that gives me real joy.”
You can read this story and many others in the September issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly – on sale now
