Some athletes seek to unleash the inner beast or find the eye of the tiger but diver Melissa Wu will know she’s in the zone at the Commonwealth Games in Scotland if she’s successfully channelled the spirit of her 13-year-old self.
Wu, now 22, will stand on the diving platform wiser for her Olympic and world championships campaigns. However, in a sport fuelled by pressure and often hindered by injuries she wanted to search within and “find” that carefree kid who treated the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games as one great adventure and, in the process, claimed a silver medal and captured the hearts of Australians.
“I have had a lot of different experiences in diving – I’ve built a career on past experiences - but it was really nice to be able to dive back then as a kid; nice and naive, not really knowing what to expect,” said Wu, one of the team’s veterans and a proven champion.
“It’s great, tremendous, to be able to draw on things like that when [competing] becomes stressful. You can tend to over-think things at times but it’s an advantage to have the ability to remember how simple it was [in 2006] and to reflect on that time; a time when you didn’t care, when you answered ‘great’ whenever people asked ‘How’s it going today?’ It was so simple and how it really should be ... I think as you get older layers cover that.”
Wu is back in the national colours after she took a break last year to take stock.
While Australians had watched her bloom from the cute child prodigy who did well at Melbourne to the warrior who won the silver medal at the Beijing Olympics and, two years later, gold at the Delhi Commonwealth Games, she needed time out to discover "normality".
“I kept training,” said Wu, who also studies commerce at university. “I just didn’t do the hard dives required in competition. I focused on university, I had more of a social life and had some fun.
"I didn’t finish school so I lost some social skills. Even though I went to university it was as a part-time student and that meant the friends I made came and went because they overtook me. I was going snail-slow. Last year allowed me time to build friendships the way most normal people do. It was great to be able to work on that because it helps build self confidence which is what I’ve been building.”
Wu is in a discipline which requires bucket-loads of self esteem, courage and confidence and while she appears in control while perched 10 high metres above the pool’s surface, she admitted there had been times when hurricanes of doubt swirled inside her head.
“It’s a scary sport and most of the fear comes when you’re doing the dives,” she said. “There’s the actual fear you might hurt yourself but, in time, it becomes the fear of the doubts, the fear of not performing in competition which is hard to deal with. We do a lot of training with our dives, to deal with the fear [of] doing them.”
Wu spent time this year galvanising her mental reserves, and focussing her live-wire energy in sessions with John Novak, who, apart from being the Head of Mind Management for the NRL’s Canterbury Bulldogs also developed a program called the Boomerang Effect that was adopted by a number of elite athletes, including Australia’s superfish, James Magnussen.
The Boomerang Effect is a process which demands positive thoughts and words; it states the energy you put out is returned; it also develops a realisation of the decisions that either help or hinder you and, in time, it becomes a lifestyle. Wu, whose cover of her journal proclaims: "You’re strange . . . I like it", said the sessions provided a clarity.
“That’s why I’ve worked with John a lot,” she said. “Working more on the mental side, dealing with fears, going for it, not allowing for ‘it’ to hold you back.
"When I compete my body knows what to do but things are so different in competition. There’s adrenaline and there is those thoughts and things that can creep in. Sometimes you go into autopilot but there’s competitions where I have to work on being positive and calm – being calm is crucial because you only have seconds [to complete each dive]. It’s a process. You can’t get too far ahead of yourself. I find realising that tends to work for me.”
According to Novak, Wu has the brand of inner toughness found among UFC fighters and footballer gladiators.
“She is, given what Melissa has done, among the elite that I’ve worked with," Novak said.
“The pressure Melissa is under to produce in five seconds is massively tough. The fact she can come out of a situation and say ‘I can do this again’ says a lot for her mental toughness. You can’t do a sport like diving without having a tough constitution. It’s mental application at its very best."
Despite her talk of the doubts she’s fought, that the water is surprisingly “hard” upon impact, and that injuries were becoming harder to control as she gets older, Wu retains a commitment and incredible desire to being the best she can possibly be.
Her passion for that split-second it takes to plunge from the great height, through the great nothingness and deep into the water is obvious.
“I have the fire in my belly,” she said before her third Commonwealth Games campaign. “I’ve had a pretty good year, I‘ve worked not only on my diving results but my mind frame as well. I want to be able to repeat that process I’ve worked on this year and to be happy with how I dive. Regardless of what happens, if I can put the pieces I’ve worked on and nail five good dives in every round I’ll be happy.”
And if that 13-year-old version of herself finds it to the top of the 10-metre platform, when everything is on the line Wu will be ecstatic.
