Commonwealth Games silver brings peace to Erin

The phrase “every cloud has a silver lining” becomes clear as daylight when it comes to champion swimmer Erin Gallagher.

This reporter first interviewed Gallagher and Roland Schoeman at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. Aged 15, the former was Team SA’s youngest competitor, the latter the oldest swimmer at 34.

Eight years later Gallagher grabbed her first Commies medal at the recent Games in Birmingham when she sealed silver in the 50m butterfly.

The wait for silver was worth its weight in gold for the now 23-year-old.

Along the way to that medal were the usual swimming-related injuries, a big  sinus operation, a lengthy bout of Covid and a few more unusual things, like dislocating her knee at a matric dance party.

But Erin’s real challenge wasn’t actually in the room, it was in her head — heavy and grey.

“Swimming had become my total identity. My very existence revolved around swimming. If I didn’t swim well, I felt worthless in all other aspects of my life,” she revealed this week.

“I’d been training with [SA head coach] Graham Hill for 10 years and had swum myself into an absolute rut ... I must stress, not through any fault of his.

“He had helped me tick so many boxes in my life, but I came to realise that I was entirely stuck in a routine that consisted of just swimming and I needed something more. Although I only figured out later that I needed to start engaging my brain again and have something new and exciting to focus on.”

It was actually in Glasgow that Hill had predicted Gallagher could evolve into the same force as his other star attraction at the time, Chad le Clos.

So the Durbanite packed her bags and headed north to Tukkies to tackle a BSc in geography and environmental science and revive her swimming career with Rocco Meiring. 

Meiring coaches Olympic and Commonwealth gold medallist Tatjana Schoenmaker and it is he who has applied the finishing shine to the diamond that Hill had unearthed in KwaZulu-Natal so many years earlier.

“The first thing Rocco asked me to do was go and see Prof Ben Steyn, a psychologist here at Tuks. The prof didn’t exactly diagnose depression but soon established that for me swimming was a crutch and that before I could start again I had to kind of grieve the fact that I hadn’t achieved my goals at the Tokyo Olympics last year.”

In fact, going into the Olympics, Gallagher had distinct feelings of not being at all worthy of her spot because she hadn’t qualified in the initial time-bracket before the Games were pushed back because of Covid.

“And that had come off the back of a 2019 when my performances had been noticed by FINA [international federation for water sport] and I’d been expected to do well at the world championships in Korea, but I didn’t achieve my goals.”

It sounds crazy for a sportsperson to say they didn’t want to go to the Olympics, but that was Gallagher’s lot. “I truly wasn’t excited, just wasn’t comfortable in my own skin ... it had also taken me about eight months to recover from Covid in 2020.

“The period of 2019-21 was a dangerous period and at some stage I felt like I was literally the definition of insanity, constantly doing the same thing and expecting a different result.”

Prof Steyn told Gallagher that her imaginary horizon was purely swimming-orientated. “He’s really helped me get an outside perspective now and I have my studies, my friends, my family to fall back on if my swimming isn’t going well.”

But it was by no means a quick-fix for Gallagher and there were still dashes of doubtfulness. 

“Two days before I won my silver I was lying in bed late at night, thinking ‘I’m done with swimming, my journey is at an end’. I mean, I’d made baby steps at Commies but I’m the type of person that wants giant steps so I’m slowly learning to actually be proud of baby steps.”

And, thankfully for Gallagher, she found that finally winning that medal has had the opposite effect to what she had expected. “It’s weird because I feel the pressure has actually fallen away now. It was an incredible feeling to win the medal but five minutes later I was back to being the normal Erin.”

What she took out of these Games was that some days memories are more important than medals. “Being part of Team SA and with all the support from swimming, etc, was the overriding sensation I brought back from Birmingham.”

The Tuks student is also quick to point out that emotional and cerebral struggles are much less of a stigma these days and she ropes fellow Games medallist and long-time “roomie” Kaylene Corbett into the discussion.

“Back in the day no-one spoke about the mental aspect of sporting life, but these days we can see it’s happening everywhere, not just swimming. Kaylene has been an immense help since I opened up to her.

“The things that make her sad don’t necessarily make me sad, but each of us are very much there for the other, which just adds to my firm foundation of support and we’ve built up a beautiful friendship.”

Not that the medal means her journey is now complete. “I definitely want another crack at the Olympics [Paris 2024) and if I make Commies [Victoria, Australia, 2026] they’d be my fourth and I don’t think another SA female swimmer has done that yet ... so that would be cool.”

She’s also learnt to cool down when it comes to her sheer impulsiveness and impish nature. “For sure, that comes from my dad’s genes. Six weeks before Commies I was at a birthday party and leapt from high up a tree swing and hurt my knee badly, a crazy thing to do in hindsight.

“He’s tried to get me to calm down a bit ... and he’s right,” she laughs.

Back in Glasgow eight years ago, Schoeman’s words to the teenager were: “Soak it all in, learn from it all. Don’t take things for granted but just watch everything around you and don’t be overawed. Remember you’ve qualified for the right to be here, just like everyone else has.”

Quick research shows that Erin means peace in Greek and eight years later that cloud has passed over Gallagher’s head. She’s earned that right to shine and no-one can deny her her place of peace in the sun.