'A lot of people feel they have ownership over my body.' Bronte Campbell on the criticism she's heard for decades.

Imagine going on a sabbatical from your job, a job you’ve had for 10 years, a career you’ve been aspiring to for over 20 years. Safe to say you’re going to feel a little unmoored, a little brave stepping out into something new, a little bit excited about a change of pace.

Now imagine telling people about it and their reaction is not to sympathise or celebrate or commiserate. Instead, their response is to slowly look you up and down and say:

"It doesn’t look like you’ve put on much weight, yet."

Watch: Cate and Bronte Campbell talk about their relationship. Post continues atfer video.

After the Tokyo Olympics, I took an extended break from professional swimming during which time I got this comment a lot. Not a little bit, a lot.

It’s been 18 months and I’m still not sure, how are you supposed to respond to this?

So far my go-to response is: I smile, fake laugh and change the topic. 

It’s easier to pretend that you haven’t noticed anything weird in the question. There are always some awkward encounters when you’re a professional athlete. Usually, it’s strangers asking me about my sister, asking me if I’ll ever be better than her (my older sister and I compete in the same events). I know that sometimes the familiarity we feel for our sports people, makes us feel we own some of their narrative and can ask very personal questions. Perhaps it was partially this familiarity that fed these weight questions, I don’t think many of us would think twice about telling a friend they looked fit after they’d finished training for a triathlon.

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A post shared by Bronte Campbell (@bronte_campbell)

But to me these weight questions, they felt different. 

What surprised me was the audacity it takes to comment on a complete stranger’s weight. These were not people I knew well – they were usually people I ran into on the street or was introduced to at events. I can’t imagine going up to a stranger and commenting on their body shape, but not one of these people seemed to think it was a strange thing to say.  

It's not the first time I’ve fielded comments about my body. Over the years I’ve become fairly accustomed to (usually older men) looking me up and down and telling me ‘you look fit’ as I get out of the pool, which is a compliment I’d rather they kept to themselves.

Sometimes women say a version of this too, usually with a hint of wistfulness, something like ‘I wish my legs looked like that’ and while less threatening, I still find this uncomfortable. It’s as if my body is existing to torment them about their own bodies.

Maybe my response should be: "Thanks, I actually don’t have much say in how my legs look, it’s mainly down to genetics and the 30+ hours of training I do every week so I can complete my job."

But I don’t use this reply. I politely smile, fake laugh and walk away.

An instance that particularly stands out came in 2016 while I was swimming at the Valley Pool in Brisbane. I’d just got back from the Olympics and was doing some laps on my own to maintain fitness before our formal training started again. As I was finishing up the session a man in the next lane stopped me. 

He told me he’d been watching me swim, and he thought I had a nice stroke and a neat technique. 

"Thank you," I replied, "I’ve been working on it a long time."

"But I think it could be better! I’ve just watched the Olympics, and I noticed that the swimmers really attacked the front of their stroke, that’s where all the power comes from. You need to be splashier at the front of your stroke."

Despite the irony of mansplaining to an Olympic swimmer about how Olympic swimmers should swim, I thought this was very funny; only trumped by how utterly wrong his advice was. For those wanting to improve their swimming, please don’t try ‘be splashier’, it is not a good strategy. 

The bit that stuck with me was after I thanked him for his advice and got out of the pool.

And that’s when he looked me up and down and said, "Well, at least you look fit". As if my body shape was somehow a consolation prize for not being quite as good and splashy as those Olympic swimmers. 

And do you know how I responded? I smiled and fake laughed and walked away. 

My inability to find a response then has not improved with age. And while I came across these comments sporadically through my career, the volume significantly increased when people knew I wasn’t training anymore. As if now I’d stopped swimming and was giving my body space to settle into its ‘natural’ shape, this gave everyone permission to comment on the expected change.

Not everyone phrased it as bluntly as "you haven’t put on weight yet", lots of people would go for the compliment of "you still look fit though". I can’t pinpoint the time when these two versions began to sound the same to me, but they started to make me feel equally uncomfortable. 

But still, my response was to smile, fake laugh and change the topic. 

And perhaps you’re reading this thinking, "what is the big deal, someone is saying you look good?" or "this chick complaining about compliments has absolutely no clue". I’m open to both critiques; complaining about compliments does sound insane.

I think the thing that unnerved me about these experiences is that I did not feel like my body was mine. 

My body has always been a machine, how it looks is a by-product of the strength and power I build into it to enable me to do my job. What I put in it, how often I exercise it, what recovery techniques I use on it have all been to ensure I can swim from one end of a swimming pool to the other at maximum speed. It has never been about shape, or weight, or aesthetic and I had a coach who never made it about any of those things. I honed my body to complete a skill and I’ve never thought too much about it.

In swimming there is absolutely nowhere to hide. English diver Tom Daley summed it up well: "Not everyone can say they wear less clothing to work than they do to bed." And I’d be lying if I said the visibility isn’t challenging, that there isn’t that little voice in your head saying you should look a different way, comparing your body to everyone else’s on the pool deck. 

What feels different now was that I realised that it wasn’t just a voice in my head comparing my body to others, everyone else was doing it too. Millions of people watch the Olympics, I never considered that they were not just looking at my feats in the pool.

I realised that a lot of people feel they have ownership over my body, feel comfortable enough to say to me, as a stranger, that they hadn’t noticed a change in my weight yet. My favourite part of this comment is the implied insult, that I would put on weight if I was given enough time. Because that’s what retired female athletes do, obviously. 

We are at a time when sports are looking very hard at how they measure and talk about body composition. As they should, there should be an emphasis on high performance, not aesthetic. It’s good that sports understand and take responsibility for the role they play in the conversation. 

But we Australia, the big broad collective ‘we’ of society, also need to think about it. These comments didn’t come from inside my sport, they came from normal people on the street. They came from a culture of thinking that a woman’s body is open for conversation. 

Jelena Dokic’s experience at the Australian Open is another public example of this culture. In her case it was straight up body shaming and trolling through social media. The difference in our experience is that mine was happening face to face, and no person thought it was a mean or unusual thing to say.

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A post shared by JELENA DOKIC 🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺 (@dokic_jelena)

Jelena was direct and brave in her response, but you could see the emotional charge. I am still trying to find a response that balances politeness while not accepting the comment. Because unlike Jelena’s experience, I don’t think the people I’ve met who comment on my weight, are malicious or aware of the discomfort they’re causing. However, it no longer feels acceptable to smile and walk away, and it feels equally impossible and exhausting to educate every person who comments. 

My body did change a lot in those 18 months, of course it did – an Olympic ready body is not a natural state. 

Am I always to be judged against the standards of an Olympic swimmer? That is an unrealistic bar to clear. And perhaps these comments hit home because this was the first time my body was significantly changing; it was the first time since I was seven years old that I’d allowed myself a proper break. Without the rigours of elite training, I looked different, but also felt the healthiest my body has been in a long time. 

So I can rejoice and lament the fact that my body will change when I stop swimming, but regardless of what happens when I hang up the swimmers for good, my body is none of your business.

Listen to Mamamia's Here If You Need where Olympic swimmer Cate Campbell & sports journalist Hayley Willis breaks down the sports news every week.

Feature Image: Instagram @bronte_campbell.