How do you reach such great heights when you’re scared of heights? Editor at Large Louise Evans meets the diver who can bluff her way to an Olympic medal.
Just before Maddison Keeney executes her favourite dive – forward three-and-a-half somersaults, she does some mind manipulation.
She pretends she’s doing an “easy” one-and-a-half somersault dive. The mental gymnastics help her relax. Tense body, strained dive. Relaxed body, fluid dive. So she’s plays a game of bluff. It’s subtle and almost subconscious.
Being strong and athletic, Keeney gets good take-off from the board, which means more time in the air and a higher dive that facilitates greater accuracy and flow.
Then just before she starts she says to herself “front three-and-a-half”. Then comes the magic.
“Visually everything is a blur,” the 27-year-old BHP technology technician said. “Everything is spinning around but I can see where I am and what I’m doing and how many somersaults I’ve done.
“I don’t need to count the somersaults. I know just by feeling. It feels pretty exciting. If it goes well there’s a sense of relief and excitement and I’m thinking ‘what scores I’ll get’. If it hasn’t, you want to stay under the water for as long as you can.”
Keeney is Diving Australia’s three-metre master. Over the last eight years she’s won medals of every hue at world championships and Olympic and Commonwealth Games in both the three-metre springboard and three-metre synchro with partner Anabelle Smith.
Maddison Keeney – Three-metre twister
Result | Year | Venue | Competition | Event |
---|---|---|---|---|
Silver | 2024 | Doha | World Championships | 3m Synchro with Anabelle Smith |
Silver | 2023 | Fukuoka | World Championships | 3m Mixed Synchro |
Bronze | 2022 | Budapest | World Championships | 3m Synchro with Anabelle Smith |
Gold | 2022 | Birmingham | Commonwealth Games | 3m Springboard |
Gold | 2022 | Birmingham | Commonwealth Games | 3m Synchro with Anabelle Smith |
Bronze | 2019 | Gwanju | World Championships | 3m Springboard |
Silver | 2018 | Gold Coast | Commonwealth Games | 3m Springboard |
Bronze | 2016 | Rio | Olympics | 3m Synchro with Anabelle Smith |
Not bad for a diver who admits she’s scared of heights. She loves watching the men’s 10m platform but won’t go anywhere near the tower.
Keeney fell into the sport when her mum Lorraine signed her up for after-school sport and put her 10-year-old “scrawny kid” down for diving.
“I liked the technical side of it,” Keeney said. “Diving never came easily to me and I love the challenge.
“Every day you can get just a little bit better and the diving community is great. I have so many friends in Australia and internationally. It’s not a huge sport so everyone knows each other. It’s a big family.”
To further her career Keeney moved from Perth, where her family was based, to the Brisbane high-performance diving centre aged just 17. “I wanted to take the next step so I had to move on my own. It was a bit scary.”
The Queensland Academy of Sport-supported diver likes to exercise her mind too, so having finished school in Perth at Churchlands Senior High in 2013 she continued her academic career in Brisbane. She enrolled at Queensland University, completed a four-year Bachelor of Science degree with majors in physics and computational science and landed a job with BHP in fleet management.
In Brisbane she also began training with Anabelle Smith who became her synchro diving sister with whom she’s won four championship medals including 2016 Rio Olympic bronze.
“She’s an amazing person inside and out,” Keeney said. “She is so easy to get along with. I’m so lucky she’s my partner and a really great friend. She works hard as an athlete in and out of the pool.
“We started off both training in Brisbane for two years so we have a good foundation from 2014. When we come together for a competition, it’s second nature.”
Keeney has also enjoyed the best of times and the worst of times with Smith – both extremes colliding spectacularly at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.
Smith, now 31, and Keeney were in gold medal position going into the last dive in the three-metre synchro when a miniscule mistake sensationally sunk their campaign.
“We were doing a dive with two twists and I was too far off the board. I got lost. I did one twist and opened out and wiped out. It was really embarrassing. I ruined it for Anabelle. It was also really scary doing a twisting dive and you don’t know where you are in the air.”
They got no points and finished last, making way for fellow Australian team of Esther Qin and Georgia Sheehan to win gold.
But wait there’s more.
“My individual competition was the next day. I had to go back and do the same dive. I didn’t know what I was doing. Had I forgotten how to twist? It was scary. Diving becomes so second nature. When all of a sudden something goes wrong, you’re wondering if you can trust yourself to do it again.
“I was able to come back from a devastating synchro event and have a really good individual competition.” Keeney won the silver medal but more importantly – got her mojo back.
Now she’s heading to another Olympics in Paris, having qualified with Smith for the synchro and needing to secure her individual 3m springboard berth at the Adelaide June 5-9 selection trials.
As ever, Keeney’s biggest competition in Paris will most likely be the Chinese, but she’s sanguine about the threat they pose. With 10-year’s international competition experience behind her she feels for her rivals, rather than fears them.
“The Chinese divers get poached at a very young age and put into a system away from their families and their whole lives revolve around a sport.
“I went to uni, I have a job and I am free to do what I want.They are very successful but at the cost of a lot of freedoms.”
The vagaries of the Paris schedule means Keeney faces a 10-day gap between the synchro and her individual event. She’ll spend the down time at the Australian divers training base in Southend, the English coastal city in Essex an hour’s drive east of London. It’ll be the team’s holding camp before and during the Games, a place to rest, recover and reset.
She’s happy she’s starting this Olympic campaign with the synchro because “Belle” will have her back. “I get to share it, so it’s a little less stressful. You have someone there to help balance you out. You are not alone.
“The individual is me versus the world. In the springboard, it is hard to maintain control, so many things can go wrong. The board has a mind of its own sometimes. You can flip off and get a bad bounce. It’s dynamic.”
And if the nerves hit, she can do some mental gymnastics and play her game of bluff. No big deal. Just an easy dive. And then – triple-somersault magic.
Louise Evans is an award-winning journalist who has worked around Australia and the world as a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and media executive for media platforms including The Sydney Morning Herald (eight years), The Australian (11 years) and Australian Associated Press (six years in London, Beijing and Sydney).
A women sports’ pioneer, Louise was the first female sports journalist employed by The Sydney Morning Herald and the first female sports editor at The Australian. Louise went on to work at six Olympic Games, six Commonwealth Games and numerous world sporting championships and grand slam tennis events.
Louise is the Founding Editor of AAP FactCheck, the Creator of #WISPAA – Women in Sport Photo Action Awards and national touring Exhibition and the author and producer of the Passage to Pusan book, documentary and exhibition.
In 2019 she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal (OAM) Queen’s Honour for services to the media and sport and named an Australian Financial Review Top 100 Woman of Influence for services to the arts, culture and sport.
In 2020 she won a NSW Volunteer of the Year Award plus the NSW Government Community Service Award for her women-in-sport advocacy work.
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