Hill on happiness: ‘Swimming became a bad word in our household for a while’
Danielle Hill celebrates at the Swim Ireland Irish Open Swimming Championships & Olympic Trials. Pic: Tom Maher, Inpho
Thursday, 3pm. Always Thursday, always 3pm. For weeks and weeks. For months and months.
Thursday at 3pm is when Danielle Hill would fire open the laptop at home in Newtownabbey, just north of Belfast, and peel back the layers.
Thursday at 3pm is when the 24-year-old opened up and broke down. Thursday at 3pm is when this country’s fastest ever female swimmer realised that her crippling unhappiness was very real, and not something she’d concocted in her head.
Thursday at 3pm is when she felt understood and felt a slow return to her old lost self.
Contacted last week to organise this chat, we asked what time would best suit to take our call.
Thursday, 3pm.
Occupying this slot for much of the past nine months has been Jessie Barr. At the London Olympics, Barr ran the third leg of the women’s 4x400m relay. These days, she is a sport and performance psychologist at the Sport Ireland Institute.
The pair’s relationship, from their first get-to-know-you-session last September, had been exclusive to Zoom. They had never met in person until running into one another at the Olympic trials in the National Aquatic Centre the week before last. They ran into one another in between Danielle’s pair of Paris-sealing swims.
“I don't smile very often, and I also don't give out hugs very easily. Jessie got both that day. We saw that we had done it,” she begins.
“By the end of that week in Dublin, and seeing the 50m freestyle time I posted, I was so happy and knew then that old Danielle was slowly reappearing.”
The old Danielle got lost in the water post-Tokyo. She had spent the guts of eight years building towards her debut Games. Hitting the qualification mark for the 100m backstroke with her final attempt and then walking out onto the pool deck in Japan little over a month later were unparalleled highs.
Reintegration into post-Olympic life left her feeling “meh”. A lull and a greyness took hold that could not be shook. There was little joy in returning to the windowless 25-metre tank at Belfast Royal Academy.
What followed was “two bad years of results”. And the more dissatisfied she grew with her times, the more pressure she smothered herself in to turn them around.
In missing out by one place on a final lane in her favoured 100m backstroke at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, Hill’s swim was over a second and a half slower than what she’d posted 13 months earlier to reach the five-ring circus. In a two-length discipline, the difference is a small pond of water.
“I went to those Commonwealth Games and massively underperformed. Then, in 2023, got the opportunity to swim at a World Championships. There as well, I underperformed on the biggest stage.”
Those World Championships at Fukuoka last July threatened to break her. A dam burst and she was powerless to escape the sadness and feeling of isolation that flooded through her.
She competed in four individual events. In only one did she make a semi-final. But at the end of the Wednesday where she progressed from the 50m backstroke heats and swam in a World semi-final, she cried herself to sleep.
Reliving that harrowingly lonely night, she begins to cry again.
“It makes me emotional even talking about it now because I have never felt so alone in my whole life, even though I was walking away from a World Championship as a semi-finalist. The moment when I should have been feeling one of my happiest and proudest, I was so alone and so unhappy with myself and what was going on around me.”
Hill believed herself to be in the right headspace on the lead into those World Championships. She wouldn’t have boarded the plane otherwise. But it was only when removed from her support structure many time zones from Newtownabbey did she realise that mentally, she was not okay.
“We went on holding camp to Thailand for two weeks before those Championships, and within three or four days, I wanted to be home. I didn't want to be there anymore, and I thought, something in myself is not right. The team dynamic, not necessarily that it wasn't right or that it was bad, but I wasn't enjoying it.
“At team Larne we have created such a massive family team. I thrive on that kind of stuff, there is not one person bigger than the team. You go away to these national squad things, and maybe that is the case because some people don't work in an environment where there is a team, and that is totally fine. Not very often do we get to go away and work as a team, and so it can be hard.
“There was so much pressure from myself to perform that I was just struggling in myself. I felt like there was nobody there I could talk to. I had no outlet. On top of that then I performed absolutely horrendously, to the point where I almost embarrassed myself.
“After two years of really bad performances, mentally I wasn't in the right position. I was ready to walk away from the sport.”
Throughout the holding camp, Danielle Facetimed her mom, Caroline, as much as the eight-hour time difference would allow. During Worlds itself, her parents were holidaying in Albufeira, and so not wanting to further unload on them, she reached out to her sister, Louise. The text from one sibling to another read: I am so done.
“She rang me immediately,” Danielle recalls, her voice quivering once more.
“My mum and dad were on holiday, my sister was just about to go on holiday. I didn't want to burden these guys even more. I was in a position where I felt like I was also embarrassing them with my performances, which would never be the case.
“They knew the whole time what was going on. They just wanted me home.” Upon landing back in Newtownabbey, there was no talk of swimming whatsoever. Swimming became a bad word in the Hill household. It was forbidden. Neither did she want to converse with her coach Peter Hill (no relation).
A holiday to Rhodes with friends offered further distance from her pool existence. She got to be just Danielle, not Danielle Hill the swimmer or Danielle Hill the Olympian.
Eventually, the moratorium was lifted. She returned to the pool and slowly built the number of weekly sessions. Team Larne is what kept her from quitting. Hill wasn’t ready to walk out on her second family.
When not perfecting her stroke rotations, she’s coaching the club’s development squad or overseeing the masters. This is her purpose.
But to rediscover the eight-year-old who raced with no cares or worries, she needed to be the change that she wanted to see.
The psychological aspect of performance was the one area she’d never properly dived into. The call went out to Barr. A weekly hotline was established.
“It wasn't easy, especially for me,” says Hill of baring her soul.
“I am not a person that shows emotion very easily. I'll tell you if I am annoyed, or my face will say that before I do. But in terms of the other side of it, I don't like having the pity or the sorrow.
“It was hard first of all to accept that something wasn't right and then do something about it. But I had Peter by my side the whole time, who is more than just a coach.
“Jessie was an athlete, an ex-Olympian, she knew where I was coming from the whole time. To sit and have someone understand you is incredible because you think you are making all this stuff up in your head. But I realised this is all very real and I am not the only person feeling this way in sport.”
In previous conversations with other psychologists over the years, Hill kept the shutters down and curtains pulled. With Barr, there was no wildly sophisticated strategy. It was the connection forged.
She was comfortable opening up to the person on the screen in front of her. Between them, they sifted through the mental debris and found a way for Hill to be herself at competition time.
“She saw the tears and heard everything you’ve just heard. She was all ears and that is what I needed to bring me back down.”
Their work lightened Hill. Their work helped to transform her.
At the Olympic trials, she took over a second off her own 100m backstroke Irish record. Her 59.11 was the seventh fastest in the world this year.
There was no outpouring when seeing that time and hearing the roar of Team Larne in the stand. She saved her tears for her hotel room that evening, just as she had done at Worlds a year earlier. Except these were the happiest of tears.
Three days later, she became the first Irish woman to break 25 seconds for the 50m free. Her 24.68 snuck in under the Olympic marker. There was no holding back. The water was thrashed and crowd saluted.
Amidst the cheering was her dad. David revealed to his daughter that, as well as the 100m backstroke, he had booked tickets to the 50m free in Paris months ago. He always believed.
“It is an awesome feeling to know you are going to Paris. It is a relief. A reset button has also been hit. We now look at can we go sub-59 this summer. Put ourselves in the best possible position and see what we can do because it is a really exciting time to be involved in Irish swimming.”
Hill’s excitement carries more value than any shiny personal best in the making. Her flame burns once more.
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