Pressure on Maddi Levi, Australia’s best women’s rugby sevens player, had been building. In a whirlwind four years she had swiftly progressed from D-grade teams in Queensland, through a brief stint in AFLW, to an Olympic Games and recognition from World Rugby as one of the best female athletes in the world.
But as her feats grew, so did her own expectations. Finally, before the first stop of the 2023 season just over a year ago, the tears flowed in a meeting in a Dubai hotel room with the Australian team’s psychologist.
“I sat down with him and just burst out,” Levi says. “I just made the [World Rugby] dream team and I got nominated for player of the year, and I felt like there was just so much weight on me to perform and so much weight on me to actually be the difference.”
Twelve months later, and Levi has reached even greater heights. The 22-year-old has been again nominated for and now won World Rugby’s sevens player of the year award, and finished as the top try-scorer on the circuit and at the Paris Olympics.
It has been an astonishing elevation to the highest echelons of Australian sport, but the Queenslander credits her successes to her family, teammates and coaches, choosing self-deprecation at every opportunity. And inside, she jokes she is still far from perfect. “The beauty of the Australian program and having that psych on board is – you don’t actually realise until you start talking about that stuff – like, ‘geez, I’m actually a bit fucked up’,” she says. “You don’t actually realise how many demons you have.”
Watch this fast, powerful, skilful athlete dominate the competitive global sevens arena and it’s hard to conceive of the source of self-doubt, but Levi accepts it’s an ongoing challenge. Her mind wanders towards the negative when remembering the final of this year’s Dubai sevens earlier this month. Levi scored the match-winning try, a length-of-the-field intercept that turned the tournament on its head and secured Australia the title.
“I was just dropping balls, and then I tried to over-correct it, and then I was just doing too much,” she says. “I think, not that we don’t have a strong team, but I’m like, ‘if I don’t perform here, I could be letting the team down’.”
Levi traces that sense of responsibility to her upbringing, and repaying the sacrifices made by her parents to support the dreams of her and her 21-year-old sister – and teammate – Teagan. Mother Richelle was a cleaner and father Jason, a rugby league player who became a truck driver. He once admitted to his eldest daughter that, yes, his job was boring and the hours were long, but the money was good. “He was like, ‘I did it to help support you guys’,” she says.
Long before their parents would join the Levi sisters on the global sevens tour, they would ferry them to ballet and contemporary dance. “They sat through hours of dance concerts, and I look back at the footage now and go, ‘I actually sucked, Mum, why did you pay all that money?’ And she was like, ‘you enjoyed it’.”
Reflecting back now, Levi says her experience in dance was complicated. It was a source of joy, but other things came with it. “The dance industry can be so toxic and so manipulative, and the people will literally climb on top of you to get to the top,” she says, recalling bullying especially towards her sister. “When we started to get noticed a bit more, that was when it tended to start. It’s as basic as leaving you out – and as a young girl, all you ever want is to have friends and be included.”
That experience prompted the sisters to support anti-bullying charity Dolly’s Dream, created by Kate and Tick Everett following the suicide of their 14-year-old daughter, Dolly, in 2018. “I’m not the only one who suffers with self-doubt,” Levi says. “And it’s probably the thing that in women’s sport that probably jeopardises people’s games the most is just the ability to not back themselves, not believe in themselves.”
Levi’s self-belief faces another test in coming months. She has been drafted into the Queensland Reds team, as Rugby Australia’s sevens athletes start juggling both the shorter and traditional forms of the game ahead of next year’s 15-a-side World Cup in England. There is no guarantee the transition will come off.
“Being a dual international is something that is definitely enticing, and I’d love to hopefully get there,” she says. “I guess the hardest thing is probably just trying to keep that continuity with that team and having people come in and out, and obviously we don’t want to disrupt them, because they’re trying to win as much as we want to win when we come in.”
The endgame is ensuring the Wallaroos excite at the 2029 World Cup, to be hosted in Australia. Despite sevens players like Levi enjoying full-time contracts and appearing at Olympic Games, most tournaments they play are overseas and occur during the early morning in Australia, limiting their exposure.
Even Levi’s boyfriend – West Australian Ironman athlete Will Savage – doesn’t always tune in. “To be fair, he does train at ungodly hours in the morning, so if we play at 1am and he has to get up at 4am, I’m like, ‘OK, I get that’.”
Their existence largely out of the limelight means the 2029 tournament, and the 2032 Brisbane Olympics, present tantalising opportunities to connect with Australian audiences. “You look at the Matildas and how many stadiums they sold out, and just that Matildas effect they had in the last year, and hopefully our media team and the way that we execute the Rugby World Cup can do the same,” she says.
Levi has been open about her ambitions to play until her home Olympics, when she will be 30, and is one of Rugby Australia’s feature attractions in the so-called Golden Decade to 2032. “Looking at it now it’s also about as much longevity in the sport,” she says. “The game’s just getting faster and faster, and I’ve had chats with Walshy [coach Tim Walsh] about continuously playing to 2032, at the moment it’s probably a bit unrealistic. I need to probably have some time off post-LA [Olympics in 2028], if possible, to let my body recover.”
More immediately Levi faces a crash course in playing wing in the more structured 15-a-side game, while continuing with sevens and the next stop on the tour in Perth starting on 24 January. If all goes to plan, she will make her Wallaroos debut against the USA and American superstar Ilona Maher – who Levi shares DMs with and is making the shift to 15s herself – in Canberra in May.
Yet in a world of imposing opponents, from the relentless New Zealanders, the wily French or Maher’s fast-improving Americans, Levi’s inner monologue might be the most formidable. “Off the field stuff is what I’ve been working on a lot, and just being confident in the role that I play on that field,” she says.
When Levi finds herself in doubt, the world’s best female sevens player just tries to remember the words of the team’s psychologist, uttered that night a year ago in Dubai. “He was like, ‘if you’re scared and nervous, imagine the people you’re playing against and how nervous they are’.”
