Two decades ago, Hannah McLean was one of the nation’s leading swimmers – winning Commonwealth and world championship medals and breaking world records. But when she traded her life as a high performance athlete for marriage, children and a career in her late twenties, she was unprepared for just how different life would be.
“You have to find a new operating system in life after sport,” she says. “You can’t use the same modus operandi you had as an athlete; it doesn’t fit.”
McLean makes no secret of the fact that transitioning to life after sport was tough.
But having navigated the experience, she now helps current and former elite athletes with this challenge – through her work as a performance life coach at High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ), and the New Zealand Olympic Committee’s Wāhine Toa leadership programme.
Reflecting on the highs and lows of her swimming career, McLean has much to be proud of.
At the 2005 world aquatics championships in Montreal, she became the first New Zealander in seven years to qualify for an individual final at the worlds, finishing fifth in the 100m backstroke.
She went on to claim the bronze medal in the 200m backstroke at the 2006 world champs in Shanghai.
That same year, McLean arrived at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne as the favourite in the 100m backstroke. She imagined herself earning the gold medal and ending her career on a high. But the race didn’t go according to plan.
“My ranking suggested I could have taken the gold. And I didn’t. I had a disaster of a race in my key event and came fourth,” she recalls.
Despite her devastation, she found form in her next two events, winning bronze in the 200m backstroke, and breaking the Commonwealth record in her leg of the 4 x 100m relay in a time that would have won the individual 100m backstroke days earlier (the event she’d been expected to win). Her Commonwealth record stood for four years.
“The 200m backstroke was my redemption race,” she says, rightly proud of her bronze medal. “It was really special, getting the bouquet of flowers on the dais and being able to pass it to my mum in the stand and her pride in being a parent with flowers on the bus going home.”
But the disappointment of not winning gold in the 100m backstroke left McLean with a sense of unfinished business.
“That pressure I put on myself to go out on a high because I was ready to retire and sail off into the sunset meant there was more hanging on Melbourne than there should have been. I placed too much importance on achieving a result to be happy with what I’d committed to my swimming career,” she says.
By now, McLean had been swimming for 15 years, having begun the sport at Mount Eden Swimming Club at the age of 10. Her first coach, Brett Green, clocked her considerable talent and told her he believed she could go to the Olympics one day. He even gave her a commemorative pen ahead of the Sydney 2000 Games to spur her on.
At Green’s encouragement, McLean went on to join the North Shore Swimming Club where most of the nation’s top swimmers trained under the guidance of Jan Cameron.
“Jan was an incredibly driven, talented, passionate, committed swimming coach and former swimmer,” McLean says. “She had a real vision for creating an environment where New Zealand swimmers could perform on the world stage. She thought if Australia can win all those medals, why can’t New Zealand do that too.
“Jan built a culture you wanted to be part of, and she sold the dream. She did a great marketing job on the vision of being a New Zealand Olympic swimmer and ultimately a medallist. She wanted to produce an Olympic medallist.”
Cameron had won an Olympic silver medal herself, competing for Australia at the 1964 Tokyo Games. After moving to New Zealand, she became the driving force behind New Zealand’s first high performance swimming programme. McLean’s timing in joining Cameron’s squad was impeccable.
With her Sydney 2000 pen a prize possession, McLean embarked on qualifying for the Games, missing the New Zealand qualification time by an agonising 0.17 seconds.
“It was devastating to miss that qualifying time for Sydney,” McLean recalls.
Her training took on even greater purpose as she embarked on a campaign for Athens 2004 – sticking a photo of the Olympic pool next to her bed and visualising her Olympic dream every night. “I wasn’t going to let anything stop me getting there,” she says, her steely determination still evident.
McLean spent the next few years putting her all into swimming – while also undertaking a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Auckland, majoring in English and classical studies. When she was named in the 2004 Games team, the birthplace of the Olympics was a fitting location for the classics scholar to finally experience the Games.
“Seeing the remnants of the architecture and understanding the mythology, it felt like a bit of a pilgrimage,” she says. “And it was the mecca of Olympism.”
McLean had mixed fortunes in the pool in Athens. Battling first-event jitters, she also had to contend with blinding sunlight during her 100m backstroke heat because the organisers had run out of money to put a roof over the pool.
“I remember taking off and not getting into the right position in the lane and just spinning my wheels. I hit the lane ropes multiple times. It was a disaster,” she recalls.
Looking back, McLean recognises the enormous scale of the Olympics added to the challenge of her first race – and feels her results would have been better if she’d contested the previous Games.
“If it was my second Olympics it would have made a huge difference, getting those first Games nerves out of the system and having an extra layer of experience,” she says.
Fortunately, the 200m backstroke event was scheduled for the evening when the sun was lower. McLean progressed to the semifinals, swimming a personal best to end her Olympics on a positive note. The 200m backstroke that year was won by the current IOC president, Kirsty Coventry.
McLean let her swimming career quietly ebb away in 2007 not long after getting engaged. It wasn’t an easy decision to walk away from a life that had given her so much. And there was still the issue of the gold medal she hadn’t quite won.
But the rest of her life was calling, and before long she married sports lawyer Ashton Welsh, and the couple had two children, Charlotte and Angus.
What took far longer, she says, was reconciling the disappointing parts of her swimming career and finding new purpose – a journey that was helped by a timely comment by one of her coaches, Thomas Ansorg, on her wedding day in 2009.
“Missing out on the gold medal at the 2006 Commonwealth Games was the greatest disappointment of my swimming career,” McLean says. “But I’ll always remember this lovely moment at our wedding, surrounded by all our friends and family, coaches and swimmers, when Thomas looked around and said: ‘Hannah, this is your gold medal.’ And I just thought, ‘Yeah it is: my life, my husband, the future, that’s what’s really important’.”
In adapting to life after sport, McLean says she holds on to the expression: All that glitters isn’t gold. Plus, she’s learned to recognise all that she did achieve.
“I remember breastfeeding Charlotte while watching the 100m backstroke at the 2010 Commonwealth Games on TV. And a little strip came up with the Commonwealth record and my name on it. It was surreal,” she says.
McLean now puts her hard-won wisdom to good use by helping today’s elite athletes prepare for life beyond sport – working as a performance life coach at HPSNZ. She also leads the Prime Minister’s scholarship internship programme which gives athletes the opportunity to gain work experience while continuing their sporting careers.
“Having lived experience as an Olympic athlete helps me understand the challenges sportspeople face,” she says. “Developing a career and identity outside of sport really contributes to athlete wellbeing and successful transitions.”
McLean is also a facilitator on the NZOC Wāhine Toa programme, which helps elite female athletes transition into leadership roles within sport and wider society – having undertaken it herself nearly a decade ago.
“I have a huge amount of gratitude for the timing of that programme in my transition,” she says. She’s grateful to the women who’ve mentored her during her post-swimming career – and for the professional help she eventually sought.
“It took me years until I finally did the psychological work I needed to do to process my disappointment in my swimming career. It’s probably why I’m so passionate about supporting athletes with their transition,” she says.
McLean’s work on the NZOC leadership programme saw her reconnect with former swimming opponent Coventry during her recent visit to New Zealand.
“We talked about the fact both of our coaches were women in a male-dominated environment, trying to make it as high performance coaches. That link is pretty special,” McLean says.
As a leadership and performance coach with her own consulting business, McLean’s influence now also extends beyond sport into other high-performance environments, including companies and high schools.
With the drive and determination that saw her become a champion swimmer, there’s likely to be more yet to come in the story of Hannah McLean.
