CNN
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When Cody Simpson stood behind the starting blocks at his first Olympic swimming trials last year, the experience felt brand new but also eerily familiar.
With a huge crowd watching and fans chanting his name, it transported him back to the thick of his music when he regularly performed in front of thousands and made live appearances on television.
“I had the experience of having to get up and do things in front of a lot of people who cared about the outcome,” says Simpson. “I knew how to deal with it rather than let it screw me up at the time, I guess.”
It’s now been three years since Simpson turned his attention away from music and focused on competitive swimming.
In that time, his progress has been rapid. He had not expected to reach the end of the Olympic tryouts for the Tokyo Games, nor had he anticipated earning a spot on the Australian team after two years of training.
“I really didn’t get used to it, we weren’t cautious about trying to build slowly,” says Simpson. CNN Sport. “My coach had me do things that he definitely wasn’t ready for at the time he was doing them, but I loved that routine.
“It put me on a trajectory of rapid improvement because I just had to learn to deal with it, whether it was throwing up at least twice a week for the first six months, just adjusting to what it was trying to put my body through. .”
Earning a place on the Australian team for the Paris Olympics has been Simpson’s goal since returning to swimming, but right now he is preparing to compete in his first international event at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, England, with its 50 meters. butterfly heats scheduled for Friday.
The brutal training schedule and hours spent staring into the bottom of a pool seem a far cry from Simpson’s life as a pop star, which began when he started covering songs and posting videos on YouTube when he was 12.
As his music began to gain traction and his online following grew, “he was given opportunities he couldn’t turn down” and within a year he moved to the US with his family.
Since then, he’s recorded four studio albums, played venues around the world, collaborated with Justin Bieber and Flo Rida, dated high-profile celebrities including Miley Cyrus and Gigi Hadid, starred on Broadway, and appeared on talk shows. TV. Dancing with the Stars and The Masked Singer Australia.
But throughout that heady time, Simpson’s desire to swim again never left him. He had competed at a high level as a junior in Australia and even started looking for squads to join when he first moved to the US.
“I think because I put it in a good place in my mind, the desire to go back to swimming never faded,” he says. “The fire stayed gently burning inside me until I had to pick it up.”
Simpson, 25, was born into a family of swimmers, with her parents, Brad and Angie, both competing for Australia. She jokes that she knew how to swim before she could walk and always envisioned a career in the pool before her music career took off sooner than expected.
“I think everyone in their life has that moment where they realize they have a knack for something or an affinity for something that maybe they don’t have for other things,” says Simpson, “and for me, that was swimming.
“It was my first love, the first thing I remember loving doing. And that hasn’t changed, I guess, to this day.”
READ: Meet Black Women Fighting for Equality in Swimming
Simpson says his parents never pressured him to take up swimming, and admits his mother, having experienced the demanding nature of the sport firsthand, even tried to dissuade him from returning in 2019.
But in the end, the pull of the pool turned out to be too strong.
“It was a matter of not wanting to deal with any issues in my life and having no regrets,” says Simpson, “and I kind of owed it to myself to try to get this unfinished business done that I thought I had in the pool: that total untapped or unfulfilled potential that I thought I had.
“And just to scratch my itch, really, it was getting too much to bear… I knew music would always be there for me, and I can tour and I can do all that stuff until I’m an old man, but you just can swim for a certain number of years. I wanted to see what I could do.”
Among those who have supported Simpson since his return to the sport are Australian swimming legend Ian Thorpe and the 23-time Olympic gold medalist. Michael Phelps.
“Having people like that in my corner and being able to call or text them and ask for things or advice is very special,” says Simpson, “especially because these are the guys I had on my wall and on my computer screensaver. and things that grow: Ian is one of them and also Michael is another”.
Being able to turn to Phelps for advice brings Simpson’s swimming journey full circle: During his first trip to the US, he had his father drive from New York to Baltimore to try and meet Phelps at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club. .
“We went at the time we thought he might be training,” recalls Simpson, “and the next thing you know, he shows up.
“I had him sign like 20 swimming caps; My dad took a picture of us together and I met his trainer. I ended up going in and doing some sessions with the junior team.”
Simpson’s late arrival in professional swimming makes him an anomaly in a sport in which most elite athletes have been training and competing intensely from a young age. He hopes to show people that it’s possible to thrive in the pool without having trained rigorously throughout your teens.
And with a combined 17.4 million followers on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, he’s likely to bring more attention to the sport as he documents his swimming career on social media.
“I’d love to inspire more kids to get involved and show it’s cool,” says Simpson. “I love the sport, so if that’s all I do for swimming is try to get more eyes, then I feel like I’ve done part of my job because I love it and I want more people to love it. ”
Simpson is scheduled to compete in the 50m and 100m butterfly events at the Commonwealth Games; reaching the final of one of those events, he says, would be “pretty special.”
For now, her music career is on hold, but it continues to play an important role in her life. Late last year, he took advantage of a lighter training week to record his fourth studio album, “Cody Simpson,” which was released in April.
“I play guitar all the time,” says Simpson, “it’s one of the things that’s a bit cathartic right now. It’s something I do to relax and it’s really nice to have something I love outside of the pool.”
He plans to return to music full time when his love of swimming begins to wane, but not anytime soon.
“I’m going to keep writing and cultivating my guitar playing and all that stuff and I’m definitely going to do it again after I swim,” says Simpson. “The forefront of my mind is what I’m doing in the pool right now.”