Chapter 23

Those fucking nuggets.

Dave and his fucking chicken fucking nuggets.

Our team was in Maastricht in the Netherlands, just over the border from Germany. It was supposed to be a great opportunity to get ready for the Games in Hamburg. National teams from around the world were set up in different parts of Europe, getting acclimated to the summer conditions. Given that all the aquatic events took place indoors, it was a little redundant, but it was supposed to give everyone a chance to sync their body clocks and give us the best chance of taking home a bag of medals.

As the chef de mission had told us in the three hours he spent with us before jetting off to Switzerland where the track and field athletics cohort were based, there was a lot of money tied up in getting us to the Olympics, and how much money the government was willing to allocate to our sport in the future would always depend on how successful we were in the present. So, we weren’t to “fuck around”. The subtleties of diplomatic language.

But we certainly weren’t. I hadn’t had this much sleep in years. Dave of the 1500m and the all-night celebratory bedroom stamina was my roommate again. Everyone had a personal wake up call, a door knock to remind us to go to the shuttle bus for the pool, the exclusive use of a university aquatic centre and gym, meals prepped as per our nutrition plans, and a solid ten hours of bed rest and recovery over the course of the day. Usually I was up at five, training before and after a full study load of sports science with a minor in physiotherapy. This was almost like a holiday in comparison!

Although at the moment, it felt like a holiday in a third-world country. The kind where they frequently remind you not to drink the water or eat anything served outside the environs of your nice sanitary hotel. Dave banged on the door.

“Dude, let me in. I’m fucking dying out here.”

“Fuck you. I’m dying in here. Fuck you and your fucking nuggets. Go shit in the fucking lobby toilet.”

“Bastard!”

I heard him scrabbling around and then the door slammed. Serves him right. I hoped he shit himself in the elevator on the way down. He should know that.

“I hope you shit yourself on the way down, you fucker!” I called, although he probably couldn’t hear me.

I’d lost track of the time I’d been confined to the toilet with stomach cramps and putrid issue. This was all the fault of fucking Dave and his fucking nuggets.

Even though we were in training for the biggest swim of our athletic careers so far, our trainers and team management weren’t idiots. Something had to give. They weren’t about to let us super loose out on the town, but they let us call in for ‘cheat meals’ on Saturday. Our first cheat was patat, the Dutch word for ‘fries’. One of the local staff had suggested them to us when she’d heard us discussing cheat meals.

“What? French fries?” Dave had asked.

“No, not French. Dutch,” she’d explained. “And you can have many different toppings. Most Dutch order them as patat met, which just means ‘fries with’.”

“With what?” I asked.

“Mayonnaise. You’ve seen ‘Pulp Fiction’ right? It’s true. We put mayonnaise on our fries. But good mayonnaise. And there are many other varieties.”

So, for our first cheat meal, Dave and I elected to get a selection of patat in. It turned out that the place we ordered from considered Japanese mayonnaise to be good, and I couldn’t disagree. We should have ordered more. All those others who sent the local runners out for pizza or fried chicken or Cantonese noodle dishes ended up snarfing half our haul. At least they had the good graces to offer trade. Later that night, Dave and I agreed it was probably for the best. Pretty stupid to order about ten kilograms of fried potato between the two of us, even if we were burning five-digits worth of calories every day.

What set us undone was the following week was Dave’s premier choice for the cheat meal - the chicken nugget. He’d convinced me to get on board, and the runners had brought in a carton of nuggets from a certain global hamburger chain, at Dave’s specification.

“It has to be the original and the best. And with sweet’n’sour sauce. None of their fake barbecue bullshit,” he proclaimed.

Swimming does give you a voracious appetite. Between Dave and me. We polished them all off. Don’t judge us. We were hungry, young, and we burned in excess of ten thousand calories a day in the pool. Full of processed chicken chunks, we retired to our room at the head-coach mandated hour of nine-thirty and were in bed by ten.

It was the next night that things got messy.

During the afternoon’s training session, I hadn’t felt quite right. I mentioned to my lap coach who said it was probably just nerves - we were a little over a week from moving into the Olympic Village, and only about two weeks out from the start of the swimming program. I’d gone to bed that night feeling more drained than usual.

A few hours later, I’d woken up, drenched in sweat. I’d kicked off my covers and was lying on the bed, feeling quite out of it. You know that sensation when you wake up, but you’re half dreaming, so you’re not sure if you are fully away or not? That’s exactly how I felt. Until some movement south of the border made me rocket out of bed and into the bathroom. I skinned down my boxers and clamped my bum to the seat just in time for the entire volume of Victoria Falls to cascade out of my arse.

“Ohhhhh,” I shuddered as the matter of the entire universe passed through my spasming colon. This was unearthly. Unholy. Unheard of.

My mouth felt dry. Like the beach, where waves pull away from the shore before thundering back with a vengeance, my dry mouth suddenly flooded with moisture, heralding a dread, familiar sensation. I grabbed the tiny waste bin ‘for sanitary disposal’ that sat next to the toilet and threw up into it.