Swimming Sensation Timothy Hodge Proved Himself Wrong

When four year old Timothy Hodge was in bed and recovering from having his right foot amputated in 2005, he uttered a sentence his parents ensured would carry no weight.

With the bottom of his leg swathed in bandages, Hodge looked at his mother Cheryl and father Steve and quietly said: “I don’t think I’ll ever be good at anything now.”

His parents responded by being true to their word when they said Hodge would be given every opportunity to find his place in sport. Indeed, Hodge can’t help except to laugh as he recalls that at one point he did a different sport every day of the week – soccer, karate, swimming, tennis, and even T-ball.

Now, aged 22, he boasts a cabinet crammed with trophies and medals, including three from the two Paralympics Games he’s competed in; he holds world records, and has worn Australia’s green and gold sporting colours with distinction. These achievements re-enforce his fear about the life that awaited him in the aftermath of the amputation was way off the mark.

When asked for his motivation to excel ahead of the Australian Swimming Championships underway on Queensland’s Gold Coast, Hodge pauses before paying tribute to the words Cheryl offered him when he was seven years old and terrified by the prospect of being beaten by the other boys in a race at the local pool.

“I was always worried, thinking about what if the next guy wins?” said Hodge. “But my mother simply said: ‘just try your best’.

“Mum always said ‘don’t worry about them. If you swim your best, it doesn’t matter where you come’. I live by that today because if you’re focussing on the competitors, you’re wasting way too much energy on them.”

These days, to ‘try’ his best Hodge – who smashed the 200m Individual Medley world record set by his childhood hero Matthew Cowdrey OAM in 2008 – lives a life that’s so disciplined it would test the resilience of even the most stoic Spartan warrior.

He is awake by 4am; in the pool at Blacktown by 5am; trains until seven; on some days he’ll attend the New South Wales Institute of Sport where he does gym work for an hour and a half. Otherwise, he heads to the Western Sydney University where he’s studying electrical engineering, or he’ll be at work.

It’s little wonder Hodge says he has good reason to be in bed by nine . . .9.30pm . . . at the latest.

“I try to get as much sleep as possible,” he says, looking remarkably wide-eyed and alert. “That’s important because I’ve found if I go to sleep 10 or 20 minutes late I really feel it the next day. Everything is so finely tuned.”

Hodge is proud of his work ethic, and he pays homage to Cowdrey – who won a total of 23 Paralympic Games medals, 13 of which were gold; a combined total of 23 world championship gold medals, and three Commonwealth Games gold medals – for setting a high benchmark for other swimmers to follow.

“I feel like one of my life’s accomplishments is to have the world record that was held by Matthew Cowdrey, especially the one I’ve been chasing for quite a number of years,” he said.

“I use the standards he did to push myself as I worked my way through the age groups and to break his world record. To keep [the record] in Australian hands was a dream come true. It has taken a lot of hard work, long training sessions and many kilometres in the pool to do it.”

Hodge is obviously single minded, and mentally tough. Perhaps that’s a legacy of having his foot amputated when he was aged four and a half because his right foot was fused at angle, and he was  missing one of the bones in his lower leg.

He points out his parents only agreed for it to be amputated after they sought opinions from five different specialists, and then spoke to the parents of a girl who’d had the operation.

“I only remember a little bit,” said Hodge of his memory of having both feet. “I was able to walk on my own without a prosthetic leg when I was about four. However, the doctors said as I grew my right leg would grow at a different rate to my left – partially because I had a bend in the bone.

“They also said because I was missing a second bone my ankle wouldn’t be as stable so as I got older and heavier it wouldn’t be able to take my weight when I was running or walking. They said the best thing was to amputate.

“I didn’t understand fully the extent of it. We met a girl who’d just had the amputation done – she was about a year older than me – and her parents said they found amputation to be the right decision. They were confident they’d made the right choice. My parents agreed with the amputation option, and I was sent to see a clinical psychologist to prepare me for the operation.”

The psychologist drip fed over a period of time what was going to happen to Hodge. It wasn’t until two weeks before the operation that Hodge was told what was going to happen: “I was going to have my foot amputated. It wasn’t going to be there anymore.”

The ramification of what was going to happen hit home on the day of the operation and Hodge was being put into the car by his parents.

“I remember the day they took me to hospital,” he said. My mum put me in the car, and I didn’t want to get in. I did everything I could not to go in the car – fighting – it wasn’t going to happen. They were going to amputate my foot, and I wasn’t going to have it anymore!

“I didn‘t know it was for the better. Now, I realise it was the right choice – my quality of life has been a lot better since then, and it has allowed for me to do a lot of sport and enjoy the most incredible experiences.”

Hodge, who has been a NSWIS scholarship athlete since he was 14 – the same year he made his first Australian team and was starstruck to be seated next to Grant Hackett OAM, a three-time Olympic gold medallist, at the team’s induction.

“My NSWIS scholarship has opened up a huge world of support for me through physiotherapy, massage, sports scientists, and dieticians,” he said.

“When I was at school I used the Personal Excellence team – it’s called Athlete’s Wellbeing now – to help with school and juggle things. In Year 10 I knew I wanted to do engineering and they helped me.”

Hodge, who has made it clear winning a Paralympics gold medal would be the ultimate, said he would be thrilled if his exploits have a similar impact on young swimmers to what Cowdrey had on him.

“I’d like to think I am helping to inspire the next generation of swimmers,” he said. “We have a huge amount of talent in the Australian team at the moment, but we need the next generation to carry on the torch.

“There’s some very good swimmers coming through, and just as I looked to Matt, and I wanted to beat his record, I hope the next generation of swimmers are looking to break mine.”

Daniel Lane, NSWIS