By Tania Phillips
Stanthorpe Swimming Club welcomed home their favourite son – and first homegrown Olympian Ben Armbruster on Sunday morning at the place where it all started for him – the Stanthorpe pool
It was a chance for the latest crop of local swimmers to meet their idol, who they had cheered on at the Paris Olympics just a few months ago.
It was also a chance to jump in the pool and take him on in a race or two (with a handicap of course).
For Ben himself it was a chance to say thank you to his town, former coach Gail Smail and friends and family for the support they showed him in on the way to and at Paris.
It was also a chance to jump back in the pool for the first time since Paris and do a little bit of competitive swimming.
“I only did a couple laps maybe three or four,” he laughed.
“It was pretty special though, I haven’t swum since Paris so it was my first time back in the pool and it was in Stanthorpe as well which was nice.”
Though a little bit of a change from his last swims.
“It was a bit of a different scene from Paris but it was just as special almost,” he chuckled.
“The kids were loving it. We did a couple of races where I gave them a head start and I’d try to catch up. It’s was some of the hardest swimming I’d ever done because I hadn’t done it in ages but it was all good.
“They weren’t going easy on me. I only just touched the club officials out but I gave them 10 or 20 seconds head start.”
Ben said he relished his Olympic experience.
“The whole experience was everything I thought it was going to be and ended up being exactly what I wanted and I expected,” he said.
“It was pretty cool to be able to do all that but there was so much support coming from back home. I could see it coming from my phone. I tried not to get on social media too much and focus on my training and what not but I could still see all the posts and comments from back home. It was pretty nice to see everyone watching.
It would have meant a lot.
“Yeah,” he said with a hint of emotion in his voice.
“It’s hard to put into words. It was really good to have my family with me. That’s the first time I’ve been racing overseas and had family there. Usually when I’m racing they’re not there just because it’s hard to get to everywhere I’m going but before the sessions started in Paris I was able to walk out on pool deck while everyone was warming up and go walk out into the crowd, find my family and say hello. It was really nice. Just to have them there to watch everything in person was really really good.”
He said he was really happy with how his Olympics played out – only narrowly missing out on making the finals at an Olympics that many swim fans (outside of his coach Chris Mooney, team mates and supporters) considered he was a surprise qualifier for.
“Obviously I wanted to make the finals and have another swim,” Armbruster said.
“But everyone was complaining about it being a slow pool, I jumped in and in the 50 free I was right on my PB and then I PBed in the 100m fly. So, I was really happy despite everybody’s complaints about the pool being slow. It didn’t really phase me.”
While he was a little disappointed to miss the finals, surprisingly the young swimmer, who had just a handful of international swims under his belt, didn’t find the Olympics as daunting as you might expect.
“Not really daunting, I knew it was a different level being there with the best of the world but because swimming Australia put a really big emphasis on qualification times and how you have to make the teams,” Ben explained.
“We get used to the pressure I guess of racing especially at trials, there was a big crowd there. I felt a lot more pressure at trials than I did at the Olympics.
“It was always the goal to go to Paris but the Swimming Australia qualification times and stuff like that, all the competition in Australia – I believed in myself and I knew what I had to do. But it was the doubt in my mind whether I’d actually do it. But I got my hand on the wall and got my spot on the team and I was so thrilled and over the moon with happiness. There was a lot riding on that, making the team, the whole process.”
So what now for Ben Armbruster?
“This is my first time having time away from swimming,” he said.
“I’ve had the past two months since I got back and I’ll have the rest of this year off from the pool. I’m going to keep doing my gym, doing a social comp of touch rugby with the uni and just socialising and hanging out with mates. It’s been really nice.”
After taking a semester off for the Olympics Ben is enjoying being a normal university student and has settled back down at Bond University on the Gold Coast where he is currently studying Sports Management but working his way towards changing over into Sports and Exercise Science.
“I love being down at Bond, it’s been really good. I’ve got a heap of friends in all my classes,” he said.
“My social life is great at the moment and I’ve got a great bunch of mates in the swim squad. They make turning up every day to the pool a lot easier as well.
“I’m back into the pool in the new year. I will go down to Hobart for New Years to see my grand parents and as soon as we come back I’ll jump back in.
“It’s been weird not swimming but I can still feel that timer ticking down to when I have to get back into the pool. I’ll jump back into the water at some stage but until then I’m just enjoying every day as it comes.”
He said he doesn’t have any expections on himself for next year after the long break, knowing that it will take a while to get back where he was before Paris.
“But I’ll do what I always do – jump in, do what I always do, have a crack and see what happens,” he said.
However, don’t think this break is dampening his fire for competition. He freely admits that Paris has given him taste to head towards the LA Olympics in 2028.
“As soon as we were racing in Paris, I knew I wanted to do that again,” he said.
“It’s some of the most fun racing I’ve ever done.”
Theoretically he could compete in Brisbane.
“I could,” he laughed.
“But I don’t know if I will.
“If they have the 50s in the Olympic by then maybe but I’ll be looking a bit like Cam (McEvoy) and just doing sprints at that stage. I’d be 30 there, we’ll see what happens but you never know.”
