According to the Sydney Morning Herald, among other papers, former Australian great Grant Hackett has flown to the United States to enter a rehabilitation program to treat an addiction to prescription sleeping pills.
Hackett is the second Australian swimming legend to enter rehab this year, as Ian Thorpe had a much-publicized admission as well.
Hackett’s addiction is not new news; he admitted in 2012 that he had once been addicted to the sleeping pill Stilnox (also known as ambien in the United States). This apparent relapse comes at a challenging time for Swimming Australia, where the federation is still recovering from a scandal involving a stilnox-fueled rampage in a pre-Olympic training camp that is blamed in part for the team’s lack of success.
However, coming to the United States for treatment is a much different tact than Thorpe has taken, and likely a wise one at that. In Australia, swimmers like Hackett are hailed as heros – whereas in the United States, they can live and seek treatment in relative day-to-day anonymity.
Braden,
Tack, not tact. It’s a yachting term – a solution to the various climatic conditions.
why is stilnox spelled multiple different ways within this article?
All the top swimmers are taking ambien.
Unfortunately, this is true. The sport demands high performance nighttime performances that are often laced with caffeine. By the time an athlete has warmed down, gotten a rub, made it back to the hotel and eaten, it is usually late (11 or 12pm). They have little choice but to resort to sleeping aids in order to gain rest and be ready for when their alarm comes calling the next morning. Ambien (Stilnox) is excellent for what it does: it knocks the user out and carries relatively few hangover type side effects the following morning (even on 5 hours of sleep after consumption).
That said, the problem lies from a culture within the higher ranks of swimming that uses the… Read more »
EDIT:
1. the sport demands high performance nighttime swims (first paragraph)
2. the problem comes from a culture (second paragraph)
Thought the same thing for a second when I read the FB post headline.. Though I didn’t assume anything like some…
Is their a reason you put smh in the title? As in the acronym Shake My Head?! If Mr. Hackett read this he would find it quite condescending
swimfan – “Sydney Morning Herald”.
As it turns out, acronyms mean multiple things, and anybody who read the first sentence of the first paragraph would have figured that out.
SMH can also mean “scratching my head,” “St. Michael’s Hospital,” “Somatic Marker Hypothesis,” “Scotland Memorial Hospital,” and I’m sure hundreds of other things.