As an Olympic athlete, Emily Seebohm is no stranger to a physical challenge, but SAS Australia vs England was something else entirely.
The retired swimmer, 33, was first offered a place on SAS after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, but turned it down for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!.
But this year, when she was recruited for the show just weeks before filming started, she was ready for the challenge.
Emily had no misconceptions about how brutal the boot camp would be before she jetted off to North Africa for filming, but there was one particular thing she struggled with.
So, was it the fighting or the height challenges that she didn’t want to do? No, it was actually being thrown into a leadership role.
“I was dreading being a team leader,” she exclusively tells New Idea.
“I knew I would find being a leader hard because to me, being a leader is the most experienced, the most knowledgeable [person].”
“You’re in that leadership role because people really buy into what you’re saying, and I just knew that I wasn’t the most experienced person there.”
“I wasn’t the smartest person there. I wasn’t the most capable person there.”
Emily admits she knew she’d end up being picked as a leader because she’d told the Directing Staff (DS) that she’d feel out of her depth doing it.
However, she found a way to make it her own and focused on encouraging her fellow recruits rather than giving them orders, because “that wasn’t the type of leadership that I was.”
Though many people might think being an athlete gave her an advantage on the course, Emily says it actually added another layer of pressure for her.
“People see you doing it, and they’re like, ‘oh, you know, an athlete will easily do it, so I think it adds pressure,” she tells us.
“You’re like, ‘oh no, I actually have to finish this course because I’m an athlete and I should be able to do all these things’.”
SAS pushes the celebrity contestants to their physical and mental limits, and it was no different for Emily.
Emily was memorably knocked to the ground in a fight with social media star Jack Joseph early on in the series, with the scenes dividing fans.
Discussing the brutal fight, Emily insists she has no hard feelings towards Jack over the bout, joking that her ego was the only thing that was bruised.
“Jack was strong! When he hit me, it was hard,” she says.
“We had a chat [after] and like straight up, I said, ‘don’t worry, Jack, everything’s fine.'”
“He was upset for like the rest of the day about that fight. And I just said to him, ‘It’s fine. You have to do it. If you didn’t do it, you were going home’. There’s no way around it.”
Given there were nine men and five women on the cast, Emily says she knew she’d be paired up with a man, because the other women were smaller than her.
“There’s no way that they would be put up against the guy,” she admits.
In fact, she adds that she would have volunteered to fight a man if she’d had the chance, saying she only wishes she’d have got more punches in before she was knocked down.
Emily and Jack were the final two people of the group to fight, and the athlete confesses that it wasn’t easy seeing everyone ending the fights injured and bleeding before her turn.
“Watching everyone else was hard for me. I got really clammed up,” she says.
“If I went first, that would have been a lot easier because [seeing] other people doing [it with] bloody noses, [seeing] people that fell and hurt their legs and arms – that was hard.”
“Then you’re waiting, and you’re seeing all the other people get picked, and you’re like, ‘okay, there’s only two guys left over there, and both of them are quite big.'”
“So, to me, the hardest part was waiting for it.”
The physical challenges were one thing, but Emily also struggled with being separated from her son Sampson, two, but adds that it also spurred her on in the competition.
“That was the hardest about the show for me, but also I wanted to tell him that you could do anything you put your mind to and from the get-go, when I got asked about the show, I was like, I want to finish, that’s my goal,” she tells us.
“So for me, if I had quit early just to come back to see him, then I wasn’t trying to reach my goals, and how was I going to tell him that I couldn’t do it, but then ask him to do it himself?
“You have to lead by example, and I guess that’s why I wanted to do it.”
Though Sampson is too young to recognise Emily’s fame as an Olympic champion, he has recognised her on TV, and she hopes that one day, he will be proud of her.
“As he gets older, he’ll be able to see the challenges and see what I did and be like, wow, that’s super cool, mum, what you did,” she adds.
