IT’S ALL very well to sing your way into a nation’s history, to dance in the sky above billions of mesmerised eyes and play the starring role in Australia’s finest hour before bedtime.
Before your 14th birthday.
But how do you float back down? How do you return to normal?
“I don’t think I ever did,” Nikki Webster tells The Saturday Telegraph in her sunny Leichhardt dance studio. “I think it became my normal. Which is not a bad thing. It became my life.”
On a breezy night 15 years ago this week, Nikki Webster launched “the best Olympic Games ever” with exquisite innocence, oozing talent and a familiar toothy grin.
Over the succeeding fortnight, Sydney presented to the world a celebration of sporting greatness, culture and charm not since matched by any city on the planet.
Ask any Sydneysider who was lucky enough to live through it and they will agree: life was never so sweet in the Harbour City.
And Australia nearly lost the girl who kicked it all off. Vicious gossip and public criticism came very close to driving Nikki Webster out of the country for good.
“You think as a performer you just go out and do your thing and the audience judge you. But to have media judge you and have people who have never met you judge you was a hard thing for me to cope with as a teenager,” she says.
“It was dark.
“It was what everyone calls tall poppy syndrome.
“I was just this young naive artist trying to make a go and work hard.
“I’d worked damn hard and I wasn’t getting the reception. I couldn’t understand it.
“Then people were telling me how I needed to change my career and break through like a Britney and change my image and I was thinking ‘is this me?’. It was confusing.
“It was quite dark and I think that’s why I went to LA, because I thought ‘I need to do this by myself’.”
When Webster was Stateside she was a young woman in a big new city and wasn’t exposed to cruel jokes and gossip writers trying to chain her to her childhood.
She was free.
And she considered staying put: “I did question whether I wanted to come back as an artist here at all.
“All the comedians, I was the punchline of everyone’s joke and I was just a kid.
“It was hard, because I’m such an Aussie girl, to go ‘I don’t know if I want to be there’.”
But Nikki Webster is brave. Only brave girls yell “can I fly higher?!” during hair-raising dress rehearsals for an acrobatics display that won the hearts of the world.
And she loved the country she did so proud.
So she came back home and set up a dance studio with her brother. She married Qantas flight attendant Matthew McMah and last year gave birth to Skylah, a contender for the cutest little girl in Australia.
“She loves music,” says Webster.
“She does a little ballet dance class and she just loves to dance and she loves watching the kids here at the studio. She absolutely adores it and she gets treated like royalty because she’s the cutest thing to all the big kids.”
Skylah is also learning to swim at the Olympic Park aquatic centre — metres from the site of a performance that shot her mummy into the stratosphere.
“I remember standing watching Cathy Freeman light the cauldron and I was counting. I’m not very good at maths, so I was going 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004 — where will I be?” she says. “I don’t think I ever thought I’d be a mum in 15 years, that’s for sure.
“To have a daughter that could hopefully look up to me and I could make proud is just awesome. It’s cool to leave that legacy behind, whatever I do, I’ve done that.”
And how magic “that” was.
With an elaborate candy bar of lollipop cakes and personalised cookies, a three-tier pink and gold cake and a jumping castle in the shape of Cinderella’s Carriage, Skylah’s first birthday party is a dream come true for her famous mum Nikki Webster.
