IT\u2019S ALL very well to sing your way into a nation\u2019s history, to dance in the sky above billions of mesmerised eyes and play the starring role in Australia\u2019s finest hour before bedtime.<\/p>\n
Before your 14th birthday.<\/p>\n
But how do you float back down? How do you return to normal?<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think I ever did,\u201d Nikki Webster tells The Saturday Telegraph in her sunny Leichhardt dance studio. \u201cI think it became my normal. Which is not a bad thing. It became my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
On a breezy night 15 years ago this week, Nikki Webster launched \u201cthe best Olympic Games ever\u201d with exquisite innocence, oozing talent and a familiar toothy grin.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Ask any Sydneysider who was lucky enough to live through it and they will agree: life was never so sweet in the Harbour City.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou 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,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was dark.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was what everyone calls tall poppy syndrome.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was just this young naive artist trying to make a go and work hard.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d worked damn hard and I wasn\u2019t getting the reception. I couldn\u2019t understand it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen 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 \u2018is this me?\u2019. It was confusing.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was quite dark and I think that\u2019s why I went to LA, because I thought \u2018I need to do this by myself\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Webster was Stateside she was a young woman in a big new city and wasn\u2019t exposed to cruel jokes and gossip writers trying to chain her to her childhood.<\/p>\n
She was free.<\/p>\n
And she considered staying put: \u201cI did question whether I wanted to come back as an artist here at all.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the comedians, I was the punchline of everyone\u2019s joke and I was just a kid.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was hard, because I\u2019m such an Aussie girl, to go \u2018I don\u2019t know if I want to be there\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Nikki Webster is brave. Only brave girls yell \u201ccan I fly higher?!\u201d during hair-raising dress rehearsals for an acrobatics display that won the hearts of the world.<\/p>\n
And she loved the country she did so proud.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe loves music,\u201d says Webster.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe 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\u2019s the cutest thing to all the big kids.\u201d<\/p>\n
Skylah is also learning to swim at the Olympic Park aquatic centre \u2014 metres from the site of a performance that shot her mummy into the stratosphere.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember standing watching Cathy Freeman light the cauldron and I was counting. I\u2019m not very good at maths, so I was going 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004 \u2014 where will I be?\u201d she says. \u201cI don\u2019t think I ever thought I\u2019d be a mum in 15 years, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo have a daughter that could hopefully look up to me and I could make proud is just awesome. It\u2019s cool to leave that legacy behind, whatever I do, I\u2019ve done that.\u201d<\/p>\n
And how magic \u201cthat\u201d was.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
IT\u2019S ALL very well to sing your way into a nation\u2019s history, to dance in the sky above billions of mesmerised eyes and play the starring role in Australia\u2019s finest hour before bedtime. Before your 14th birthday. But how do you float back down? How do you return to normal? \u201cI don\u2019t think I ever … Continue reading<\/a>Olympic hero Nikki Webster reveals she nearly left Australia for good due to gossip and cruel comedians<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-57"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1557,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1556\/revisions\/1557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nikkiwebsterfan.net\/press\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}