Transcript

Monday 1 May 2017 - After the Game

SARAH FERGUSON, PRESENTER: Welcome to Four Corners.

In sports mad Australian we love to share the triumphs and heartbreaks of our elite athletes on the football field, the cricket pitch or in the swimming pool.

The national obsession with winning has prompted governments and sporting bodies to pump public funds into the careers of young people who show promise.

But, unless they fall into scandal, we hear little about our champions once they're forced to give the game away.

Often they don't do so on their own terms and that's when they can find themselves overwhelmed.

The suicide of rugby great Daniel Vickerman this year has prompted more athletes to speak out about life after the game.

Tonight some of our former superstars tell us how leaving sport created a dangerous vacuum in their lives and urge sporting bodies to do much more to prepare elite athletes for the fall.

LOUISE MILLIGAN reports.

BRENDAN CANNON, FORMER WALLABY: Nothing like a stadium, walking out onto the playing arena, people cheering for your team, cheering your team mates for the excellence they produce.

The moment you get told you can't play rugby anymore the light goes out.

It's all gone.

You're a former player.

The spotlight that shines so brightly and sometimes can be blinding gets turned off and you effectively feel like you're in the dark.

LOUISE MILLIGAN, REPORTER: Daniel Joseph Vickerman was born in South Africa.

He moved to Australia at the turn of the millennium.

OWEN FINEGAN, FORMER WALLABY: Dan's style of play was exactly what you wanted.

It's what I loved.

It was confrontational.

It was in your face.

He was a physical, aggressive, no-holds-barred player.

GREG MUMM, THE FINAL WHISTLE: You always knew from a coaching point of view that with Dan on the team you were not going to have to question physicality.

It just came with Dan.

COMMENTATOR: Daniel Vickerman, he takes it with two hands.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: On the rugby field, he used his enormous height and heft to devastating effect.

COMMENTATOR: Now it's Vickerman, up over half way... good metres here by the Wallabies.

OWEN FINEGAN: I'm sure there are international rugby players that would have been shuddering around the grounds knowing that Vicks was coming to clean them out.

COMMENTATOR: What a tackle from Ian Gogh...Vickerman used to be 6 ft 8, now he's 3ft 4...

LOUISE MILLIGAN: After ten years playing at the peak of his sport - rugby union - Vickerman retired from the Wallabies due to injury.

He studied at Cambridge University and built a career in finance. In short: he seemed like the ultimate success story for life after sport.

BRENDAN CANNON: He was just a big, beautiful guy.

He sadly never saw himself the way that others did.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: In February this year, five years after his retirement and struggling with mental illness, Daniel Vickerman took his own life.

BRENDAN CANNON: There was no obvious indicators that what was to happen was going to happen.

The Saturday that it happened, it was a really normal day.

Been to basketball with his little boy in the morning, went to the beach that afternoon, and had a family dinner that night where they went out and everything was, there was nothing untoward.

VICKERMAN MEMORIAL PRIEST: May he rest in peace.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Vickerman's death shocked the sporting world.

BRENDAN CANNON: It was just disbelief. Just utter disbelief.

OWEN FINEGAN: When a good mate of yours, when you find out they've passed away, you almost feel a little bit of guilt about 'Was I a good enough mate? Did I ask the right questions? You obviously think, straight away, 'no, you didn't'.'

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Daniel Vickerman left behind a wife and two young boys.

EULOGY:I stand before you today on behalf of two families in grief and given Dan's significant achievements, I think it's safe to say as well, an entire world that is in shock.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Brendan Cannon was Dan Vickerman's rugby room-mate and his dear friend.

BRENDAN CANNON: I think it's just such a tragedy that our much-loved mate felt so alone at that moment to, to do what he did.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Vickerman had struggled with debilitating depression.

He had been diagnosed with a mental illness and prescribed medication.

He had told friends it had been exacerbated by coming to terms with life after rugby.

GREG MUMM: A lot of his conversations were around the fact that you go from being a certain type of person one day, the centre of attention, highly-supported, highly-frameworked and structured in terms of what you were doing and the feedback you got, to being completely left on your own the next.

And I think for many people in the general population that can seem a little bit precious and a lot of people seem to think, "Oh well, it can't be that bad, you were doing what you loved as a job."

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Suck it up.

GREG MUMM: Yeah, suck it up.

And the difficulty is, I think, for athletes, a lot of that journey is all they know.

And Dan spoke of that, kind of like feeling of abandonment in the sense that so much was done for me when I was playing then, now I feel no-one could be bothered calling to see how I'm going.

BRENDAN CANNON: All of us at different times have had really dark periods post-football.

And Dan was no exception, really.

He had dark periods away from football, in his transition.

We rallied around him, a couple of times, and we thought that we'd managed to navigate him out of the darker periods.

COACH: Let's go back five. Throw them in.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: In the tight-knit world of Australian rugby, Vickerman's death has opened a wound for the men he played with.

COACH: Crouch! Bind! Set!

LOUISE MILLIGAN: It's prompted them to speak up about what has remained, until now, largely unsaid.

GUYS IN SCRUM: "One! Two! Keep going, keep going."

OWEN FINEGAN: I think my generation of rugby players are probably very good at holding their cards close to their chest.

It's that generation of men that bottle it up.

Man up and be tough, don't talk about your issues or your problems.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: It's a theme that, across Australia and internationally, sporting bodies are grappling with: how to prepare elite athletes for the crash so many suffer when the game's over.

OWEN FINEGAN: You definitely can't replicate the adrenaline and the fuel and the buzz you get playing professional sport.

You go from running out onto a stadium with 116,000 people watching and feeling the hairs on the back of your neck rise, and singing the national anthem and getting a real, you know, pumped-up feeling.

Then you retire, and the only time you sing the national anthem is when you go to a school assembly for your kids.

BRENDAN CANNON: You go from being the king of your domain, where you know exactly what your value is, what your job is, the influence you can have on your team mates, that time of thing, then all of a sudden, you're standing on your own, in a room full of strangers, which are your new work friends.

And they're wanting to talk to you about what you used to be, and all you want to focus on is what you want to become.

And you're very unsure as to who you are.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: If there is any sport that captures the Australian public's imagination, it's swimming.

BELINDA HOCKING, FORMER SWIMMER: I think it's a feeling like no other to be in the water.

This feeling like you can't really be touched.

STEPHANIE RICE, FORMER SWIMMER: The highs are incredible.

That feeling doesn't get replicated in day to day life.

BELINDA HOCKING: The elation you feel when you finish the wall knowing that you've either won or done the best that you can, is just something that you can't describe.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: But the steady procession of swimmers who have very publicly lost their way draws into sharp relief the difficulties athletes face after retirement.

STEPHANIE RICE: The perception in my mind was everything else will be downhill from here. I've just reached the pinnacle.

This is my lifelong dream, so is everything else from here downhill?

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Belinda Hocking used to be the best back-stroker in the world.

COMMENTATOR: What about this from Belinda Hocking. Just fantastic.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: She went to three Olympics and won Gold at the Commonwealth Games.

But she's gone from sporting glory to a job hunt that's lasted six months.

Recently, she found herself queuing up at Centrelink.

BELINDA HOCKING: I walked in there and they said 'well what have you done?' And I said, 'I'm a triple Olympian, I've been swimming', and they're like 'Oh my God, that's amazing!' and you go from five minutes of people saying 'that's amazing, you've had such an incredible journey, I wish I had been to an Olympics' and they're more employable than what I am.

You put on the top of your resume 'triple Olympian, dual Commonwealth Gold Medallist" and I still haven't heard back from ten jobs that I've applied for.

I've been told numerous times of 'lack of experience' and how was I meant to get that experience when what I was doing was being an elite athlete?

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Belinda Hocking even struck out when she applied for an admin job at Swimming Australia.

BELINDA HOCKING: I'm not upset at the organisation for that, but makes me feel pretty shit about my life because if I can't get a job at the organisation that I've been a part of for 13 years, it doesn't really hold out much hope for the rest of my career opportunities.

It's been really hard... sorry. You go from being the best in the world at, and I can happily say I was the best in the world at what I did.

And you've got a lot of people around you saying that the skills that you've got are transferrable and that you'll get a job quite easily, and that hasn't happened.

It's been really hard.

RACECALLER: Put the name in lights. Stephanie Rice breaks the world record.

STEPHANIE RICE: Everything that I knew about myself and prided myself on - my confidence - came from swimming.

RACECALLER: Look out Beijing. Here comes Stephanie Rice.

STEPHANIE RICE: So take away the vehicle that gave me all of those feelings and all of that pride and confidence, it was like 'who is Stephanie Rice?' because I only knew Stephanie Rice the swimmer.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: After she smashed world records and won three gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Stephanie Rice was the ultimate swimming superstar.

RACECALLER: Stephanie Rice, you are a sensation.

STEPHANIE RICE: One night I was the golden girl, triple Olympic gold medallist... and then wake up the next morning to be the worst person in the entire world.

And it just happened like that.

ABC NEWSREADER: Stephanie Rice's team mates have described a homophobic slur she made on twitter as out of character.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Stephanie Rice's fall from grace began when a stupid tweet, in which she used the word 'faggots', went viral.

ABC NEWSREADER: The offensive comment was removed late yesterday.

STEPHANIE RICE: Actually it was my mum that was like 'do you know what faggot means?' and I was like 'no!' I just didn't.

And so she had to explain her generation what it was like and then I was like, 'OK, I understand how it's been received now'.

And I was copping 500 messages or more a day of complete hate.

And okay, how do I get through this? Because I liked the good stuff, but I'm not really prepared for all the bad stuff.

STEPHANIE RICE, PRESS CONFERENCE: I just really owe it to everyone to apologise for what's happened.

And I want people to know how sorry I am for what's happened.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Rice never recovered her former Olympic glory.

She was dogged by injury and she was bitterly disappointed at her final Games in London.

STEPHANIE RICE, PRESS CONFERENCE: I think I've done absolutely everything I could have done. It's been really tough.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: She fell into a slump after the Games and felt a failure.

STEPHANIE RICE: Just a long slog of being at the bottom and not seeing any light at the end of the tunnel and that lasted for at least two years.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Stephanie Rice's good friend is Grant Hackett.

Hackett has been in rehab after spectacularly going off the rails.

Rice isn't surprised at how many athletes go down this path.

STEPHANIE RICE: You are now in this position of being 25 to 30 and having no clue what you're going to do with the next 50 years of your life.

And all your peers and everyone else around you has already gone through that when they were 17-18 at uni, figuring it out, and now they're in their journey.

They are like working to be a doctor or whatever and you're like, 'I have no idea what I want to do'.

And so, that was brutal, because you just get robbed of everything that you believe that you are, and figure out that it was all external, it was all based on other people giving me the confidence, not actually being confident inside.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Stephanie Rice has now come out the other side.

She's a businesswoman who designs swimwear and promotes health and fitness products.

But Belinda Hocking is still finding her feet.

BELINDA HOCKING: We put these athletes up on these pedestals and we want their autographs and their signatures and we want every single little piece of them while they're being an athlete.

But as soon as they're not that athlete, we don't care.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: If you were someone who had an underlying mental health problem, how do you think you would cope with all of this?

BELINDA HOCKING: I'd want to hurt myself.

I think I'd definitely want to hurt myself because there was a time a couple of weeks ago, I didn't want to leave the house.

I didn't to see anyone, I didn't want anyone to see me because I was so sick of people asking what I was doing and asking if I'm OK.

And for someone who has been all over the world to then someone who doesn't want to leave their house...

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Something's wrong?

BELINDA HOCKING: Something's wrong.

GEAROID TOWEY, CROSSING THE LINE: In the Olympian community alone, there's over a hundred who've committed suicide.

And that's including gold medallists.

You know, it's not just people who haven't made it in a sport who've struggled; it's absolute stars in the sport who have struggled.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Hocking is doing a degree in teaching and classes in animal studies.

Several weeks after we met her, she got a part-time job as a medical receptionist.

BELINDA HOCKING: I'm optimistic and I'm upbeat - I think you have to be. It was a pretty bad week last week, there was lots of crying and not knowing what I'm going to do, but I think you have to just look towards the future and hope that one day you'll wake up knowing what you want to do.

DANIEL KOWALSKI, AUSTRALIAN SWIMMERS ASSOCIATION: I think all of us involved in the sport could put our hand on our hearts and say we weren't doing enough to prepare our swimmers for life away from the pool and that's something that's being addressed.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: The peak body Swimming Australia has put in place some programs to support the athletes' wellbeing and to prepare them for life out of the pool.

DANIEL KOWALSKI: I think it needs to start earlier and it needs to not be seen as a detriment to performance, but actually as an enhancement to performance.

I think that's why it's really important that we start educating these kids at a younger level whilst their hopes and dreams are to represent their country, don't expect to make a living out of it so you can buy a house.

Prepare yourself so you can get a job, so you can afford to pay a mortgage and to put food on the table.

They're the types of things we need to be discussing.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Olympian Gearoid Towey runs Crossing the Line, an organisation which supports retiring athletes.

GEAROID TOWEY: There's a very simple question in all of this.

If you can't do your sport tomorrow, what can you do? At the moment, athletes are competing for maybe ten years, if they're lucky.

Ten years out of an 80 year life.

At the moment, that ten years, for a lot of people, it's destroying the rest of their lives. It's destroying the next sixty.

NATHAN BRACKEN, FORMER CRICKETER: When you're on, it's like you're in cruise control.

And you can see everything.

You know what's happening, you know what they're thinking, it's almost like you're playing the game one step ahead.

It's a massive adrenaline rush.

Then it goes.

And I've pretty much comes to terms that I'm not going to get that ever again.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Nathan Bracken was once the world's top one-day bowler.

Now he's in a family business that lays asphalt.

NATHAN BRACKEN: I work for my father-in-law.

He gives me utmost respect, 24-7.

I went into in an industry that I really knew very little about and he's taught me from the ground up.

REPORTER: A new test career was born when paceman Nathan Bracken became the 387th player to wear the baggy green.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: For Nathan Bracken, becoming a professional cricketer was always a childhood dream.

NATHAN BRACKEN: It's a fairy tale.

It's probably more than you ever wished for.

As a kid, you sit there and it's what you want to do and aw, how great would this be?

And all of a sudden you're in a position where it's just bigger and better than you can imagine.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: The lanky lad with the distinctive blond mop became a ferociously gifted fast bowler.

BRETT LEE, CRICKETER: He's a great One Day bowler.

He's got brilliant stats. Nathan's always done well for the Australian cricket team.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Nathan Bracken was forced to retire in 2011.

His father in law gave him the job because he simply couldn't get other work.

NATHAN BRACKEN: I applied for pretty much every job under the sun.

I applied for packing shelves in shopping centres and the comment is, 'Oh what do you need a job for?", "Oh, you don't need this", "Oh, don't be silly."

I had a sponsor who said 'mate, apply for the job'. Done.

The manager from their head office rang up and said, "Oh mate, you are going up against 22-year-old kids. You're 32."

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Bracken's career began to unravel when he was injured in 2006.

NATHAN BRACKEN: As you can see there at the bottom that's a cross section of the knee.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: And so what it is, what had you done. What is that damage?

NATHAN BRACKEN: Ah torn the cartilage.

And from there it just continued.

December was when it really got bad.

And it was in the middle of a 19 over spell, and getting towards the back end of that spell, the knee started to get sore, I felt it grab.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: So did you know that was the beginning of the end for you?

NATHAN BRACKEN: No. I just thought, 'Oh well, it's something, get it fixed, and life goes forward.'

HALEY BRACKEN, NATHAN BRACKEN'S WIFE: From then on until his retirement, his knee got progressively worse.

Basically, he was told it was bone bruising.

It will get better.

He fought to get scans.

He was given prescription medication just to mask it and he played with that injury to the point where he couldn't straighten his knee any longer.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: His wife Haley watched her husband's decline.

HALEY BRACKEN: There were times when Nathan would wake up in the morning and he couldn't walk.

So, he would hobble around like he was 80, 90 and I was scared.

I'd say to him, 'you've got to say something, you've got to do something'.

And he'd respond and say "I am. I am saying there's something wrong but I'm not getting anywhere"

LOUISE MILLIGAN: With the backing of Cricket Australia, Bracken played on through three operations and years of rehab, until he could simply play no more.

NATHAN BRACKEN: It is with great regret that I have to announce - it was a lot easier last night when I was practiced this - that I will be retiring from all forms of cricket effectively immediately.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Bracken went to see Cricket Australia to ask what it had in place for players forced to retire because of injury.

HALEY BRACKEN: So he met with them just to see if they could cover medical costs. The term they used, the words they used, was 'If you want anything from us, you have to sue us'.

NATHAN BRACKEN: There's no system set up in place to take care of players that have career-ending injuries.

It's short and sharp - 'see you later, thanks for coming'.

VOICE OVER: THIS IS DANCING WITH THE STARS!

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Floundering and worried about money, the Brackens accepted an invitation to go on the reality TV show 'Dancing with the Stars'.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: But Bracken, still struggling with the injury, was booted out at first opportunity.

COMPARE: The first couple to leave Dancing with the Stars for 2011 is... Nathan and Marsha.

NATHAN BRACKEN: I went into it with the approach of 'hey, I want to achieve something.

I don't want to feel useless and worthless any more. I want to achieve something'.

It didn't work.

I came out of that probably worse than when I went it.

I felt like I was a failure again.

That I couldn't achieve anything. I couldn't do basic things.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: By then, Nathan Bracken could barely leave the house.

NATHAN BRACKEN: Some of the goals I was setting were so trivial.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: What sort of goals?

NATHAN BRACKEN: Making breakfast.

So I'd go to bed and the goal was to get through the day to making breakfast tomorrow.

And that's it.

And that's where it's at.

I remember times you'd just sit there and you'd think... I-I felt a failure. I went from, I could provide for my family to all of a sudden, days where, yeah, I couldn't.

My wife's been amazing. And to be honest, to be honest without her, without her, and my two boys, it would be a very, very different story.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Nathan Bracken decided to sue Cricket Australia and its' doctors for negligence.

HALEY BRACKEN: Ultimately, what it came down to was we had no option.

He lost his contract.

He was injured.

We had no future prospects.

We didn't know how much the medical bills would be. We didn't know what we were facing.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Cricket Australia denied negligence and fought his claim.

The case settled confidentially.

HALEY BRACKEN: You know, Cricket Australia tout themselves as a family-friendly game but what they put my family through, it's shocking.

It took five years. The case went for five years.

So that's an indication of how vigorously it was defended.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Cricket Australia declined to be interviewed for this program and said it could not discuss Bracken's case.

In a statement, it said cricketers are provided with payments for two years after an injury.

But that's only for players on contract - those who have retired after an injury are only paid excess medical expenses.

And there is no workplace compensation scheme for cricketers or many other athletes around the country.

LEE CARSELDINE, FORMER CRICKETER: It's very, very hard on the body.

And you will walk away at the end of your career with niggles and a lot of aches and a lot of pains and in some cases, you'll have injuries that will follow you for the rest of your life but that's part and parcel of playing sport.

You get the good remuneration; you get the good returns financially for putting your body on the line.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Cricketers decided to help themselves by setting up a fund to support past players.

LEE CARSELDINE, PAST PLAYERS REP, AUST CRICKETERS' ASSOCIATION: When the Australian Cricketers Association was formed just jeez 20 years ago; there was nothing in place for players.

Not only for current playing players but also for past players.

So it's only within the last four years that the past player welfare programme has really developed and that's grown significantly and those funds are actually coming from the current playing group.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Nathan Bracken says he's on the road to accepting his new life.

NATHAN BRACKEN: The thing is, I'm out the other side and doing things like this, it's not about me.

Sitting here saying this and going through all this is not helping me.

But if we can change it for somebody else coming out of the game.

If there's something in place that can help these men and women coming out, then I'll sit and do this all day.

COURTENAY DEMPSEY, FORMER ESSENDON PLAYER: They look at us as indestructible, fit, strong, built blokes that can take anything.

But realistically, it's not the body, but it's the mind that takes over.

Which is the hardest part to mend.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Courtenay Dempsey used to run on to the MCG in front of a hundred thousand football fans.

Now he's playing footy for the Greenvale Jets, a suburban club on Melbourne's northwestern outskirts.

Dempsey was delisted from the big league, The Essendon Football club, at the end of last year.

COURTENAY DEMPSEY: The coach called me in and just said, ah, 'your services aren't needed this year, sorry next year' and umm... like everyone says, it comes with the territory and it's a cut-throat industry, professional sports, and no-one really cares about your well-being and what you do, anyways but a lot of people forget we're still human beings.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Dempsey was a teenager from an indigenous community in North Queensland when he was picked up by an Essendon scout.

COURTENAY DEMPSEY: My manager rang me up and he goes, 'oh congratulations, you got drafted to Essendon'.

And I was like, 'oh cool, thanks, where's that?' And he sort of laughed at me and said 'oh mate, you're moving down to Melbourne'.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: He played defence for the Bombers for a decade.

The dream turned sour.

The Bombers became embroiled in a scandal over the club's supplements regime.

Dempsey was one of the few who didn't take the peptides.

COURTENAY DEMPSEY: I don't like needles; actually I don't like needles now.

It was, probably, the best thing, dodging the biggest bullet you could ever, ever dodge.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: But after living through the turmoil for three years, Dempsey was told he was dropped during a 15 minute meeting with his coach.

COURTENAY DEMPSEY: You devote your whole life into that club.

And then all of a sudden they just take it away from you, and you're thinking, what have I done wrong? I've done everything that you've asked me to do and yet, you still throw this at me.

I do feel bitter.

Like a piece of meat, just getting thrown and forgotten about once they know you're done.

XAVIER CAMPBELL, ESSENDON CEO: A lot of the time players are not finishing on their terms and feel they could play longer and you know that process can be confronting and meeting with your senior coach to say that 'we're not going to extend your contract' is a challenging one.

And you know, with Courtenay, I know since his delisting, our Player Development Manager's met with him three or four times, I've met with him a couple of times to try and help with that that that transition and we'll continue to do that.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: The challenge for Courtenay Dempsey, like so many other athletes, is that he's never done anything else.

COURTENAY DEMPSEY: I've been stuck in this regime for 11 years, 12 years, most of my life, and all of a sudden I've got to go out into the wider world and fend for myself, which I don't have a clue about because I went from school straight into football.

And All I know is football.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Dempsey hit rock bottom. His family were very concerned.

COURTENAY DEMPSEY: They kept harping on about me seeing someone, saying I've got some form of depression.

I thought, 'nah, there's nothing wrong with me, I'm just upset about being delisted and finishing not on my own merits'.

And you know, I still say that to this day that I was fine.

But then when I slowly go over it, and look at it, you can tell that a lot of it probably was depression and a lot of my family were right about it.

GRANT THOMAS, FORMER ST KILDA COACH: We can all cast our minds back from 18 to 30. Pretty much what happens in those times is important for the rest of your life.

That's at a time that AFL players are in a bubble where they're treated as superheroes and they get an impression of the world that's just so far from reality.

Unfortunately, we tend to deal with effects rather than causes, so we only wait to hear of the terrible stories we hear of players not coping with life after football and circumstances around that before we start doing anything.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: For Sydney Swans coach, John Longmire, the focus is trying to identify and head off problems long before players retire.

The club's hired an in-house clinical psychologist to work with players on their mental health rather than simply addressing their performance.

JOHN LONGMIRE, SYDNEY SWANS' COACH: There's no point talking about performance if the person's not feeling right in themselves.

And it just seems like a common sense approach to be able to treat the clinical part of it, rather the performance part of it first, because if you did it the other way around, I'm not sure you'd get the right result.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: In 2015, Longmire gave star player Lance 'Buddy' Franklin several months off to manage his mental health and epilepsy.

JOHN LONGMIRE, SYDNEY SWANS' COACH: It's not just about one player here.

It's hopefully allowing the opportunity for people and players to talk about it, and not be judged - that's the most important thing.

GRANT THOMAS: I think the AFL can do a lot more work.

They have psychologists and psychiatrists and the like in place, but in my mind, that's not dealing with the causes, it's dealing with the effects.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Former St Kilda coach Grant Thomas believes the more professional sport has become, the more removed athletes are from reality.

He believes compulsory training and education is vital.

GRANT THOMAS: We send kids in secondary schools to do work experience.

Why can't you send AFL players to do work experience? Are they above that? Don't they want to know what they want to do if their career collapses on them? Do they know what industry they want to work in? Do they know what their skills are?

LOUISE MILLIGAN: At Essendon, they've brought in programs to try to address this problem.

XAVIER CAMPBELL, ESSENDON CEO: Particularly in their first four years, their developmental years as a player.

Their financial literacy, organisational skills, coping with resilience, general coping skills.

A lot of that is mandatory.

And then beyond that, it comes into much more tailored programs around specific areas of interest for players.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Courtenay Dempsey is still finding his way.

He wants to build a profile working with the indigenous community.

He's engaged a social media company to help him achieve this.

SAM MUTIMER: OK Courtenay, what we're going to do today is we're going to cover a social media campaign, I know that you've got a speaking gig up and coming.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Recently, he found a job recruiting and managing indigenous security guards and cleaners.

COURTENAY DEMPSEY: My competitiveness will probably come out in this and I'll want to develop and get somewhere in what I'm doing now.

So be the best in what I'm doing now and hopefully that will come about sooner rather than later.

LAUREN JACKSON, FORMER BASKETBALLER: As a young athlete all you are thinking about is the now. You're on an island; you're on your own.

For your entire life, you're being told, 'you're the best, you're the greatest. You're doing this, you're doing that. And then all of a sudden, there's no-one there.

Everything, it just sort of stops.

Everything just stops.

One of my good friends from America, one of my teammates, said to me, 'you know, athletes die two times'.

And it's true.

Once your career is over, you've got to recreate yourself in a way that other people don't really have to.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Lauren Jackson didn't think about that when she was quite literally at the top of her game.

JACOB HOLMES, AUSTRALIAN BASKETBALLERS' ASSOCIATION: Lauren's an absolute superstar.

As a sportsperson but also as a person.

I think she's delivered outcomes for basketball in Australia that will be never surpassed.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: For Jackson, the dream started when a four-year-old beanpole from the NSW border town of Albury started shooting hoops.

At a touch under two metres tall, she moved to the Institute of Sport at fifteen, then went on to play for Seattle Storm in America.

COMMENTATOR: How good is Lauren Jackson? She can be a defence is player? She can be offensive... I mean what can't she be?

SPORTS REPORTER: For the second time in five years Lauren Jackson has been named most valuable player in the WNBA...

JACOB HOLMES: Lauren was pretty ruthless, obviously. I mean, you don't become the best player in the world if you're not ruthless and competitive and highly-skilled.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: She brought home four medals from four Olympics and carried the Australian flag in London.

LAUREN JACKSON: That was the most amazing thing ever, I actually just can't remember what I was feeling at the time - it was so euphoric, I was so euphoric.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Lauren Jackson ploughed on through a cascading series of injuries - hip, shoulder, broken ankle, fractured back.

But it was her knee that got her in the end.

LAUREN JACKSON: My knee had just turned to mush.

It was just the bones were soft, I suppose you would say.

I couldn't actually get back from it.

It was the universe's way of telling me it was all over.

The doctor sort of said to me, like, 'You've got no chance, your knees are not going to do it'. And I just broke down.

I was in tears.

And that feeling is something that I'll never forget, but I couldn't do any more, so.

LAUREN JACKSON, RETIREMENT PRESS CONFERENCE: To say goodbye to my love, what was my life, my identity, which was so wrapped up in basketball...you know it just hurts, it hurts a lot.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: But as she retired, Lauren Jackson was harbouring a secret. Her injuries left her dependent on a cocktail of prescription medication.

LAUREN JACKSON: There are high stakes.

You're getting paid a lot of money to perform, and when you're a franchise player or someone that is expected to perform day in, day out, you do what you have to do to get by.

For me, that was pain killers, you know? And sleeping pills, generally.

Because after games I'd be in so much pain that you just want to go to sleep.

Anyway, you just sort of get in a cycle. And for me, with the knee surgery(s!). Multiple.

I was just in so much pain and rehabbing it.

Oh my god it was just a nightmare. So, having to get off everything was really, really, really hard.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: She went home to her parents to detox.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: What medication were you on?

LAUREN JACKSON: Do you really want to know? I don't even... I was on a LOT of stuff.

I mean, to be honest, I really don't want to even talk about what I was on publicly, but it was enough to make me go... I had to stop.

Otherwise I could have ended up like anybody else who had had a really tough time getting out of sport.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: It wasn't just coming off the drugs.

It was also the physical side effects athletes experience when they stop playing elite sport.

GAYELENE CLEWS, PSYCHOLOGIST: They're going through almost a chemical withdrawal, and in many ways you could probably liken it to coming off something like cocaine.

When you're actually engaged in physical exercise and movement, it can be very emotionally stabilising because it brings up the serotonin, brings up the dopamine, when you do it as part of a team and a group, brings in the oxytocin.

They're all feel-good neurochemicals that actually help stabilise mood, but they also help with concentration and learning and memory.

So the athletes can find themselves highly emotionally disregulated, like anxious, struggling with depression as a result of the chemical change.

LAUREN JACKSON: The crashing part, the depression part, it's, that for me was the hardest part to deal with.

I had to go on anti-depressants for periods of time through my career because it was difficult to readjust.

To readjust to life.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: What about the support network that you had around you and suddenly, do you have anything?

LAUREN JACKSON: It's gone! No. The people that really pushed me to get to the highest levels, they're just, like I haven't heard from anyone.

I'm sure if I called Basketball Australia and said, "I need a job. I need help. I need something, help me" .

I'm sure that they would help.

There's no doubt in my mind.

Was there any structure in place leading into my retirement? No, there wasn't.

ANTHONY MOORE, BASKETBALL AUSTRALIA: Lauren's right.

There is no structure in place.

There wasn't when she retired and there still isn't and that's not good enough.

We need to support our elite talent both on the court and off the court, when they're in the team and when they're not in the team and as they're transitioning.

For us to be able to build that structure over the next 3 to 5 years, that's an absolute priority for our business.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Lauren Jackson's saviour was a baby boy.

Harry was born in February this year.

LAUREN JACKSON: He's the best thing that ever happened to me because I could quite well have... who knows?

I don't even want to think about what could have happened to me.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Lauren Jackson and all of the athletes we spoke to say their sports can do much better to prepare young people for the brutal shock of life after sport.

LAUREN JACKSON: The government puts in a lot of money into making us as finely-tuned as possible so that we can win medals at Olympic Games, World Championships and things like that.

It's a bit like being put out to pasture when you retire.

You just, 'All right, we're done with you now, on your way'.

There has to be.

Just a little bit more support through that process.

LOUISE MILLIGAN: Jackson also has a message for young athletes embarking on their career.

LAUREN JACKSON: I wish I could say to another young athlete, 'It's going to stop. It stops really quickly. It ends. You need to find yourself, find out who you are - now.

Do it.