Shayna Jack's sad admission after 2024 Olympics: 'Lost and confused'

Yahoo

10-02-2025

Shayna Jack has been quite busy over the past 12 months, winning two gold medals at the 2024 Paris Olympics, competing on I'm A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, and most recently being awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia. Yet despite all of her incredible achievements, the champion swimmer admits she entered 2025 feeling 'lost and confused' about her future.
Shayna, whose world imploded when she tested positive for a banned substance five years ago and served a two-year competition ban, tells Yahoo Lifestyle she worked so hard to have a redemption arc after being branded a 'drug cheat' that she wasn't sure what to do when she finally achieved it.
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'I had no idea what I wanted to do moving forward after the Olympics. I was very lost and very confused about my career and my purpose because when I came back after my drug saga, my purpose was to prove a point,' she shares.
'My purpose was to get on that Olympic team and basically send a message that stands and speaks louder than anything. And I did that, and I came home with two Olympic gold medals, and when I finished, I felt like, what's my purpose now?'
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The 26-year-old says spending over three weeks in the jungle on I'm A Celebrity gave her the time to reflect on her career and begin to think about her next move - writing her first memoir.
'My time in the jungle gave me so much time to reflect and be proud of myself and see how far I've come and be proud of the woman that I am because of everything that I've faced. And in a way, it inspired potentially a book,' she reveals.
'Why wouldn't I help people and start trying to share my knowledge of the lessons that I've learned and the experiences that I've had? And even if it reaches one person and helps one person, it's more than I was potentially doing the day before. So being in the jungle was an incredible decision for me. It allowed me to find some fire to get me going again.'
Speaking about her experience on I'm A Celebrity, Shayna shares that her favourite moment was being told she had been awarded an Order of Australia because it was the first time in her career she had been given an 'immediate celebration'.
She explains that most athletes are hard-wired not to give themselves the approval that they have accomplished a lifelong goal and proven something to themselves or others, so it was 'very special' having her co-stars support and celebrate her in the moment.
'A lot of the time, even at the Olympics, we won gold on the first night but you still had eight more days of racing - and I raced on day nine. So I had to basically take my medal off, put it away, get back to my room and go to bed. There was no celebration with family and my fiancé and friends. You don't go on social media and celebrate with everybody there, you move on,' she details.
'And so for me to get the OAM award in the jungle and have Nicky [Buckley] read it out was incredibly special, because I just didn't expect it,' she continues. 'It really did bring me to tears and I can say wholeheartedly that if that happened outside of the jungle, I probably wouldn't have publicly told people, because it's not necessarily something that we publicly always talk about.'
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Shayna became the third celebrity eliminated from I'm A Celebrity on Sunday night after Married At First Sight star Samantha Moitzi and TV host Nicky Buckley.
Her time in the jungle was dedicated to supporting the Prostate Cancer Australia Foundation in honour of her dad, who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2023, and her fiancé's grandfather who had died from prostate cancer.