“Failure Is The Greatest Lesson”

From a ruthless sacking, to a high profile divorce, to heartbreak after an 18-month IVF battle, Johanna Griggs tells Tiffany Dunk how her lowest points have inevitably led to her biggest and brightest triumphs.

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When you walk into Johanna Griggs’ home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, one feature is glaringly absent. The House Rules and Better Homes and Gardens host was the first female Australian swimmer to break the 30-second barrier for the 50-metre backstroke. But you won’t find a single piece of memorabilia of the sport which shot her to stardom as a 14 year old before spring-boarding a successful media career that has lasted over 26 years and counting.

“All the stuff in our house is about our family unit and the memories that we’ve made together,” explains Johanna of her decision to leave the trophies gathering dust in the garage.

“In fact, my boys [Jesse James, 24, and Joe Buster, 23] were quite old before they realised I’d even had a background as a swimmer because, to be perfectly honest, to them I’m just ‘mum’. I remember one of them coming home from school one day and asking if I was a swimmer, or a swimmer swimmer. I told him what I’d done and he went, ‘Oh, that’s embarrassing because I was saying to people that I’d never seen you swim before’.”

Today, Johanna laughs, the only swimming she does is in the dam at the farm in the NSW Hunter Valley that she and husband Todd Huggins, 44, retreat to in their time off. It’s a far cry from those early years, which saw the sports-mad teenager relentlessly powering through the pool after taking up the sport competitively at the relatively late age of 13.

A year later, she made the national team. At 16, she won bronze at the 1990 Commonwealth Games. But at 17, Johanna was felled by chronic fatigue syndrome, which was so severe she would spend two-and-a-half long and lonely years recuperating.