BACK IN JUNE, Sam Fricker entered the Australian Open Diving Championships with a shot at qualifying for the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. Having made his Olympic debut at Tokyo 2020 and with a Commonwealth Games bronze medal under his belt, Fricker was favoured to do so. Ultimately, it was Cassiel Rousseau and Jaxon Bowshire who snapped up the two available qualifying spots while Fricker was left out, but he wasn’t without support.
Fricker shared his disappointment on TikTok in a video where he gazes wistfully across an airplane aisle with his head in his hands. He captioned it “POV: Flying home from the Olympic trials when you didn’t make the team”. Sounds fairly simple, right? Well, that video has 4.6 million views and has received almost 2,000 comments of consolation.
@samfricker I’ll never give up, I love the sport and will continue to fight for my dream to win an Olympic Medal 🙌 #olympics ♬ Pink Skies – Zach Bryan
This is the norm for Fricker. The 22-year-old’s most viral TikTok has almost 60 million views and his videos regularly cross the ten million view mark. If social media followings were the only metric on which sports stardom was measured, you might assume that Fricker is Australia’s greatest athlete. His two million TikTok followers far outnumber those of basketball stars Josh Giddey (908,000), Patty Mills (335,000) and Ben Simmons (243,000), F1 driver Oscar Piastri (784,000), Olympic gold medallist Jess Fox (195,000) and tennis bad boy Nick Kyrgios (207,000).
“It [TikTok] has changed my life. I never thought that my social media content could go that far and reach that many people. I posted videos on YouTube for years and I got like ten views a day,” Fricker tells Men’s Health. “I think every athlete should do it because then you have the freedom to do what you want and share what you want and build a brand without being limited by things like the timing of big events.”
Fricker’s TikTok journey started when he was 17. His first video on the platform – posted in 2019 – is a simple clip of the diver showing off a new haircut with the song ‘Solo’ by Clean Bandit playing. It has less than 10,000 views and typifies most people’s initial TikTok experience, but it was only the start for Fricker. “My sister got me onto TikTok and I just started making a few funny videos, I didn’t think much of it,” he says. “It’s been an incredible rollercoaster since then that has grown into something that is bigger than I ever could have imagined.”
Fricker is now up for a TikTok award in the ‘Sport & Fitness Creator of the Year’ category, and he doesn’t understate how much the award would mean to him. “TikTok has changed my life and I love the platform so much, so winning a TikTok award would be something I’d be really proud of,” he says.
Having a supportive community that numbers in the millions has helped Fricker in some harder moments, like his recent Olympics near miss. “When I’m outside of comp, I feel extremely grateful to have these people that follow along who I can create content for and it does motivate me.”
These moments come part and parcel with being an elite athlete, according to Fricker. “To become an Olympian, there were so many failures I had to deal with along the way,” he says. “So many times you look in the mirror and you think can I do this?”
Fricker had that question answered earlier in his career, when he won a 2017 international youth diving meet in Dresden, Germany. He picks that victory out as the best moment in his career. “At my first international event, I didn’t do very well. I made the final but came last in it and I came away thinking it was impossible to get a medal at those events. I thought that everyone else was just that much better than me,” he explains.
“I came back years later and won a gold medal in Dresden and it was like a perspective shift,” Fricker continues. “That was one of the first times that I’d been completely smashed in the face and knocked down, so to come back and achieve something I thought was impossible showed me what I was capable of doing.”
Fricker still thinks back on his Dresden experience when coping with failure and has devised a system for overcoming setbacks. “I’ve learned to deal with those barriers by having a little system where I write things down, set new goals and sometimes go back to the drawing board when something doesn’t work out,” he says. “No matter how hard it is, you ride your plan and you start chipping away at it nearly immediately. After the Olympics that’s exactly what I did.”
Moving forward, Fricker’s goal isn’t simply to get back to the Olympics. He’s aiming higher. “My dream is to win an Olympic medal,” he says. “That’d be my last goal in diving that I haven’t achieved yet, having made the Olympics, won a Commonwealth medal and been an Australian champion.”
Fricker understands that to be an Olympic medallist, he’s going to need to work for it. While he’s battling through an injury at the moment – an issue with his lower back that he describes in his personal diagnosis as “either a disc or maybe a stress fracture” – he did give us an insight into his intense training routine.
“Training keeps my whole life centred. Everything else works around it,” Fricker says. “Typically I’ll train for two hours in the morning and three hours in the night for a total of 24 hours per week. In the mornings we’re always doing a lot of core work, a lot of body work, a lot of strength work. You’ve got to be strong in your legs and core because they’re what you use to control everything when you’re in the air. Then you need your upper body to take the impact.”
“We dive for nearly three hours of the night and I would do between 60 and 90 dives a day.” Fricker continues. “It’s not like running, but because you’re going up stairs for hours and hours, it’s like a really long period of cardio, which also helps me stay in shape.”
@samfricker #diving #olympics ♬ original sound – rapidsongs
Maintaining such an arduous regime is crucial for Fricker, as major events are dwindling for divers and performing well during what few opportunities remain is a necessity. Diving events will not be held at the 2026 Commonwealth Games as organisers have announced a shortened program due to Victoria pulling out from hosting duties. This leaves divers like Fricker with even less time in the spotlight and means that every major event counts that much more. But here again, he finds a benefit in social media.
“A lot of divers train in the quiet. They don’t get a lot of publicity unless there’s a big event like the Commonwealth Games, which can be a big payoff,” Fricker says. “Having those events taken away makes it tough for the younger athletes. I’m very grateful to have social media because it allows me to capitalise on every single day and reach an audience and stay in the spotlight without having to wait for those major events.”
The TikTok awards will take place on November 27th and will be streamed live on the @tiktok_australia TikTok account. A win would mean a lot to Fricker, but as he says, he doesn’t do it for the accolades. “I just like making videos,” he says. “It’s really humbling that so many people enjoy watching them.”
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