First Olympians: Palau's teen swimming Queen looks back

Imagine being 16 years old and competing in the biggest sporting event on the planet.

Now imagine being 16, eight a half thousand miles form home without a cellphone.

Welcome to the life of Nicole Hayes: one of Palau's first Olympians at the 2000 Sydney Games, a civil engineer and, 21 years later, proud owner of a cellphone.

"There was no way to call my mum when I landed and say 'mum I got here safe'. There was no way to email my mum and say 'mum I got here safe'. My parents just put me one a plane and said 'good luck'.

Now 37, Hayes was born in New York, raised in Houston, Texas and now calls Washington DC home.

Born to a Palauan mother and American dad, she still remembers American summers spent in the South Pacific with her extended family.

"My mum is Palauan, my dad is from Charlotte, North Carolina and when they met I think he was in the Peace Corps at the time.

"So that's how they met - otherwise they would have never had an opportunity to meet, which is pretty cool - so she came back to the States with him when he returned and myself, my sister and my brother did our schooling here in the United States."

And it was at school where her affinity with water began.

"I think I was five or six and my teacher at the time just said to my parents:

'Hey, she's doing pretty good. Do you think she wants to do this more frequently? Do you think she wants to do this after the lessons are over?'

"My parents asked me and you're a kid, you're like 'sure I like this, this is fun' and so they signed me up for a team."

In hindsight, Hayes thinks her parents might had an ulterior motive.

"They probably thought we have to teach her discipline, we have to teach her work ethic, we want her to grow up exercising and we want her to have positive experiences on a team - let's let her do that!"

But she enjoyed swimming - and she was good at it. 

At 14 she found herself representing her mother's homeland at the 1998 Micronesian Games in Palau.

A year later the Palau National Olympic Committee was recognised by the IOC, and on the lookout for athletes to compete at Sydney 2000.

"They way the rules worked back then was the most approachable way for a country to compete for the first time is to have a male and a female in an individual sport, so they were looking at sports like track and field, like swimming, like weightlifting."

Hayes made the cut after impressing at the 2000 Oceania Swimming Championships in New Zealand. Three months later she touched down in Sydney and, on her very first day, came face to face with her sporting idols in the cafeteria.

"I had a yellow beanie on because I was cold and the Australian swim team walked in. There's Grant Hackett, there's Ian Thorpe, there's Michael Klim - you know all those people that you hear about, they're in magazines. They're not real almost and there they were.

"You're 16, (thinking) play it cool, play it cool. Eat your dinner, don't drop your fork, and then one of them comes by and says 'cool hat' and I just melted into the floor." 

Representing Palau in the pool was also a special moment for Nicole's extended family.

"For the Palauan side of my family it was definitely a great way to get to know my family better, so on a personal level it was really meaningful for us. For the American side of my family everybody came to Sydney and it was actually the first time our whole American family was able to get together."

Hayes was among five athletes to represent Palau in their first ever Olympic Games. 

She's still in regular contact with sprinter Peoria Koshiba, although fellow swimmer Anlloyd Samuel and weightlifter Valerie Pedro, who was the country's flag-bearer and first competitor, have since passed away.

"I was the youngest on the team so they gave me a lot of grace," she recalled.

"It was for me the young kid hanging out with the older cool kids because everybody was college age, so I was this high school kid hanging out with college kids so it was really cool."

A day after Pedro made Palau's Olympic debut in the light-heavyweight division, it was time for Hayes to make splash in the 100m freestyle heats.

"Sydney was the first year that they allowed the full body-suits for competition but the catch was those suits were only allowed as long as they were made available for everyone.

"So Speedo came in and just had boxes and boxes and boxes of swimsuits and said, 'hey everybody, take 15".

Hayes won the opening heat in a time of 1:00:89 but only ranked 47th overall and did not progress to the semi-finals.

She continued to represent Palau at the World Swimming Championships, the Micronesian Games and the South Pacific Games but persistent injuries led Hayes to retire from the sport at just 19.

"I was really broken-hearted about it for years," she admitted.

"I couldn't watch Athens, I could barely watch Beijing and I watched London. That was the first Olympics that I was really able to watch because I didn't want to retire when I did."

"But I was injured, I had life-needs and so it was a little bit out of my control, but everything turned out the way it should have and because of that I've been able to build a life."

Hayes still holds a number of Palauan national records, including a best effort of 1:13:71 in the 100m backstroke at the 2001 World Swimming Championships in Fukuoka, Japan.

Fast forward to 2021 and Hayes may no longer be a competitive athlete but her niece and nephew have inherited the swimming bug.

"My sister's got three kids and watching other people's kids learn how to swim, old team-mates are telling me, 'hey I'm telling my son or daughter to swim fast like my friend Nicole used to'.

"That's really cool but I don't get to a pool. I did do triathlon for a little while, so I was swimming a bit - but no (more). I still have my old swimsuits but I don't know if I'd fit into them either."

After working in civil engineering and design, project management and running her own company she's now living the corporate life in the US capital.

But, more than two decades on, the memories of a truly unforgettable few weeks in the Sydney sun still ring true.

"We did a 'have you ever' at work and they did this ice-breaker question and said 'if your house was on fire and your family was out and your pets were out and you had to go back and get one thing what would it be?

"I have my uniforms from the opening ceremony, which was a story in of itself, I have my ID on the lanyard and all the pins that I traded for they're still on the ID.

"And now this one's slightly embarrassing but I will share it anyway...whenever you leave the Olympic village they say take anything you want and since I was 16 I took anything I wanted, so I still have the comforter that was on my bed."