Ms Jessicah Schipper OAM

It lasted all of 3min 52.69sec, but it was a moment that Jessicah Schipper would never forget.

Sunday, 17 August 2008. The women's 4x100m medley relay was the final event on the swimming program at the Beijing Olympic Games.

She stood anxiously as Emily Seebohm took the Australian team out in the backstroke and Liesel Jones followed in the breaststroke. And then for 56.25sec Schipper did what she did best. She swam 100m butterfly. Fast.

So fast did she swim that she gave Libby Trickett a flying start in the final freestyle leg. And that was all she needed. Australia won the gold medal in world record time. 

In a 12-year international career, which included multitudes of success, much of it in individual events, this was her golden moment. 

The ever-smiling girl from Pine Rivers High had also won Olympic gold in the mdeley relay in Athens in 2004 as a heat swimmer. She'd won individual bronze medals in the 100m and 200m butterfly in Beijing. But this was what mattered most to a person who epitomised the word team.

One of the best butterfly swimmers in the world for more than a decade, Schipper won individual gold in the 2005 world championships over 100m, and did likewise over 200m in 2007 and 2009, when she broke the world record. She alsso won gold in the medley relay at the world championships in 2005 and 2007, and set a 100m short-course world record in 2008.

At the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne she won the 100m - 200m butterfly double, before retaining her 200m title four years later in Delhi.

Always a first-class ambassador for her sport and her country, she also swan at the 2012 London Olympics before reiting in 2014 to enjoy life as a wife and mother.