At a glance…
- Olympian and Australian Survivor winner Shane Gould knows a thing or two about perseverance and winning. Despite that, she was the first person banished on Traitors Australia 2026.
- Was it her reputation outside the game that led to her banishment?
- She sits down with The Weekly to discuss the season and what she missed out on.
For more than five decades, Shane Gould has been proving that age is no barrier to achieving something extraordinary.
At just 15, she became an Olympic champion, winning three gold medals at the 1972 Munich Games. More than four decades later, she entered Australian Survivor and showed an entirely new generation that her competitive instincts had not disappeared with time, winning the series at 61 in 2018.
So when Shane Gould walked into The Traitors Australia, she was hardly an unknown quantity. And perhaps that was her problem. The 69-year-old was the first person banished from The Traitors Australia, echoing her return to Australian Survivor: All Stars in 2020 when she was also the first person voted out.
For Shane, there is an uncomfortable question behind both exits: how much of the decision was based on the game she was actually playing, and how much was based on what people already thought they knew about her?
“I don’t apologise for my bigness,” Shane told her fellow contestants at the Round Table, pointing out that her Survivor victory was only “a small part” of her life. Speaking to The Weekly after her banishment, she says it was “terribly frustrating” to watch people make decisions about her so quickly.
“It’s a quick judgment,” she says. “But that’s what the game forces you to make decisions that, with good thought, you might not want more time to think through.”
And Shane knows something about being judged on the basis of a reputation. Her entire adult life has unfolded in the public eye. First she was the teenage swimming sensation who took the world by storm. Then came decades of life beyond the pool, before she returned to reality television and became a Survivor champion. That win, she believes, made her an obvious target.
“I was hoping that they wouldn’t look at me and say, okay, she’s been a winner of another show, so we will vote her out,” she says. Instead, she had hoped the other contestants would resist what she calls the “easy option” of getting rid of previous winners.
“I was trying to convince the players to not go for the easy option. Make good TV,” she says. “The easy option was to get rid of the winners… Keep the good players in there, and make it interesting.”
It wasn’t the first time she’d encountered that problem. When Shane returned to Australian Survivor for All Stars, she was also the first player voted out.
“I had big plans,” she says, laughing. She had hoped The Traitors would be different. Instead, her reputation once again preceded her.
“I didn’t want to join with the group as former Survivor players. It’s too predictable. It’s too scripted,” she says.
“I wanted us all to come together. And this is us. This is who we are. Yes, we have all the experiences, but that’s not who we are. That’s not our identity. Let’s play the game and get to know each other and make it more interesting in the now, not based on past events or experiences or notoriety.”
There was another layer to the suspicion, too.
Ian “Dicko” Dickson, who was instrumental in pushing Shane’s name at the Round Table, is from the same generation as the swimming legend. Shane believes that familiarity may have worked against her.
“He’s of my generation, so he knows of me in real life,” she explains. “He’s grown up seeing me on TV as an athlete, seeing… different things in my life.”
Shane believes Dicko also recognised that, as an older, well-known contestant himself, he could become a target.
“So I think that he knew me and then he recognised, being an older person, that he might be targeted as well. So he was trying to deflect away from himself towards me, get rid of me first.”
Dicko was concerned that the contestants wouldn’t want to see an older person win; he said so in the first episode. To protect himself, he created the LSD alliance (Loyalty, Secrecy, and Discipline). However, by creating a secret alliance, he put the target on his back.
When asked whether she thought “the age card” played a role, Shane agrees, but with an important qualification.
“I think the age card, but it was more that he personally, he grew up with me,” she says. “He knew me more than other people did from reading about me.”
And that knowledge, she believes, included an understanding of her competitive strengths.
“He knew, you know, being an older person, he kind of knew some of my strategies and power to have got through the Survivor game.”
There was also the unfortunate matter of Cam Merchant’s key.
Before the game had even properly begun, Shane was given the power to choose another contestant to leave. Trust Gretel Killeen and the Traitors team to come up with an impossible decision.
“It felt totally unfair,” she says. “It was a moral dilemma… In that split second, I thought, no, I’m going to be a bit wicked and traitorous here and play this traitor game and stay in the game and vote someone else out.”
The decision became another piece of evidence for those already questioning her. For Shane, however, the real frustration was how quickly a narrative could take hold.
“Oh, terribly frustrating,” she says. “It’s a quick judgment.”
She points out that once one person begins pushing a particular name, others can simply follow.
“‘Dicko’ forcing Shane on us. All right, I’ll go with you. At least it’s not me. Anyone but me,” she recalls. “It’s very difficult to stand out.”
In a game built around suspicion, perhaps that is the ultimate irony for someone like Shane Gould. Her extraordinary history is both her greatest achievement and, in a reality TV game, something she cannot leave at the door.
Away from the pool and the reality TV world, Shane is also passionate about water safety, which is why viewers may have noticed her wearing a Float to Survive T-shirt during The Traitors Australia.
The program is headed by Bruce “Hoppo” Hopkins of Bondi Rescue, who developed the message after finding that traditional water-safety advice did not always go far enough. Shane and her husband, Milt, have worked with Hoppo for several years to help develop the program, which teaches people how to stay calm and move slowly in the water if they find themselves in trouble.
“It’s an active float,” Shane explained. “It’s not just a passive… star float. It’s actually just move slowly.”
The idea is simple: rather than panic or fight against the current, remain calm, go with the flow and allow the water to help carry you back to safety.
For Shane, appearing on a national television show was an opportunity to spread that message well beyond the swimming community.
“It might mean I’ve saved someone’s life,” she said of wearing the shirt. It is a fitting cause for an Olympic champion whose life has been so closely connected to the water and one that Shane hopes people will remember long after her brief time in The Traitors castle.
She had hoped The Traitors would give viewers the chance to see beyond the Olympic medals and the Survivor title.
“I wish I’d stayed on The Traitors because it would have been an opportunity to reveal more about myself, my thinking processes, my interests and my relationships and my struggles,” she says.
“Because that comes out with those confessional interviews.”
She may have only lasted one Round Table, but Shane isn’t bitter about the decision.
“It’s these games. You just can’t take it personally. You have to have a pretty tough skin,” she says.
Still, her early exit raises a fascinating question.
Was Shane Gould banished from Traitors Australia because she was a formidable player with a proven record of winning, or because the other contestants saw a 69-year-old Olympic legend and Survivor champion and decided they knew exactly what she was capable of?
Perhaps, in a game where perception is everything, the answer is a little bit of both.
Watch The Traitors Australia Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7.30pm on 10 or on-demand on 10Play.
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