Holly Lincoln-Smith

Lincoln-Smith was born on 26 March 1988 in Sydney.[2][3] She has two sisters and is her parents's youngest child.[4] She currently lives in Mona Vale, New South Wales.[2] In 2004, she was living in Warriewood, New South Wales.[5] In 2005, her father had open-heart surgery in order to remove a tumour and her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.[2][6][7] In 2009 her oldest sister died "after a long battle with anorexia and depression".[2][6][8] In 2010, her sister Emma Lincoln-Smith represented Australia at the 2010 Winter Olympics in skeleton.[2][6] The sisters are hoping to become the first set of sibling Olympians where one competed at the Summer Games and the other at the Winter Games.[6][9] She is currently involved in a long-term relationship.[2]

In 2001 at the age of 12, Lincoln-Smith competed in the U13 finals of the NSW Junior Surf Life Saving Championships.[4][10] During the event, she saved the life of fellow competitor Tom Fabian after he was in distress. She left the course to rescue him and, after helping, got the attention of the safety crew on a boat, resumed her swim and finished 27th in the field of 40 swimmers.[4][10]

Lincoln-Smith attended Mackellar Girls School, where Debbie Watson was her physical education teacher.[2] In 2005, she completed her Higher School Certificate while a student at Queenwood School for Girls.[7] She went on to attend Macquarie University where she is doing a course on Human Resource Management.[2][11] As of 2011, she was in her third year of the programme.[12] In 2008, she earned a scholarship from Macquarie Sports to help her focus on water polo. As part of the scholarship, the Macquarie Group required her to spend a week in their offices where she received some "work experience as a trader in foreign exchange".[11]

Lincoln-Smith is 183 cm (6 ft 0 in) tall, weighs 83 kilograms (13 st 1 lb), is right handed[2] and has a tattoo on her left ankle of a cherry blossom, which represents her family.[2][6]

Lincoln-Smith is a centre forward[6][13] and prefers to wear cap number two or four.[2] She started playing the sport as a 13-year-old at Mackellar Girls Campus where Debbie Watson, an Olympic gold medalist and the school's water polo coach, nagged her to try the sport.[2][9] She has held a scholarship for water polo from the New South Wales Institute of Sport[14][15] and the Australian Institute of Sport.[16]

In 2004, she represented New South Wales at the U17 national championships where the team came out on top, and she was the leading goal scorer and named the player of the tournament.[5] This victory was one of the contributing factors to her getting a call up to the junior national team.[5] In 2008, she represented New South Wales as a member of the U20 team at the national championships. Her team took home gold after a 9–6 victory over Western Australia where she scored three goals in the match. The 2008 win was her fourth and final U20 national championship win.[17] In 2009, shortly after her eldest sister's death, she seriously injured her shoulder when she dislocated it while at the gym and required reconstruction surgery on it.[6][8] As a result, she was unable to compete in water polo for nine months.[2][6][8]

Senior national team

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Lincoln-Smith is a member of the Australia women's national water polo team.[25] She competed in a tournament in the United States for the senior side in 2006 because Melissa Rippon and Taniele Gofers were injured.[26] In 2009, she was part of the Australian side that finished third at the FINA World League Super Finals in Kirishi, Russia.[19][27] This was her first major tournament on the senior side.[19] In 2009, at the FINA World Championships where Australia finished sixth,[28] she was named by her team as the Australian Player of the Tournament.[6][8] This was her first major international tournament with the team.[2]

In 2010, Lincoln-Smith was a member of the Stingers squad that competed at the FINA World Cup in Christchurch, New Zealand[29][30] that took home a silver medal.[2] She was part of the Australian side that won a silver medal at the 2011 Kirishi Cup in June. In the game for the medal, they played Kazakhstan women's national water polo team. In that match, she scored three goals.[31] At the 2011 Canada Cup, she scored a goal in the first period in the gold medal match against China that the Australian team ended up winning.[25] She represented Australia at the 2011 FINA World Championships.[9] She competed in the Pan Pacific Championships in January 2012 for the Australian Barbarians.[32] In early 2012, she survived the first cut of players for the team that would compete at the Olympics when the selection was narrowed down to nineteen players.[6] In February 2012, she was named to the final training squad for the 2012 Summer Olympics. She attended training camp that started on 20 February 2012 at the Australian Institute of Sport.[3] The team of seventeen players will be cut to thirteen before the team departs for the Olympic games,[33] with the announcement being made on 13 June.[34] She was part of the Stingers squad that competed in a five-game test against Great Britain at the AIS in late February 2012. This was the team's first matches against Great Britain's national team in six years.[33] In the first game of the test series on 21 February 2012 that Australia won 13 – 5, she scored one goal.[35]

In 2005, the New South Wales Institute of Sport awarded Lincoln-Smith the Ian Thorpe Grand Slam International outstanding achievement award, and she had an opportunity to meet Ian Thorpe.[7]