Well, it's great that you kind of broke that down for us because just looking over your Wikipedia page, it says that you wanted to pursue more of a social life. If there's any other questions, just ask me because I can ramble on for hours.ĭustin: No, that's perfect. I needed to break the apron strings and be independent and start discovering life was all about. At that time in life I felt I needed to get away from my family. I want to go into the military." He just looked at me like I was nuts. He said, "You're going home?" I said, "Yeah. My coach came up to me and put his arm around me and he look at me. I got out of the pool one day and sat on the side. I got out of the pool after three years of swimming in England. Four years of training in the United States. Yeah, went back to England and carried on swimming and got offered the scholarships and would've given me four years in the United States before the Los Angeles Olympics. I watched the Southern Methodist guys, the Mustangs, and I was just dreaming.
I kind of saw at that time, I didn't place in any of my events, but I could see I had to step up my game. I came over from England to swim in international competition against Canada and the U.S.A. I got offered a scholarship to Houston University and to SMU, Southern Methodist University in Texas, which was unbelievable because they booked the Mustang swimming team, which at that time and I think it may still be now, the best swimming team in the United States. I had an ex-Olympic coach who was training me. Ended up being I was seventh fastest in the whole of Great Britain through all the age groups. Yeah, I spent six and a half hours a day swimming and made the British international team in my first year there. I'd get up at 5:30 in the morning and scrape ice off my wind screen and off I go to swim training. Leaving a sunny, beautiful country going to, I'm not running England down, but man, it just is drear and rainy the whole time.Ĭliff Simon: Yeah. We immigrated to England when I was 15 and carried on school. One of them being that I could swim for or try to get into the British international team because in those days, South Africa was banned from all the Olympic games. I won a few national competitions in South Africa and then my family immigrated to England in 1977 for a couple of reasons.
At that time, I was a national level gymnast and carried on swimming. I'd always had Olympic dreams as a swimmer, even from a young kid. I started doing gymnastics as well, but by the age of about 11 or 12, I had to kind of chose which one I wanted to go further in because they two completely different sports. So she got me swimming at a really young age. They tried to protect their way of life, which is just nuts.Ĭliff Simon: But yeah, I started off my mom was actually a swim teacher when I was young. We really got news from outside of South Africa. We never knew what anyone thought about us. We didn't see news of the rest of the world. We were really removed from the rest of the world and during the Apartheid area, everything. Growing up in South Africa, which was really. I really had that in my mind from when I was kind of young. We're all going to meet the same demise one day.Ĭliff Simon: We want to live life and live and let live.
We want to experience as much of life as we can. I was talking with my wife last night and it's actually, when you think about it, we're actually all fueled by death. I mean, I love the title Fueled by Death like amazing because it was funny. You were a swimmer and then that kind of led you into performing on stage, is that correct? Or how did one kind of beget the other?Ĭliff Simon: Yeah. Jeff: You started off as a kid as an athlete. We also talk about his acting career, most notably his role of Ba'al on Stargate SG-1, what it means to be typecast as a bad guy, and his upcoming projects including the science fiction show Personal Space on Amazon Video. From growing up in South Africa in the 60s to becoming a champion swimmer to learning to dance and eventually performing at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, Cliff has taken life by the horns and never let go. Cliff joins the show to talk about his incredible life and how he is the true embodiment of being Fueled By Death. Cliff Simon is an actor but that only scratches the surface of who he is.