Miscellaneous
At On Side we are celebrating the impending Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo with a special Clean and Gold series. Hosted by Tim Gavel and three-time Olympic gold medallist Petria Thomas, our Clean And Gold series features some of Australia’s Olympic and Paralympic greats about their Olympic journey. Today we speak to two-time Olympic gold medallist Anna Meares and Paralympic gold medallist Curtis McGrath. By her own admission Meares has come a long way from that little girl riding a BMX bike, winning two Olympic gold medals eight years apart. Her story is one of resilience, with her fighting spirit instrumental in coming back from breaking her neck in a horrific crash at a World Cup meet in Los Angeles to winning an Olympic silver medal just seven months later. She is the only female track cyclist in history to have won Olympic medals in all four sprint events – keirin, sprint, team sprint and the 500m time trial (discontinued) – but, surprisingly, her proudest moment is off the track. “My proudest moment was being flag bearer in Rio … I feel like that was in recognition of the accumulation of performances over a long time, being consistent over 16 years being at the elite senior level, being at the Olympics and world championships every year and being on the podium,” she says. McGrath, too, has battled back from the most agonising of circumstances. He took up canoeing as part of his rehabilitation after having both of his legs amputated as a result of a mine blast whilst serving in the Australian Army in Afghanistan. When he was being carried on the stretcher in Afghanistan he told his comrades that he would go to the Paralympics. “I didn’t say that with much substance and much knowledge of what that actually meant,” he says, “but it was a comment to try and ease the minds of the guys around me, they were also going through a pretty traumatic experience.” It makes his para-canoe gold medal at Rio all the more poignant. “I think that’s part of the reason why I pursued the Paralympic journey not for my own goals and mindset but to show that I was still capable and still able to get out there and do things and be a part of something so great as the Paralympic Games.” However, the aftermath of that gold-medal race was not as he expected. “[When I crossed the line] I expected to be excited and a huge sense of joy and excitement that I’d achieved that but what I actually got was this huge wave of relief … I almost physically felt it. It was like this wave that fell on me, the relief of going through what I went through over those four years and culminating to crossing that line and being a gold medallist is one that I didn’t expect whatsoever.” To wrap things up, Sport Integrity Australia’s medical adviser Dr Larissa Trease, an Australian Olympic and Paralympic team doctor, gives her top tips on competing clean. #cleanandgold See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.