Valerie champion of hope
In an ideal world – or should we say, a Covid-free world – 2020 would’ve seen our mighty sports champion Dame Valerie Adams drawing the final curtain on her illustrious Olympic career.
Four years of gruelling shotput training and meticulous planning had gone into preparing for her final Olympic swansong in Tokyo in July, so it’s no surprise that its eventual postponement left the Kiwi legend devastated. “Where to now?” the 36-year-old asked herself. Did she have it in her to keep going for another year? And, most importantly, would it be fair on her whānau?
“It was a huge blow,” she tells Woman at our first cover shoot. “I’m old, you know, I’m at the end of my career and I was thinking, ‘Do I have the energy to do this?’ It felt a bit like a grieving period – I had to process what it meant, learn to accept it and make a new plan.”
After much soul searching, the answer was of course yes, she would continue on and compete at the rescheduled event mid-next year. The gutsy decision should come as no surprise – over her stellar 20-year international career, the most dominant athletics star New Zealand
