Olympic wheel turns for Meares to chef de mission role
The year after Anna Meares quit cycling, the seed for her next Olympic career was planted.
The two-time Olympic track cycling gold medallist and Australian flag bearer for the 2016 Rio Games opening ceremony will make her debut in Paris as chef de mission for the national team.
She has made an impressive start, adding to the fair resume for the self-described coal miner’s daughter.
One of the toughest competitors in Australian sporting history, Meares ended her cycling career at Rio.
Fast forward to 2017 and the now ex-sprinter’s life was exciting, but also unsettled. She had started a relationship with cycling coach Nick Flyger, while struggling with retirement.
The age-old question nagged at her – what’s next?
So, like any good coach, Flyger encouraged Meares to think about goal setting.
“He said to me ‘Anna, if you could take every bit of expectation, every bit of pressure, every set of eyes, off you and there was nothing that you could not do – what would you want to do?'” Meares told AAP.
“I said to him, without hesitation, I want to be chef de mission for Australia.
“Why? Because being part of the Australian Olympic team at that level, to impact the next generation of athletes in a positive way, I just know I could do something really good.
“He said to me, ‘right, go out and start asking questions, get some mentors, get some experience, start upskilling yourself – and for goodness sake, put it out there and tell people that’s where you want to go’.”
So Meares did. And five years later, she was on the Australian management team at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games when fate intervened.
A meeting with world cycling boss David Lapparient in Birmingham led to Meares speaking at a function during the world road championships in Wollongong a few weeks later.
The last question on stage – what does the future hold? With the words of Flyger, now her husband, ringing in her ears, Meares said she wanted to be chef de mission.
She thought that might happen a decade down the track but, the next day, Australian Olympic Committee president Ian Chesterman was on the phone saying she had been on his radar.
“If I do a good job in Paris and the AOC feel that I could possibly continue in this role, I would love to do that, especially with LA and Brisbane on the cards,” she said.
Meares and Flyger are now the parents of two children.
“I would love to take my kids to the Anna Meares velodrome at a home Olympics as the chef de mission for the home team,” she said.
“That is a big goal for me.”
Two obvious traits that make Meares a natural for the role are focus – a four-time Olympian – and courage – she recovered from a crash that went within millimetres of leaving her wheelchair-bound for life to competing months later at the Beijing Olympics.
Meares knows full well she will front more than one packed media conferences in Paris where the atmosphere will be as tense as going up against her great British rival Victoria Pendleton in a sprint.
She has done her homework, spoken to people, prepared herself.
“I appreciate it’s going to have some challenging moments. I must admit, I’ve even watched some of Ian Chesterman’s media conferences from Tokyo, because how else do you learn? You learn from the best, don’t you?” Meares said of the previous Australian chef de mission.
“I’m doing my recon work. I can only do my best.”
Asked about the range of issues she could confront at the Olympics, Meares pulls up a file on her computer and counts off the documents – on this day, there are 25. Security, logistics, athlete health, etc.
While life as an Olympic gold medallist has prepared her well for what is coming, this Games will be different.
Apart from the different role, Meares is now also a mum.
“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I feel like I’m really ‘adulting’ – my capacity to be an adult,” Meares said of the difference between being an athlete and the chef de mission.
“I don’t feel as personally stressed because I trust my team – as I did as an athlete – and I’m there as a support role, for others to have their best day.
“It’s a different stress because it’s not all about me, it’s now about others.
“In some ways as well, having young children, that perspective shift of being all about myself and about the individual performance has really shifted – two human beings innately depend on me.”
It is also making her appreciate more no athlete is an island.
“I never thought about what it was like when they got that phone call after I broke my neck,” Meares said of her parents in early 2008.
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