Dame Valerie Adams: Former Olympic gold medallist talks her Olympic career and the Paris 2024 Olympic Games

Saturday Morning with Jack Tame

One week out from the 2024 Paris Olympics, the excitement and pressure is beginning to build.

There’s one person who knows those pressures well, having represented New Zealand in five Olympic Games.

Dame Valerie Adams is one of the country’s most well-known athletes, a two-time Olympic gold medallist, four-time World Champion, four-time World Indoor Champion, and three-time Commonwealth Games Champion, who was virtually undefeated in shot-put.

Although she’s no longer competing, Adams is going along to this year’s games as a member of the World Athletics Council, and she told Newstalk ZB’s Jack Tame that her preparations have been a little bit different.

“I think the stress levels are a bit different,” Adams said.

The types of stress are also different, Adams revealed, as competing has you training “pretty much at the cliff edge”, whereas in her current role, her stresses are caused by more mundane things like travel and preparing council meetings.

There’s plenty of sports on offer this year, and Adams is looking forward to the intensity of basketball and the novelty of gymnastics.

“And obviously, following the New Zealand crew,” Adams told Tame.

New Zealand is sending 195 athletes to compete in the Games across a total of 23 sports.

The Athletics team is 15-strong with “heaps of potential”, as Adams puts it, but they’re also facing quite a lot of pressure.

“We’ve had a good history of bringing back medals at every Olympic Games since I competed, apart from Athens. So there is a lot of pressure on there, but so much potential.”

“I hope spectators and viewers, especially us Kiwis back here supporting, remember and know and realise that everybody out there competing for our country is doing their ultimate best,” she told Tame.

“Whatever the results will be, will be, and just be a bit kinder with any comments or remarks that you might want to make.”

Having competed in so many high-profile events, Adams knows what it’s like to be cast into the spotlight and faced with New Zealand’s infamous ‘tall poppy syndrome’.

“I know what it’s like to perform well and succeed, and I also know what it’s like to underperform and actually get ridiculed and abused for it, and then win the gold medal seven days later, and then I was a national hero.”

“It’s not a good place to be.”

Although being at the Games is set to stir up some nostalgia, Adams is quite sure that five was enough, and being able to make a change in her capacity as a World Athletics Council member is special as well.

“You know, if you want to make change, you’ve got to be at the table, not serving coffee to people at the table.”

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