SA Weekend cover story: Kyle Chalmers, Darren Hicks and Jessica Stenson reset their Olympic clocks towards Tokyo 2021
Darren Hicks discovered the depth of his resilience after a fatal accident at the bottom of the South Eastern Freeway. Now a paracycling world champion, he’s set his sights on Tokyo 2021. As have Kyle Chalmers and Jess Stenson. EXCLUSIVE video series.
SA Weekend
Don't miss out on the headlines from SA Weekend. Followed categories will be added to My News.
- Darren Hicks’ emotional world championship win
- Kyle Chalmers’ master stroke
- Guts, grit and world marathon success
- Latest Advertiser +Rewards: Enter our subscriber-only competitions
This weekend was supposed to be the time when Olympic dreams started coming true. Elite athletes around the planet had structured four years’ worth of training around July 24, 2020 – the date of the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony.
But in March, the Games were pushed back for 12 months – the first time in history the Olympics had been postponed or cancelled for anything other than war. Considering the pandemic sweeping the globe, the decision had been inevitable. But that didn’t make it any more palatable.
Elite athletes are, almost by definition, a resilient mob. So most recalibrated their training schedules and set their sights on July 2021.
This weekend, as the clock ticks over on the new 12-month countdown, the future of the Tokyo Games is still far from set in stone. Many experts believe even the postponed Games are unlikely to go ahead without a COVID-19 vaccine, and the International Olympic Committee has admitted that if these Games don’t happen in 2021, they won’t happen at all.
Nevertheless, all the athletes can do is focus on the time frame they have been given. South Australians Kyle Chalmers, Jess Stenson and Darren Hicks are three such athletes.
Chalmers is the reigning champion, desperate to defend the 100m freestyle title he won in Rio which thrust him into the international limelight.
Stenson, formerly Jess Trengove, is the comeback kid – the marathon runner working her way back into contention after giving birth to baby Billy in November.
And Hicks is the inspirational tale of grit and determination. His leg was amputated after a horrific truck accident on the South Eastern Freeway which killed two people and sparked four years of court proceedings. He’s now a para-cycling world champion.
Today, to mark the new 12-month countdown to Tokyo, SAWeekend speaks to Chalmers, Stenson and Hicks about how the delay affected their hopes and dreams, and what their new road to the Olympics looks like.
DARREN HICKS
Five minutes into his “ramp test” in the SA Sports Institute laboratory, Darren Hicks asks his coach to switch on the nearby pedestal fan.
Hicks, who lost his right leg in a truck crash in 2014, is on a stationary bike where the resistance increases by 15 watts every minute until he can’t take it any longer.
“Ride until you drop basically,” he tells us, before clipping his left leg into the pedal.
Wearing his world champion’s rainbow jersey and with his crutches leaning on a nearby bench, Hicks’ breathing starts to increase, sweat drips from his nose, then he is grimacing, his tongue is poking out and he starts grunting – a noise which becomes almost sobs by the end of his 20-minute torture test. It’s his third test for the week. He also did an all-out four-minute test on the stationary bike then a time trial up Norton Summit. He set a PB in all three.
In February, Hicks had just returned from the track world championships in Milton, NSW. He was setting his sights towards this year’s Tokyo Paralympics, and he had a fire in the belly.
“I was just getting over my injury (from a crash in December) and seeing a bit of form, and wanted to test my body against the best in the world but I haven’t had that chance,” he says. “My last memory is riding poorly at the (track) world champs, which doesn’t play on my mind anymore thankfully and I’m back to where I want to be.
“I was convinced it (Paralympics) was going to go ahead. I think I was one of the naive ones who didn’t realise the severity that COVID-19 was going to have (on the world), so I thought ‘They’ve spent too much money, it might be more restrictive and not as many people there to watch … but it’s going to go ahead’.
“Then when it was shut down I thought the para-group did really well. We said, ‘OK, new date, let’s work hard towards next year’. Not a single thought went through my head that I would stop. I want to go through to 2024 and race Paris.”
Hicks didn’t have a problem training in isolation as he worked towards a goal that has been put back 12 months.
“Most of our work is done on the road and luckily in Adelaide we didn’t lose that, and whenever we had bad weather it was on the indoor trainer,” he says. “So I didn’t notice it a huge amount.
“I just wanted to get back to the form I had in September and make sure what happened at track worlds wasn’t me, it was my injury.”
It’s not a stretch to say that cycling has saved Hicks. In 2014 he was driving a sewage truck down the South Eastern Freeway when the brakes failed and he slammed into stationary cars in an incident which killed two people. Hicks lost his leg in the accident and endured four years of court proceedings before charges against him were dropped in December 2018.
“I wrote this in a post for Instagram, and I always felt I was a pushover or someone who was easily forgotten,” he says.
“After the accident and proving to myself that I wasn’t soft, I could take on a big challenge and accept that my life had been flipped upside down and find my feet and a new calling, it proved to me that I had a bit more guts in me than what I gave myself credit for.
“That’s been something I’ve let snowball, and I believe in myself more than I ever have yet I find so many more things challenging. It’s very odd.
“But I’ve got a bit of a calling which I never had, and I can be someone special in a way.”
Perhaps the most significant step, from a mental perspective, in Hicks’ road to recovery came in February when he told his story in front of an audience for the first time. He stood in front of 200 people in a room at a business called Codan, which is a major sponsor of Next Level Elite who mentors him.
“I have been as honest as I possibly could before and after the accident, and I’m happy to tell the truth in front of an audience because it’s no different to what I’d tell my mum,” Hicks says.
“I don’t like the word inspiring but I like the ability to explain what I’ve gone through. People don’t have to understand it fully but I’m proud of the way I dealt with adversity that I’d never faced before. I didn’t think I had it, which is what’s been really surprising.
“I cried every time I read it (speech) when I was practising it, and I nearly got there but managed to keep it together which was nice.
“When we first started writing it I’d forgotten about those real lows I went through in the first few years. I made the Australian team, then two weeks later I got cut because I was still going through my trial.
“So I had to fight for two months to get reinstated into the team and that was only two weeks before we went away to race, and I came home with two silver medals.
“I felt like I earned that spot and when they finally gave me the chance to race I showed them why they should trust me and let me do what I want to do – which is ride for my country.”
JESSICA STENSON
The bright red numbers on the tiny digital screen at Athletics SA stadium say 13C when Jess Stenson pulls up in her car at training.
The marathon runner, formerly known as Jess Trengove before she married Dylan last year, has changed more than just her name in the past 12 months – she has completely changed her life, becoming a mum to Billy, who was born in November.
Before then, running on 13C mornings in winter were becoming a bit of a drain, like a job, but now they are her daily release, even if it means dodging puddles in a bitumen carpark on her warm-up.
“In terms of pushing myself hard in training, I seem to have a different mental approach now,” Stenson says. “Prior to getting pregnant, I was a little mentally drained from the ongoing grind but I’m kind of excited by the challenge now.
“I usually get nervous sick about cross country races but now I’m excited to be out there. Two weeks ago I ran over to the pram and gave Billy a little kiss and crossed the start line and I was buzzing. Pushing through that pain barrier again, you know it’s going to hurt but at the same time the high you get afterwards outweighs the discomfort. You feel a real sense of satisfaction. It’s like my mind is lighter because I was starting to get weighed down by the pressure I was putting on myself.”
Even so, it’s still hard for any athlete to be slugging it out around a damp athletics track training for an event they don’t know will even go ahead.
Wearing bright orange sneakers, which brighten the grey skies, Stenson’s session this morning is “600m on, 400m off” for 6km.
Her coach, Adam Didyk, stands on the inside of the track holding a phone in one hand, iPad in the other, reading out times as his squad goes around and around and around, and when they are done the runners all reach for their GPS watches which beep in unison to say they are done.
Stenson had almost given up on her Tokyo Olympic dream, first when she fell pregnant and then when international travel was stopped in March, but the postponement has opened the door for her to dream of qualifying again.
“Admittedly when I knew Billy was due in mid-November I thought the Olympics would be a lofty goal but it was one I was willing to have a go at,” she says.
“Adam (coach) said, ‘Let’s not think too much about it and enjoy the process of motherhood and take each week as it comes’ and I really appreciated his perspective on that. So we went into the process open-minded.”
She started very light running over Christmas and a more structured program in mid-January, which is when she set her sights on the Berlin Marathon in April, booking flights and accommodation.
“We madly ran around and got Billy a little passport and started planning our trip, which was also our wedding anniversary,” she says.
“We’d booked our flights and accommodation and were going to explore a bit of Germany afterwards, and it wasn’t long after booking that it started to look unlikely.
“And before the race was officially cancelled we had decided that it wasn’t a good idea to take a baby to Europe, given how things were looking.”
So Stenson shifted her focus to a domestic marathon in either Adelaide, Noosa or Canberra. When those events were being called off, Stenson reluctantly had to admit a third Olympics was not an option.
But the postponement to 2021 has reopened the door. Four Australian women have already posted a qualifying time, the slowest being two hours, 26 minutes, 21 seconds, which Stenson would need to beat to book her ticket.
“We’re still in a very unknown phase and while I’m still excited about aiming for a marathon at the end of this year or early next year, between December and May, there still aren’t many options yet,” she says.
“We’re starting to see a few domestic marathons but we need to be wise in choosing one that’s in a cool climate and on a flat course to give myself the best chance.”
Tokyo 2021 or not, Stenson is enjoying the process again.
“We live near the (Torrens) river and I love running along Linear Park, having that moment every morning where I can listen to a podcast or do some learning.
“As a mum you’re often busy at home and you don’t get to read or stimulate your mind,” she says. “But some days I just want to completely switch off and I come back and I’m feeling that high of having moved and been active, I’m feeling organised and ready for the day ahead.
“My whole life I’ve loved starting the day with exercise. There are those tough days; sometimes I wake up feeling more tired than when I went to bed, and I take a little while to get out the door, but even if I’ve had a sleepless night I feel better being out there and it usually hits me in the afternoon.”
KYLE CHALMERS
‘I’m not here training 40 hours a week to be the second best in the world,” Kyle Chalmers says after stretching with a giant elastic band on the pool deck and then diving in.
It’s just after 8am when he gets in the water at the SA Aquatic and Leisure Centre, and rather than look at it as another part of the daily grind, he sees it as a privilege.
“It was potentially going to be taken away from me for six months (when we went into lockdown) and now I’m grateful to be back in the pool training and doing what I love with my coaches and friends,” he says.
It’s been four years since Chalmers shot to international fame when he stunned the world by winning the 100m freestyle at the Rio Olympics as an 18-year-old, and he looks like a different person.
He’s got a beard, his left forearm is covered in tattoos and he has grown into his body with big broad shoulders and powerful quads to match his flipper-size feet.
He went to Rio in 2016 as a no-name teenager from Adelaide and returned a household name , enjoying free coffees, a ride in the back of a ute on the MCG on AFL Grand Final day and being flown around the world for photo shoots with Adidas.
Right now he’s training in Adelaide but he would be racing in Tokyo if the coronavirus hadn’t wreaked havoc all over the world. When the shutdown came in March and the Games were postponed soon after until 2021, Chalmers went bush, going off-the-grid on a family property on the Eyre Peninsula with his swag.
“It was a shock, but I believed it was for the best,” he says.
“And now I’m looking at it in the most positive way possible. I’ve got a year extra of training, a few niggles I want to get over body-wise, and it’s really played into my favour and I’m excited by that.
“But I have also been working the last four years to be at my absolute best in July this year, but I am looking at it in a positive way. I’m a very self-motivated person and driven. I see swimming as my job but there have been days when it’s challenging to push yourself in training when you’re not working on anything like when you’re competing next, so we are kind of just training for the sake of it at the moment.”
Chalmers has installed a 6m shipping container pool with jets in his backyard in case Adelaide is forced into lockdown again.
“If we ever go back into lockdown I have a place to train in my backyard. It’s only just starting to get set up now and they put the water in and heaters on yesterday, so hopefully I can bump it up to 27C like it is here and have a splash against it,” he says.
But the postponement has done nothing to dim his motivation and drive to defend his title.
“I’m no longer the underdog, I’m the guy who’s getting chased so my whole mindset on swimming and training has changed dramatically,” he says.
“I’ve loved being the top dog for the past four years and I still get another year of that now that the Olympics have been pushed back, but I definitely like being the person who is watched and the benchmark.
“It motivates me daily to be the best. I’m not here training 40 hours a week to be second best in the world, I’m training to be number one so I’m highly motivated to stay there.
“I do enjoy the pressure – that’s what I enjoy most about swimming – those high intense moments and the Olympic Games are an unbelievable experience of who can deal with the pressure best and put their best result on the board on the day.
“You never want to be doubting yourself, in any sport. I look at UFC fighters and it could be one of the worst guys against the best in the world, and that guy has such strong belief that he’s going in to win.
“I try to take that mindset as well and go, ‘If you’re thinking you’re going to get second or third, what’s the point in going?’
“So I believe my chances are really good and I am doing everything to make sure that I do have absolutely no doubts when I stand on those blocks in Tokyo next year.
“I want to be fully confident and know I’ve done all the work and everything I possibly could to put my best race together.”