Tay-Leiha Clark puts abusive ex-boyfriend Curtis Scott in the past to focus on Olympic dream
Putting her traumatising relationship with former NRL player Curtis Scott behind her, rising sports star Tay-Leiha Clark has her sights set on the Olympics, writes Annette Sharp.
NSW
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A week after a court found former Melbourne Storm and Canberra Raiders NRL player Curtis Scott guilty of assaulting and threatening to kill his rising sports star girlfriend Tay-Leiha Clark, she has returned to her gruelling 30-hour-a-week athletics training schedule in the hope of realising her dream to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
“It’s the same goal I’ve had since I was a little girl,” Clark told this column on Thursday.
“I just want to get to the Olympics and I want to get there with my sister Tomysha, who is also an athlete, by my side.”
The 24-year-old has had a tough few years recovering from the end of her relationship with Scott — her first romance — which ended in 2019, with a court this month hearing the troubled league player repeatedly assaulted Clark during their two-year relationship before threatening to kill them both, and driving his car into a tree.
Still traumatised by the relationship, Clark is now picking up the pieces of her life while coming to terms with the enormity of the task that lies ahead if she’s to make Paris 2024 and, more immediately, next year’s World Championships in Budapest.
Further complicating the comeback of the long jumper and triple jumper — who won silver at the 2014 Youth Olympics in China — has been her diagnosis with Graves’ disease, an auto-immune disorder which affects thyroid function.
The disease has compromised the young woman’s health, causing her to repeatedly collapse, suffer severe migraines, shake convulsively, and also led to hair loss.
“I was diagnosed two years ago and it took some time to get that diagnosis, but I’m doing much better now that I’m on thyroid medication and having the four- to six-weekly blood tests,” she said, adding she is currently in remission.
In a move that suggests some ingenuity on the part of her mother, Clark credits leading sports psychologist and former NRL footballer Tony Priddle with helping her in her emotional recovery from her trauma.
“Tony’s been amazing. He’s been trying to help me break this down and move on from it all,” Clark said.
Her mother and manager Renae confirmed she originally consulted Priddle in the early months of 2018 after observing the escalation of Scott’s “struggle” with her daughter’s popularity on Instagram.
As the manager of her daughter’s social media accounts, Renae turned to the retired St George prop in the hope he might “empower” her daughter to walk away from the destructive relationship which started in February 2017 after Scott — then playing with The Storm — asked Clark out via social media.
“I knew probably nine months into the relationship Curtis was starting to struggle (because) I was seeing the vile messages he started to send Tay. Over a few months I watched it escalate rapidly,” Renae said.
“My instructions to Tony Priddle, Tay’s mind coach, were simple — empower Tay to not take her boyfriend’s abuse and give her the strength to leave him.”
It was an unusual approach, but one that ultimately paid dividends, with Priddle testifying in court about his experience as a consultant to the Clarks.
Along with Priddle, another great supporter championing Clark’s recovery is fellow Graves’ disease sufferer Gail Devers, the retired US sprinter and hurdler who is a Graves’ ambassador.
Devers, who contracted the disease in 1990 and sought treatment through radioactive iodine treatments and thyroid HRT, has been FaceTiming Clark and advising the younger woman on how to navigate her return to athletics.
Clark’s mental health recovery, meanwhile, is ongoing.
She remains bruised by some of the accusations levelled at her in the fallout of her break-up with Scott, particularly those made on some media platforms after she found the courage to take her allegations firstly to the NRL in 2020 and to the police last year.
“I was accused of some really awful things; I was accused of extortion when the Storm made Curtis pay $2500 for my entire wardrobe which he had taken and which I’ve never seen again. That had nothing to do with me, that was the Storm’s solution,” she said.
“I was accused of having an affair with a man I’d never met. That was just mortifying.”
Clark also lost work as a professional model, and a contract with leading sports brand Asics, who pulled the pin as a vicious and hurtful whispering campaign in the media fired up.
“As a young woman I didn’t really know how to defend myself,” Clark said, acknowledging her mother was right to fear her daughter would be “crucified” if she went to the police with her allegations.
“I think this can happen to anyone, and while it’s particularly prevalent around sports people, not just in rugby league, as an Indigenous woman, I know it’s experienced at that community level as well.
“What’s important is that young women know that it’s not all right for men to lay their hands on them, or to put you down and make you feel worthless and alone.”
Curtis is scheduled to return to court on November 18.
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