How our Olympians are training at home during COVID-19 pandemic
Social distancing restrictions banished us to our homes, including our Aussie Olympians training for Tokyo next year — and they’re being creative with training to keep their form.
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JESS FOX
Growing up, dual Olympic medallist Jess Fox and her sister Noemie begged their parents for a backyard swimming pool.
Fox was granted her wish as eight-year-old. Fast forward 17 years and that very pool is now playing a critical part in the 25-year-old’s preparations for Tokyo.
The slalom canoeist is unable to train at Penrith White Water Stadium as its running water is not an essential service. And the solution has proven to be a little closer to home.
“When we were kids, we would pester our parents all the time for a pool and they eventually caved,’’ Fox recalls.
“I remember learning how to tumble-turn and roll in that pool — we’d practise sitting in a small kayak and then capsizing and coming back up. I’ve learned a few things in that pool over the years but I never thought it would be part of my Olympic preparation.”
Fox, a silver medallist in 2012 and bronze-medal winner in Rio in 2016, last year qualified for the Olympics through her performances at the world championships. She is one of just 42 athletes, across seven sports, who earned selection before the coronavirus crisis hit.
“Three months ago, I would never have been excited to get in my pool to do some drills because it wasn’t exactly a great training environment. Now, your standards lower a little bit, you appreciate what you’ve got and how you can work with it,’’ she says.
“Anytime I get in my gear and my boat and touch the water, that gives me great energy I’d get from a regular training session and is quite good practice. It’s given me a spring in my step.
“My pool is pretty small, 7m x 3.5m, and my boat is 3.5m in length so turning is a very difficult art and requires a lot of precision, which is good to practise too. Mum’s yelling “careful! Don’t break the pool!’ I’ve got to be careful but I feel lucky to have a backyard pool to be able to do this.”
“Normally my training is on the white-water rafters but that’s been closed for about four weeks. In that time I’ve been doing mainly gym and coming up with different ways to do things. I’ve been doing a lot of stability and balance work with the elastics using the paddle, and anytime I can incorporate a paddling posture, either in the seated or kneeling position as I would in the canoe, or using my paddles as equipment or being in the water helps me keep in touch with it a little bit more.”
Fox believes her sport will be able to function once restrictions are eased in NSW.
“Normally my training is on the white-water rafters but that’s been closed for about four weeks and every athlete is in the same situation with their training centres closed.
“In my sport it will be quite easy to maintain social distancing because it’s an individual sport, it’s outdoor, coaches are on the base and athletes are on the water.
“I’m trying to be creative and do different skills; obviously it’s very hard to mimic what we can do on the white water without being on it. The more I can work on other areas and the one percenters, those things will give me an advantage when I do get back on.”
— M egan Hustwaite.
EMMA HOGAN
Supporters, sponsors and strangers have funded a pool for teen triathlete Emma Hogan to continue her gruelling training.
The 19-year-old, who hails from Proserpine near Airlie Beach in Far North Queensland, is coached by and lives with former two-time triathlon world champion Emma Carney on 1.4ha at Eltham.
In self-isolation, Hogan has been able to keep up her running and cycling training but has been out of the water for the past three weeks. Unable to access funding from Triathlon Australia, the pair turned to crowd-funding.
“Peter Conde, the CEO of the AIS, suggested setting up an Australian Sports Foundation fund page so we did that and we had double the total we needed within a day. There’s a lot of support out there for our young Australian athletes,’’ Carney explains.
The pool arrived from Byron Bay last week. Hogan says it was like Christmas had come early.
“I’m so excited. We’d seen other triathletes, who are overseas in complete lockdown, swimming in temporary pools in their backyard on a swim tether/waist bungy and thought that would be a great idea for me,’’ she says.
“The pool is four metres long, two metres wide and a metre deep, which is perfect. We waited in the drive way for it to arrive and I got in for the first time this week and it was absolutely freezing, but awesome. It was 18C and I had three swimming caps and a wetsuit on. Emma was running kettles of hot water out from the house. It works quite well and I’m just so happy to get back in the water.”
Hogan can now return to her training schedule of swimming 12-15km four times a week. The current COVID-19 climate has also seen her up her time on both bike and foot.
“Before coronavirus I was riding 150km a week and running about 60km, but I’m doing more cycling and running now — riding nearly 200km and running about 70km,’’ she says.
“We haven’t got any races coming up and now would usually be race season, so I’m able to change my volumes.”
Hogan has just moved into the sport’s under-23 athlete category and raced in Devonport the week before shutdown, where she shaved three minutes off her overall time.
She will be 21 by the time the Olympics begin in Tokyo and hopes she can be in the mix for selection next year by continuing her strong form. Hogan is currently the fastest 1500m runner in Australian triathlon, which makes her a valuable prospect for the relay event.
Wherever her career takes her, Hogan and her coach won’t forget the support she’s received during a challenging time for elite athletes worldwide.
“Emma will win some big races in her career and these people have helped from the outset and are along for the journey now,’’ Carney says.
Hogan adds: “I find it amazing that people want to be part of my journey and had the vision to believe in it and contribute. It’s really generous especially right now, donating money so we can keep training, I’m really appreciative and I don’t think I could ever thank them enough.”
— M egan Hustwaite.
COL PEARSE
There’s no playbook for coronavirus. Certainly not for elite swimmers pounding the pool for a place at the 2020 Paralympics.
Which will, of course, be the July 2021 Olympics — coronavirus notwithstanding.
The crisis brings with it a 12-month delay, setbacks with coaches, potentially months in practically solitary confinement, and the challenge of maintaining the rage for another year when you have just spent the previous four to peak in 2020.
But Col Pearse is looking to the silver lining. The 16-year-old Australian Para 100m butterfly record holder turns 17 in July and he reckons 12 more months of training, of gym, running, swimming and more gym — and growing — will move him up a step or two on the podium at Tokyo.
Pearse, who won 100m butterfly bronze in an Australian para record 58.60 sec at the 2019 World Para Swimming Championships, was, like everyone in the Australian Olympic teams, initially gutted when the Olympics and Paralympics were postponed for a year.
Before quickly realising this had played right into the hands of young stars on the rise — especially growing stars.
At 16, Pearse stands 185cm. At 16 his older brother had a growth spurt that not much later maxed out at 203cm — and the taller Pearse gets, the shorter the pool becomes.
All of which is pure conjecture if he can’t overcome and adapt to being left to train mostly on his own, with his coach and all the paraphernalia that surrounds today’s guns in the pool out of reach for who knows how long.
And few swimmers in Australia’s Olympic and Paralympic squads would be adapting and overcoming like Pearse.
He has gone home to the family dairy farm, at Bamawm in northern Victoria, and created his own bush version of the elite athlete at work, picking up his training where he left off before coronavirus torpedoed the Tokyo Olympics.
The Echuca-Moama Junior Sportstar of the Year — with some help from family and friends — has built a top-of-the-range gym in the family carport and his own Olympic pool in the property’s dam.
The gym looks straight out of a 1950s version of Rocky. The pool has wood pallets for a starting block and the wall to practise finishing touches, the lanes are rope held afloat by empty plastic bottles, and the water is classic dirt brown.
Pearse still flashes that trademark cheeky grin under his shock of red hair as he goes about hours and hours up and down the dam.
He underwrites all those laps with another four to five hours in his one-swimmer gym.
“Couldn’t do it without the wetsuit; dams are freezing (and winter still not here),” Pearse says. “Once you start swimming you get the occasional burst of cold water in the suit but you don’t notice it, you are more focused on your stroke action and the other things you need to get right.
“So yes, it’s a pretty big change to get used to, but I’m ready for it. It still gives me the opportunity to train.”
Pearse has long spoken of his dream to race at the Paralympics, and his performance last year at the Worlds showed he was well on track for a spot on the Australian team.
The gap between Pearse’s bronze and the gold in 2019 was a stroke more than two seconds — a junior against an adult. But the determined teen says the 12-month delay will work in his favour because it gives him more time to bridge the gap — a target he is 100 per cent confident he can hit.
In July 2021, Pearse will have clocked up more practice than most, spent more time perfecting every aspect of his pet butterfly event and be ready to conquer the world — from Bamawm and beyond.
— Andrew Mole.
HEMING HU
Australia’s No. 1 table tennis player is teaming technology with a blast from the past as he remains on track for Olympic qualification.
Noble Park’s Heming Hu is training with his mixed doubles partner virtually and has dusted off the family’s 25-year-old table tennis table while in self-isolation.
Hu, 26, hoping to qualify for the 2021 mixed doubles and Australian men’s team, usually has a short drive to training. Now, it’s a short walk to the garage.
“Because my club is 10 minutes from home, I’ve really never needed that table, but as the coronavirus thing happened, suddenly it was like ‘thank god we’ve still got that table in the garage’,’’ Hu says.
“We have to wipe the dust off it, but it’s worth it to be able to train every day. I’m trying to teach my parents to play more because the hardest part for me is that I’m not able to play or train with anyone outside my family — I can’t have a hit with my teammates or coaches. My mum trains with me each morning; she hasn’t played for so long so I have to be patient with her.”
Hu plays mixed doubles with fellow Victorian Melissa Tapper, the first Australian athlete to qualify for both the Olympics and Paralympics, and the duo have found a way to keep finetuning their preparations thanks to a phone on a tripod.
“I train with my partner virtually, we make sure we do what we can at our own tables and over the internet. This way we keep that relationship and chemistry alive so when we do go and play we still have had a preparation,’’ Hu says.
“We’re able to watch each other train, we make sure we have some fun during the session too and it’s worked out really well.”
Prolific on Instagram, Hu has been sharing videos of his home training regimen at the table and using gym balls, resistance bands and the humble doorways around the family home to work out.
— M egan Hustwaite.
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