Claudia Hollingsworth readies for the 2024 Paris Olympics with running great Craig Mottram
After setting records and smashing personal bests, Victorian middle-distance runner Claudia Hollingsworth has her sights set on the Olympics – and she’s got one of Australia’s greats in her corner.
VWeekend
Don't miss out on the headlines from VWeekend. Followed categories will be added to My News.
It was the conversation where it clicked for Australian running great Craig Mottram.
He was seated in the cafeteria at Mentone Grammar. Across from him was 15-year-old Claudia Hollingsworth, a prodigious running talent he’d been helping out for a couple of years – her father Richard and mother Skye.
Mottram, one of Australia’s greatest middle-distance runners, had been running the athletics program at the school when he’d noticed Hollingsworth. There was something about her, the way she moved and the ease with which she was beating anyone she came across.
“There is just a feeling that you get when you see someone at that level, they just stand out differently,” the four-time Olympian recalls.
Hollingsworth had no idea who the tall man organising the school’s cross-country event was.
“Mum came to a race, I think it was our first cross-country race and she’s like, ‘That’s Craig Mottram’,” Hollingsworth says. “I was like, ‘Oh him, he’s been coaching us for the last month or so.’ I had no idea who he was.”
Slowly but surely the pair got to know a lot more about each other and they started training together outside of school hours. Which is why Mottram had called the meeting. He was outlining a road map to the Hollingsworth family on how he saw their daughter making a career out of running.
“You are 15, you have got years 10, 11 and 12 of school to go, that has to be a priority,” Mottram said. “No matter how good you are now it’s not going to do much for you until you’re able to finish your schooling.”
Mottram had seen the difficulties junior stars had in transitioning to the senior ranks and he was adamant there had to be an education to fall back on if things didn’t work out.
“As a young female athlete the next couple of years will be tough, your body shape changes, other things in life crop up and you might not get faster for a couple of years,” he explained.
“Managing expectations is really important and in reality you could be an athlete that goes all the way through to LA in 2028 and Brisbane in 2032.”
That’s when Hollingsworth interrupted.
“I’m going to stop you there, Craig,” she said.
“I might not want to be running in 2032, I might want to be a career woman or have a family or be living somewhere else so if I can have it now, why can’t I just do it now.”
Mottram smiled and nodded. This girl was smart, switched on and driven. And he knew then she would be running in Paris in 2024.
After finishing another 200m run-through on the tartan track which circles the AIA Centre in Melbourne, the training arena for AFL club Collingwood, Claudia Hollingsworth is transfixed on what is happening on the oval.
The club’s AFLW players are training and it’s pulling at the heart strings. The sound of the Sherrin on this sunny May afternoon has her itching to get out for a kick but she can’t. She has some important business approaching, running the 800m at the Paris Olympic Games.
“I loved footy,” she says. “I am still unsure why I made the decision to go with running, I don’t know what turned me away. Maybe the Covid time where team sports couldn’t continue and we stopped for two years.
“In those two years I focused so much on running so I was like, ‘Let’s just give running a crack.’”
Hollingsworth’s local club was the East Brighton Vampires, and she had played for the Sandringham Dragons where she was earmarked as a potential AFLW draftee.
She loved the team environment, which is why she’s so happy to have found that bond with the On Athletics Club, which Mottram brought to life in Australia last year.
One of the fastest-growing shoe and apparel brands in the world, On established its first athletics club in the US in 2020, which boasts a host of Olympians including Australia’s Commonwealth 1500m champion Olli Hoare.
The success of the US team spawned OAC programs in Europe and Australia. All runners sign a contract to become full-time professional athletes, with coaching, a physio, and a gym in Swan St, Richmond, at their disposal.
“I loved the team side of footy and the skills,” Hollingsworth explains. “You have to be so in-tune with the game. I just love that part of it, how it is so tactical and you’re thinking about what you’re doing every move in the game and it’s not all up to you.
“You are in a team rather than being out on a track and everything is on you. I always say being a part of the On group has provided me with that team environment, I don’t feel like I have lost that team sense, which is really great.”
When Mottram told Hollingsworth about what he’d been approached to do with On, he put no pressure on her to sign up. She was already getting product from a rival brand and he understood if she didn’t want to get on board.
“There was a moment back then where we put it on the table,” Mottram says. “You can stay with this brand and it’s going to be great and I will support you but I can’t be your coach.
“She went away and had a think about things and then said, ‘I will do it but I have to be the first athlete and I have to be the captain.’ She was 16 and she was already her own woman.”
When Hollingsworth qualified for the Paris Olympics by winning the national 800m title in Adelaide in April, the cameras caught a special moment with her embracing twin sister Gemma.
Two days earlier the pair had turned 19. They still live at home together in the bayside suburb of Black Rock and are the closest of friends, even though their lives have already gone in dramatically different directions.
Gemma is an opera singer who is studying a Bachelor of Music and Arts at Melbourne University.
“I think we can feel how each other is feeling,” Hollingsworth says about being a twin.
“When Gemma is performing and when I am racing, we can feel each other. We have been there every step of the way so we see how much effort we both put into what we want to do so then when it finally works out for each other we are sort of overly happy because we have seen the whole journey and we kind of feel each other’s emotions.”
And her own singing ability?
“We used to do a game when we were younger where she used to try and be my singing teacher but I was never good enough. I was actually horrible.”
There is another elite athlete in the family, with Hollingsworth’s older sister, Sunday, representing Australia in trampolining.
“We went over to Russia and watched her at the world champs and she came second which was amazing. We were so young, only in year 7 and she was in year 9 but it was an incredible experience,” Hollingsworth says.
“My dad always talks about putting on a competition hat, when you go into competition you just sort of focus. I remember seeing her do that and I learnt a lot from her professionalism and also how much fun she has with trampolining.
“I think I saw that if you want to be good at a sport you have to have fun with it. She was a big inspiration.”
Cathy Freeman rates her extraordinaryvictory at the 1996 Stawell Gift as one of the best of her career.
The world and Olympic champion gave away a 54m headstart in the 400m event and stormed down the outside to win by a nostril on the line.
Last year, Hollingsworth had her “Freeman moment” in Stawell.
She was invited to take part in an invitational 1000m event which included a roll call of Australia’s middle-distance stars such as national 1500m and 5000m champion Jessica Hull, 800m record holder Catriona Bisset and Olympic finalist Linden Hall.
“I wasn’t actually going to do Stawell,” Hollingsworth recalls. “Craig said it was a great opportunity but in my mind the season was over for me and I wanted a break.
“On the start line it was raining and cold and I was like, ‘Honestly I don’t want to be here.’
“The whole race I wasn’t in the best mindset. I was a fair way back and in my head I was like, in all honesty I should just stop and walk. It was the worst head space I have been in a race.
“Then as I was coming around to 200 to go, I just heard Dad yell out, ‘Give it a go. C’mon do something here.’ I was like, ‘Oh I’d better start sprinting and give it a go.’ From there my legs took over and the adrenalin of it all came up.”
The teenager stayed on the inside around the final bend and then overhauled Hull – who will start as one of the leading medal contenders in the 1500m in Paris – a couple of strides before the finish line.
“I was in shock when I crossed the line. They were the best girls in Australia, to come up against them and win was just amazing,” Hollingsworth says.
One person who wasn’t shocked was Mottram. He knew that Stawell performance was only scratching the surface, which was evident this season when Hollingsworth broke personal bests and Under 20 records almost every time she stepped out, culminating in the 1min 58.40sec performance to win her first Australian senior 800m title.
Mottram took on the might of the Africans during his career, winning a bronze medal in the 5000m at the 2005 Helsinki world championships. The next year he won the silver medal in a famous 5000m race at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games in front of 100,000 people at the MCG.
He knows what it takes to be successful on the international stage and can see a lot of his own traits in Hollingsworth.
“I think the way we approach things (is similar),” he says. “We lock heads on things around training occasionally because of that. The rhythm of training gives confidence, I was like that, and if there are changes to the schedule she’ll call me on it. I think it is just this innate desire to want to be the best you can be and the confidence comes from doing the work.”
The best part of watching Hollingsworth run for Mottram is that she “never looks like she is stressed”.
“We tested her like all the other guys and there was nothing spectacular,” he explains.
“They didn’t come back and say we’ve never seen anything like this girl, her heart rate does this or her blood shows that.
“It’s obviously a combination of things but more important is the attitude which you can’t test. I think that is her biggest asset, she is just so competitive and she stays calm.”
So what can she do in Paris?
“I don’t think it’s unrealistic (to make the Olympic final). It’s going to be a hard challenge to make the final but in the 800 it is a bit of a crab shoot in that you’ve got to position yourself well, you have got to be able to finish strongly and you have got to have the mental fortitude to know that you can progress through the rounds.
“If you said does Claudia have any of them, I’d say she has all of the above.”
More Coverage
Surrounding Levi with love: Jordan Ablett on joy, loss and everything in between
In a new book about love and loss, Jordan Ablett has shared the heartbreaking but also heartwarming and ever-hopeful story of her and AFL legend husband Gary’s journey with their son Levi, who has Menkes disease.
Love takes centre stage: Inside Anthony Warlow and Amanda Lea LaVergne’s life
In their first interview as a couple since they wed three years ago, Anthony Warlow and Amanda Lea LaVergne reveal the moment they fell in love on stage during Annie on Broadway, and how the rhythm and flow of their busy lives work.