Love of sport drove Chiller higher

Kitty Chiller’s advice to young sports people is simple: play because you love it.

Kitty Chiller questioned her pursuit of modern pentathlon but was rewarded with selection at the Sydney Olympics. Picture: David Geraghty.

Kitty Chiller’s advice to young sportspeople is simple. Don’t play for the money or the promise of fame and public accolades; play because you love it.

Chiller’s great sporting love is modern pentathlon, an eccentric and some would say archaic multi-discipline sport devised more than 100 years ago by the founder of the modern Olympics, Pierre de Coubertin.

In Australia, it receives no funding and little attention and Chiller, one of its most enduring champions and advocates, is thrilled that her contribution to it as an athlete and administrator has been recognised with an AM honour.

Chiller is better known for other, more prominent roles she has held in sport, including chef de mission of our Rio Olympics team. Yet she is most proud of her decision to keep competing in pentathlon, even when it looked as though the sport would never be her ticket to the Olympics.

Nearly 20 years after she started competing, she was finally rewarded with a place on the Australian Olympic team in Sydney, the first Games to include women’s pentathlon. “I realised I loved the sport. I loved the challenge. I thought, ‘if I go to the Olympics that would be fantastic but if I can’t, I am still gaining so much from the sport’. Now that I look back on it, I am really happy that I stuck with it for the right reasons. I think that has guided the way I have approached the other administrative roles that I’ve had.”

Chiller was introduced to the discipline by Franz Stampfl, an Austrian-born athletics coach who helped Roger Bannister break the four-minute mile. Stampfl suggested she try modern pentathlon, which requires competitors to run, swim, ride, fence and shoot.

Since retiring as an athlete, Chiller has run pentathlon in Australia, mostly from her kitchen table. She reflects with pride on Chloe Esposito’s gold medal in Rio. “To see something like that happen to such a good, hardworking family and to know what they had put into it, it was sport at its best.”