Euphoria and heartbreak: The driven life of our elite athletes

It was a Christmas to remember. Camille Buscomb and Cameron French treated themselves to a few days away. They were in the UK, with family mostly back in New Zealand, so they headed off to indulge themselves.

Cooked breakfasts, cooked lunches, scones for afternoon tea, Christmas dinner, a few wines, a few cocktails. No harm done, Buscomb had until the end of January before racing again. Plenty of time for a treat.

And then the call came through on the 27th. Could Buscomb compete in Madrid on New Year’s?

Right after bingeing on rich food? It was a lucrative gold label 10km road race, and Buscomb said yes. She did well, too, finishing fifth.

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That’s life for an elite athlete, track shoes in the suitcase. And Buscomb, currently New Zealand’s best woman distance runner, second fastest ever from this country over the 5k and 10k, raced a lot. She would catch a flight from New Zealand to Japan to set the pace for the first half of a marathon and then fly home again. There weren’t many races she turned down. One was a 5k race in Monaco her manager wanted her to pace. That’s Monaco in Europe. Given she was in New Zealand at the time, that one was too crazy.

Not now, though, not now that she and partner French have a newborn, Sienna, 6 weeks old this weekend. Now, their days in Hamilton revolve around the baby’s routines, while French – New Zealand’s fastest ever hurdler over 400m, which he has scorched around in 49.33s – is also studying at Wintec. The pregnancy wasn’t straightforward, but things are easier now, and Buscomb, 32, is back walking, and thinking of returning to a bit of light jogging soon.

That’s in no small part because, while former teammates and training partners are competing at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, she has the Paris Olympics in her sights.

She and French, 30, like plenty of other top athletes around New Zealand not competing at Birmingham, whether because of family circumstances, injury or the vagaries of team selection, will be watching their peers in competition on the other side of the world. Elite sport is brutal, and the margins are tiny. Eddie Osei-Nketia, for instance, is New Zealand’s fastest ever sprinter but didn’t make the team. David Nyika, bidding for his third Commonwealth boxing gold, had to withdraw with a hand injury.

French knows that feeling all too well. Like Buscomb, he’s been a serious competitor for the past decade, clocking up plenty of time in Europe in the endless search for competition and training partners. In the leadup to the 2016 Rio Olympics he’d been at a training camp in Canberra where he was in great shape and footing it with guys who were Olympic semifinalists. He came back to New Zealand raring to go. But when you’re at your peak, it’s a fine edge, and euphoria has heartbreak on its flipside. French was doing some hurdle reps when he felt a grab in his achilles. He wonders if he had got a bit dehydrated. The grab lingered, he had to ease off the training intensity and he missed Olympic selection by about a third of a second.

Euphoria and heartbreak. Buscomb and French sold all their stuff, rented out their Hamilton house and moved to Bath in the UK at the start of 2019 for the sake of their coaching, training and competition. By late 2019, French – who had made the 2018 Commonwealth Games but had a disappointing run – was in the form of his life. The couple were happy. Both were training well, they had a plan, Buscomb had reached 12th in the world and qualified for the Tokyo Olympics, after missing out on Rio by a matter of about three seconds. French was within touching distance of qualifying for Tokyo – a couple of 49 second races would have done it, and that was well within his grasp.

It was as if the years of challenge were meant to be; the couple were reaping the dividends.

“It was sort of like we’d climbed up this little tower,” French says. “And then to have it kicked out from underneath you – by a pandemic.”

Buscomb had returned to New Zealand for her sister’s wedding and French had to scramble to rejoin her in March 2020 as the UK locked down around him.

The young couple in their modest, beautifully renovated Fairfield house – a job they largely carried out themselves, Gibbing, plastering and painting while Buscomb was pregnant – want to emphasise the positive. They’ve enjoyed the travelling life, they’ve had huge highs in their competitive careers and now there is the excitement of having their baby. Being a couple since 2011 means they have been able to support and encourage each other through the ups and downs.

That positivity is crucial to competing. It takes years of hard training, you sacrifice a lot, you’re taking a gamble. The drive is to think you can do more and better, French says. How good can you get? You don’t want to give up early because you know the tank’s not empty. There’s more to give, there’s more to try.

Having good people around helps, including your training group. “You would surround yourself with better, faster, more positive people,” Buscomb says.

She says in her younger years, she used to be hard on herself, but learned it’s better to be grateful. “You should still be proud of every achievement. I think if you’re never happy, well then you underperform every time, right?”

The trick at the start line is to take the external pressures out, clear your head, French says. You might be financially struggling, physically struggling, but you tell yourself it doesn’t matter, I’m going to do this. You have to channel. Because you need to be fired up for a race, but you also need to be controlled and relaxed.

Their return to New Zealand because of Covid, wasn’t easy, however. For Buscomb there was the uncertainty of the Tokyo Olympics, which ended up being shunted back a full year.

And Athletics NZ wouldn’t give French access to their elite facilities on the basis he was an overseas athlete, he says in evident surprise and frustration. It was hard to find training partners who could push him and it wasn’t easy to hit top times in races when he was out in front by the first hurdle. Hurdling is a highly technical sport and he was far from his usual coaches. Plus, as if to rub salt in the wound, it was a seriously windy summer. So the couple returned to the UK when they could, in May last year.

That’s when something strange happened. French picked up a hamstring niggle – common enough in a sport where the strain is immense every time you land from a hurdle. He got over it. Training was going well, he clocked a personal best over a shorter distance. But the hamstring niggle broke him. “It was that last little thing in my head that just sent me for six.”

The first part of a race was usually his best – he would go out hard, be strong around the bend and then hold on. But he would be reaching hurdle three, watching everyone else race, tell himself to “go” and there was nothing. He would reach hurdle five and go to kick and again there was nothing. “It was the weirdest feeling.”

The emotional strain of the last year was telling on both of them and French still had the pressure of needing to qualify for the Olympics. “If I had qualified, maybe I could have put it aside. But you’re hunting, hunting, hunting, and you know that you’re not quite physically where you need to be.”

It sounds a bit like depression. “Without saying it, yeah. A hundred percent.”

Buscomb was getting ready to go to the Olympics and feeling something similar, after all the upheaval and uncertainty of the year they had had, a year of limbo, races constantly being cancelled. French turned to supporting her.

For Ben Langton Burnell, the heartache is literal. New Zealand’s top javelin thrower is sitting out the Commonwealth Games after being hit last year by myocarditis, an inflammation around the heart. He felt a burning sensation during a gym workout which saw him end up in hospital for a week. He was given a five month recovery window, limiting his activity. So the man who has this country’s third best throw in competition and who had been sending it out to 85m, 86m in training had to stop. Silver lining: at the same time, he was starting up the Launch Agency marketing business – six employees have become 20 in seven months, he says – and so the Games were out of the question. He’ll be watching with interest, but he’s also back training twice a day in a punishing five or six hour schedule starting with a session around 4.30am or 5am and finishing with another at the end of the day. He’s got a few kilos to lose if he wants to get back to his previous throwing weight, but he’s feeling good and has the experience to know how to manage himself.

This Wednesday the blustery weather has cleared enough for him to have his scheduled Porritt Stadium open-air training. It’s hard to draw a straight line in the mind from this pastoral, shrub-encircled ground to the world’s top stadiums bedecked with flags, but among the dozen or so here, Langton Burnell, at least, has Paris in his sights.

At 29, he is a decent shot. He’s done a Commonwealth Games and the world champs. The 85m mark probably wouldn’t win him an Olympic medal, but it would likely put him in the top six. In fact, he thinks he might have a couple of Olympic competitions in him.

But, like French, he has been excluded from Athletics NZ’s high performance facilities including its velodrome gym, after a couple of seasons where he says he hadn’t performed. He was given the news early in 2020, the same week he split with his coach, the year before he got myocarditis. Ironically, he then started throwing his best ever distances, but he says that hasn’t been enough to get back the gym access.

He misses the environment but thinks he’s proved he can do it on his own terms. “My whole goal is just to see what my limit is with my sport. It’s a personal goal.”

Like French, Langton Burnell questions New Zealand’s selection criteria. There is an Olympic standard that most countries are happy to go with; New Zealand, however, wants medal prospects only. That, Langton Burnell says, introduces a subjective element.

“For track and field athletes, if you’re making an Olympic standard, you should damn well be going to those Olympics.”

There is an acceptance there are budgetary constraints, but that doesn’t change these top athletes’ obvious frustration with the process.

Buscomb recalls her unsuccessful bid for the 2014 Commonwealth Games. She was racing and beating competitors in Australia who were selected, but she missed out. Had she gone, she thinks she would have been all the better for the experience and would probably have performed better at the 2018 Commonwealth Games.

French says when Buscomb missed selection in 2014, New Zealand’s standards were the hardest in the Commonwealth. Other countries view those Games as development for bigger events, he says. You get the experience, you learn from it, you develop as an athlete.

It also helps you get into future races, he says, and that helps further build experience. He cites Australian athletes coming into their peak in their late 20s, having had the likes of Commonwealth Games experience when younger.

No one goes to the Olympics not wanting a medal, French says. But the conversations with our elite should be around how to support them. That doesn’t only have to be monetary. Feeling supported also matters.

The wellbeing of athletes has been thrown into relief by the suspected suicide last year of Rio Olympic cyclist Olivia Podmore. A sports integrity body has been established, and just over a week ago High Performance Sport NZ issued a 10 point action plan in response to a review into Cycling NZ.

“I think there’s a group of athletes that haven’t been well looked after,” Langton Burnell says. “And those are the ones that I think the system have to be quite careful with those sort of athletes: the ones that get kicked out of the system and they don’t know how to navigate that next part of their life, or the ones that get kicked out of the system, like me, who still have a hunger to achieve. I think those are the two sort of categories of athletes that they have to look after, and there has to be something in place, but I’ve heard that they are getting better at having stuff in place for them.”

Buscomb knows exactly what it takes to compete at the Olympics. She was New Zealand’s only woman runner at Tokyo last year. That had been 10 years in the making, ever since she cut short a US trip at the end of her school years in an unsuccessful bid for the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games. When she then missed Rio as well, she took six weeks off running. She didn’t know how to train any harder. But the desire still burned. She contacted a coach in Australia to say she would do whatever it took to be at the next Olympics. She joined a training camp in Australia. The camps became a regular fixture and she flew everywhere to race.

It’s a life on the move, and income can be uncertain. Depending on the event, she could earn varying amounts of appearance money along with prize money, with the pace setter role also thrown into the mix. She has a sponsor providing shoes, clothes and some money. Her manager would find races where the organisers would pay the airfares. Plus she would get some funding from Athletics NZ to help with the likes of reimbursing accommodation. In the buildup to the Olympics, she had a performance enhancement grant from High Performance Sport NZ.

At Tokyo, she finished 19th in the 10,000m, recording a season’s best time of 32:10.49, and 14th in her 5000m heat with a time of 15:24.39 – well outside her personal best of 14:58.59. What most didn’t know was that she was in isolation throughout the two weeks because she was deemed a close contact of someone on the plane with Covid. She was ferried in a private car to the stadium for her events. “I was allowed to stand on the start line and then do the race and then get taken back to my room.” It was difficult and traumatising, and then when she was at the airport waiting for her flight home she got the news about Olivia Podmore’s death. “It was just so much sadness.”

With racing out of the question during pregnancy and early parenthood, Buscomb is dismayed at the absence of financial support from Athletics NZ. She also thought she met the criteria for a $25,000 base grant from High Performance Sport who instead have given her a $10,000 development grant, which they have agreed to repeat next year. She has qualified for government-funded six months maternity leave and is doing some online coaching to help make ends meet.

For Paris, she’s thinking about turning to the marathon, which will better fit the couple’s new life as parents. She can do more on the treadmill at home, and when it comes to competition a couple of marathons a year is all you want to do. That means she might have three chances to qualify.

So the large treadmill taking up a decent chunk of Buscomb and French’s living room is a potent signal of the future. They’ve been told women distance runners can come back stronger from giving birth, and Buscomb has a wealth of experience to draw on. French is set to start a new job, and still eyes a return to competition. He had a glitch at the start of this year when he was training to join the Games cycling sprint team. His natural ability and strength saw him improve out of sight in three months, but he didn’t quite crack the time they set him. Had they given him longer, he’s confident he would have done it.

The desire still burns.