Valerie Vili improves on her own Commonwealth shot record (© Getty Images)
BeijingWorld Youth champion in 2001, World Junior gold in 2002, fifth in her first senior World Championships in 2003, third in 2005, Commonwealth champion in 2006, World champion in 2007, World indoor champion in 2008.
If you just looked at the stats you might think Valerie Vili’s rise to the height of Olympic shot put champion was something of an inevitability. But she wouldn’t see it that way.
For this cheerfully likeable Kiwi the journey to Olympic gold will be forever tinged with sadness at the memory of where it started, eight years ago, at home with her mother in Auckland watching the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney Olympic Games.
“I would like to be part of that,” thought the 15-year-old girl, as she gazed at Cathy Freeman standing high on a watery platform with the Olympic torch in hand. The next day her mother died.
But somehow the dream lived on. Vili had been doing a bit of shot put at school because, as she puts it, “I was the biggest kid and got thrown into it”, and after her mother’s death it was putting the shot that helped her through the ordeal.
She started breaking school records and, well, you could say the rest is history, but that’s not quite the case.
Vili’s dream of being “part of it” came true four years ago in Athens when, as it turned out, being part of it was not enough, though. Vili was only 18 – still a kid, as she says – and the experience of throwing in the final at Olympia only whetted her appetite. She wanted more than “experience”; she wanted to compete for the medals. In some ways the memory of her mother demanded that she do nothing less.
Three years later she had a World Championship medal in her bag, when, 12 months ago, Vili became the youngest ever world shot put champion when, at 22, she took gold in Osaka.
Famously, just moments after she had snatched that dramatic victory in the last round over the reigning champion Nadezhda Ostapchuk of Belarus, she turned to the nearest TV camera and mouthed a silent message to her Mum, and her late father, who’d died just a few months before.
“This was dedicated to them,” she told journalists at the time, her eyes full of tears.
There were no tears this year. And no dramatics. She dominated the Olympic final in Beijing’s National Stadium on Saturday night to claim New Zealand’s first track and field gold since 1500m runner John Walker in 1976. Then she danced across the track to find her coach Kirsten Hellier in the crowd, wearing a grin as broad as the Bird’s Nest.
Again she pointed to the attentive lense of a TV camera. “This one was for me,” she said. “Tonight was all about Val, just Val.”
This time the tears belonged to Hellier, a former Commonwealth Games javelin silver medallist.
“All I wanted to do was get onto the stands to give my coach a massive hug,” said the delighted Vili. “I can’t really explain how I’m feeling right now. It’s an amazing stadium, an amazing crowd. It’s such an awesome feeling to be here.”
Vili came to the Games as the third best in the world this year. But she’d thrown little throughout the season as she nursed a shoulder injury, and tried to relieve the pressure from New Zeland’s hopeful media. She based herself in Australia, training in Cairns and Brisbane, and flew straight to Beijing rather than heading for the New Zealand team holding camp in Hong Kong.
It was a winning strategy, for Vili quickly became the favourite after leading the qualifying round on Saturday morning with 19.73. “We could see she was in good shape,” said Ostapchuk’s teammate, Nataliya Mikhnevich, who eventually took the silver ahead of her compatriot.
But Vili was taking nothing for granted. She knew she had to launch a big throw early to put pressure on her opponents and she did so with style. She opened with 20.56, breaking her own Oceania record and meaning the two Belarussians would have to find their very best to beat her.
“I wanted to put pressure on the others from the world go,” she said. “That’s why I was so happy to come away with a PB. It’s just what I wanted to do.”
Mikhnevich managed 20.28 in the third round, but by then Vili had already had a second best of 20.40, and she went on to throw 20.52 in the fifth round. Yet it was only when her rival had landed her sixth put at 20.10 that Vili allowed herself to celebrate.
“It was a long, anxious, exciting, nervous competition,” said Vili. “I just had to give it my all. Thankfully I was able to take control from the word go but you can never let your guard down with the Belarussians because they are always coming for you.”
The victory might have belonged to her, but Vili – who has 17 half brothers and sisters back in Rotorua – will surely have to share it a little. Not least with her excited nation, for her gold crowned a day that Kiwis will long remember as their greatest ever in Olympic history. With two golds, a silver and bronze, New Zealanders are already calling it Super Saturday.
Not that Vili knew that as she wrapped her nation’s flag around her shoulders. Before she left the arena she had more people to find in the crowd. Vili set off on a lap of honour and half way down the back straight she found who she was looking for – her sister Vivien and her niece, Amcl.
“They came all the way over here to support me and I wanted to find them to say thank you,” she explained.
As they embraced, you imagine Vivien and Val shared a few thoughts for their Mum too, and that evening long ago when they sat together watching Australia’s iconic Olympian open the Sydney Games. Perhaps this one wasn’t just for Val, after all.
Matthew Brown for the IAAF
