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News28 Jul 2002


Bee-coming the best: Jana Pittman

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Beecoming the best: Jana Pittman
Matthew Brown for the IAAF
29 July 2002 - Australia’s Jana Pittman sent out a warning after her dominating gold medal performance in the 400m hurdles final at the Commonwealth Games on Sunday night. “This is just the beginning of something,” she said. “My goal is to the best I can be, and for me, that is to be world champion.”

She may be only 19, and still more than a second behind the very best in the world, but if her performances in Manchester are anything to go buy, the likes of Russia’s Yuliya Pechonkina, this year’s world leader, and Morocco’s Nezha Bidouane, the reigning world champion, ought to take careful notice.

When the tall, powerful Pittman issued her warning in the mixed zone in Manchester, she had just recorded what would have been the fastest time ever by a teenager, 54.40, bar the fact that she had produced a faster one herself in the semi-final only the day before. She described that race, which she won in 54.14, the second fastest time in the world this year, as her “best ever”, technically as well as on the clock.

In contrast, her victory in the final, by some 0.64 seconds from Jamaica’s Debbie-Ann Parris, was all the more impressive given that it was a far from perfect run. The young Australian stuttered at a couple of hurdles, and partially lost her rhythm in the back straight. She was happy – “ecstatic” she said, at winning her first senior gold – but knows that she is still a long way from truly fulfilling her massive potential.

“If I hadn’t run yesterday that would have been a pb,” she said. “And you can’t really be unhappy with two pbs. But I would like to have broken 54; I know I won’t really have broken through to world class until I run 53.”

That clear-sighted ambition is a sign of the progress Pittman has made over the last 12 months, since she withdrew from the Australian team for the world championships in Edmonton last August with a foot injury. In truth, her foot was only part of the problem. She was overwweight, eight kilogrammes heavier than she is this season, and not in condition to live up to her nation’s expectations.

And they were huge. Pittman had burst onto the world track scene the year before when, as a raw 17 year-old, she achieved a unique double at the world junior championships in Chile, taking gold medals in both the 400m and the 400m hurdles. Suddenly, she was hot public property in a sports mad country eager to grab onto yet more sporting heroes following the hugely successful Sydney Olympics.

Pittman, a “Sydneysider” herself, had experienced that mad, magnificent fortnight too. She competed in the 400m hurdles (going out in the heats), and was a member of the 4x400m relay quartet, which broke the Australian record. According to her coach, Craig Hilliard, it was all just too much.

“What she went through then in terms of doing HSC [school exams], the Olympic Games and then shooting off to Chile to win junior 400m and 400 hurdles – that’s a huge, huge rise, and the expectations afterwards were that she was going to come out and win everything.”

The Olympics, says Hilliard, was such an overwhelming experience that a lot of Australian athletes didn’t really “get their heads in gear” for the following season. Pittman, he says, was one of those who “lost the plot a little bit”.

Indeed, just as she seemed to have the athletics world at her feet, Pittman threatened to quit the sport. She was obviously highly talented. Faster at 17 than both Cathy Freeman and Debbie Flintoff-King at the same age, she had won the 1991 World Youth Championships, and was awarded the IAAF Rising Star Award at the end of 2000. Yet she was also a teenager, and a highly strung one at that.

At the start of 2001, Australia’s athletes went straight into their domestic season, and the pressure on Pittman was immense. At the national championships in Brisbane she made what amounted to a public cry for help, saying she feared becoming chronically fatigued from taking too much on.

As well as training and competing, she was studying physiotherapy full-time. As a born-again Christian, she was also going to bible studies classes four times a week, and attending church. It seemed she didn’t know whether to be an athlete, a pastor, or a physio. Not surprisingly her times on the track began to slide.

After a “crisis meeting” with Athletics Australia’s head coach Keith Connor, Pittman decided to put her track career back on course by hooking up with Hilliard and moving to the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra. That was in April last year, and it proved to be the new start she needed.

It was also an opportunity that Hilliard, coach to Jai Taurima, the Olympic long jump silver medallist, warmly embraced. “I welcomed it, I felt very fortunate to be able to work with her,” he says. “She’s such a huge talent, and my job really was a matter of guiding that talent. You’ve got to find the right balance between expectations and commitments.”

Hilliard sat Pittman down and talked through the issues, as he would with any new athlete on a scholarship to the AIS. “The question is how they embrace the issues, how they as an athlete say, ‘Yeah, I’m going to be responsible for this, this and this’,” he says. “I shut down certain things so she could retain her focus on what she’s here to do, because if you’re not performing out there who’s going to pay you any attention.”

Clearly Pittman listened. She put her university studies on hold and set about concentrating on the 400m hurdles, altering her training to become a better technical hurdler and, what Hilliard calls, “a more rhythmic athlete”. “Jana’s matured a lot as an athlete and as a person,” he says. “She’s obviously got a long, long way to go, both athletically and personally.”

Hilliard gave her a six year plan, the first stage of which involved winning the Commonwealth Games and the IAAF World Cup. “The aim this year was to come out and mix it up a little bit,” says Hilliard. “To get into some of the best races and see what happened.”

Pittman got into the Paris Golden League in July meeting and won, beating former Olympic champion Deon Hemmings, in what was then a personal best of 54.58. “That was like ‘Wow’,” says Hilliard. “Already some of the people she used to see in Olympic finals she was now beating.”

It was the perfect platform for her bid for the Commonwealth Games title. “That’s my third race against the big girls,” said Pittman after the Manchester final. “I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.”

The whole season, she says, is about learning the event, and how to handle all the possible situations it can throw up. “We’ve dealt with every issue we could possibly think of,” she says. “We’ve dealt with the rain; we’ve dealt with lanes one to seven; we’ve dealt with people dropping out of races; we’ve dealt with moving lanes at the last minute; with dealt with everything from a big race in front of 40,000 people to one with 10 people. We can cope with anything.”

That “we” is indicative of the support Pittman now feels around her, and her bond with Hilliard. It’s no surprise that he echoes her assessment of the season so far. “She’s learning an enormous amount,” he says. “Every race she’s had in Europe has been different, different winds and conditions. And it’s been fantastic for her.”

Indeed, when Hemmings pulled out of the final on Sunday at the last minute, after an accident on the warm up track, it was, says Pittman, “just another thing I’ve had to deal with; now, hopefully, it won’t ever phaze me again”.

Hemmings or not, Pittman had made herself favourite for the title anyway, after her scorching semi. Far from phazing her, such pressure is now a source of strength. “It just means that everyone can be scared of you and you can go in there feeling positive,” she says.

Back in the mixed zone Pittman points to a bumble bee tattooed on the lower left side of her abdomen. “Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly,” she explains. “But it doesn’t know this so it goes on flying anyway. Basically, it means, I’ve been given this body and I’m capable of anything; I’m only limited by my own imagination.”

Right now, Jana Pittman is imagining more gold medals. The limits are yet to be seen.

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