This story is from Sunday magazine
Dame Valerie Adams is a true star, a gritty fighter who climbed to the top of the sporting world and stayed there. But as Dana Johannsen finds, even this sporting superwoman knows sometimes, the real strength is in showing your vulnerability. Photos by Geoffery Matautia
In the corner of the bustling Wintergarden Glasshouse - a floral wonderland in the middle of the Auckland Domain - Dame Valerie Adams has taken cover behind the chrysanthemums.
The blooms are acting as a modesty screen for the global track and field star while she executes a quick outfit change during her shoot.
It’s a bold move. On this spring lunchtime the glasshouse is crammed with amateur photographers and gardening enthusiasts taking snaps of the rainbow of varietals. Several unsuspecting visitors wander around the corner, only to glimpse the 1.93m shot put star wrestling herself into a new outfit, and quickly back away.
A minute or two later Adams emerges triumphant in her new look, throwing her arms wide like a magician who has just pulled off the ultimate sleight of hand.
“Told you I got this,” Adams says to her manager Nicole Antonelli, who shakes her head in disbelief.
Adams has had to get comfortable with baring herself in public - in a more metaphorical sense, that is. Soon, she will be exposed in a whole new light with the release of a documentary about her life.
The film, More Than Gold, set to be released in cinemas this week, examines Adams in all her idiosyncratic intensity on her journey to the Tokyo Olympics, where she claimed a bronze medal to add to her collection of two Olympic gold (2008, 2012) and silver (2016).
But it is the deeply personal, sometimes shocking, revelations about her life and struggles away from the track that Adams hopes will have the most impact.
“Oh yeah, it is all out there,” Adams says.
“I wanted it to be very open, very raw. It was quite important for me to tell my story my way, and reveal my truth and share all of my story.”
If ever there were an athlete that was a candidate for a film about their life, it is Adams.
New Zealand sport may never supply a more mythic, more cinematic narrative than that of the shy, South Auckland teenager that went on to become the world’s greatest shot putter of all time.
Since first capturing the attention of the New Zealand public as a 14-year-old athletics phenom when she was a student at Southern Cross Campus in Māngere, Adams has lived her life in the public eye.
She endured the devastation of losing her mother when she was just 15, messy coaching splits, a marriage break-up, doping controversies among her rivals, and a slew of potentially career-ending injuries. Later in her career she has been open about her fertility struggles, and the challenges of being a mother and a high performance athlete.
And yet, even after all this time in the unflinching public gaze, the extent of Adams’ courage and resilience has been hidden.
There are things in the film she has never made public before, including revelations of homelessness and physical and emotional abuse.
It was scary for Adams at first, the thought of revealing so much of herself. But she says she wants people in her community to know “your situation, your upbringing, where you come from does not define who you are”.
“I think it's quite important for people to see how real life is. It's not all gold medals and amazing things, there are very, very tough times to get through to be able to get back up on the other end.
“I have always wanted to put on this persona as being superwoman, but that is not always helpful. I’ve learned now that showing your fragilities and vulnerabilities can have a lot more impact.”
Adams wasn’t always so unselfconscious. There is documentary evidence to prove it.
One of the amazing resources for director Briar March and the team behind More Than Gold is the treasure trove of archival footage of Adams as a teenager in Māngere. Adams caught the attention of news outlets when, at 14 and in her first athletics season, she began smashing senior regional records.
It provides a striking juxtaposition of Adams as a teen, who appeared suddenly very interested in the ground whenever cameras were around, to Adams now, staring down the barrel of the camera sharing “her truth” so candidly.
Or, as Adams herself describes the transformation, “from shy little Valerie, to Valerie that won’t shut the hell up”.
Adams says if she could go back and talk to her teenage self now, her message would be to embrace who she is earlier.
“I would tell her to stand up tall, I'd tell her to be proud of who she is,” she says.
“I hated being tall at school, absolutely despised it. I was always very shy. I hated assemblies, because you had to stand up. I just felt like a big lump and I wanted to just fade into the background with everybody else.
“I really wish that I had more confidence back then to stand tall and proud.”
In athletics, Adams found belonging and acceptance. Her extraordinary height, so often the source of cruel jokes at school, was the source of awe and admiration at the track.
US shot put star Michelle Carter recalls being wonderstruck the first time she came across Adams at the 1999 World Junior Championships in Poland.
“I remember I was in 10th grade when I first saw her, and she was the tallest girl I had ever seen. I had never seen someone my age that tall. I remember calling my Dad [former NFL star and 1984 Olympic silver medalist Michael Carter] that night and telling him about this girl from New Zealand, and he was like ‘well, get ready because you are going to be seeing her for the rest of your career’. And he was correct,” she laughs.
Carter, a year younger than Adams, watched as her rival transformed from a timid teen, to fierce competitor, to the most dominant force in her sport.
But the Rio Olympic gold medalist, who also announced her retirement from the sport this year, says the biggest change she has seen in Adams is her willingness to speak up to the international governing body on issues affecting athletes.
“She leads the way in every sense,” she says.
For Adams, leadership isn’t about titles and honours, it is about acts of service.
In 2015 she was appointed the first woman matapule or chief of Houma, the Tongan village of her late mother Lilika.
Two years later, she received her damehood - an honour in recognition as much about her impact on historically marginalised Pacific Islanders as it was her feats with a steel ball.
But of all the honours bestowed on her, becoming a mother to daughter Kimoana, who turned 5 this month, and son Kepaleli, 3, provided the biggest shift in the way she viewed herself.
“I didn’t realise I had the capacity to murder someone until I had children to protect,” she jokes.
“I didn’t realise there was this amount of love, that you can love a human being this much. It’s made me slightly more patient, slightly more chill, you learn you can’t control everything. In saying that, I still run my household like a high performance sport. What I have learned in sport I have implemented into my personal life, and it keeps the wheels going.”
Adams has been open about her fraught journey to becoming a mother, speaking candidly about her fertility struggles in an effort to remove the stigma of IVF, which can be seen as a “taboo topic” in Pacific Island communities.
But she is only now ready to talk about what she went through following the birth of Kepaleli. In the film, Adams and husband Gabriel Price reveal the traumatic aftermath of the birth.
“It was very touch and go there for a while, as to whether I would be around at all,” says Adams.
“At the time it was very traumatic. It just needed to stay where it was, and that was my choice. So I felt like it was the right time to share, and also acknowledge that it was a big part of my build-up to Tokyo, and a big part of the struggles that led into what was going to be my last Olympic Games,” she says.
“I needed to process it myself, I didn't really understand what the hell was going on. I needed time to be able to get through it. So now that I've got the strength, it was the right time for me to unpack that.”
The transition to retirement can be a high risk time for athletes.
Even when the ending comes wrapped in a neat little bow, when the athlete has achieved all they want to in their career, when there is nothing left for them to prove in their arena, retirement can have an untethering effect for athletes, whose identities and sense of self-worth are tied in with their sport.
For Adams, she saw retirement not as an ending, but an evolution.
She says she has moved into a new phase of her life, one where coaching and governance roles, and her young family are the focus.
“While athletics has consumed my life for the past 20 years, over the last 7-8 years in particular I made some big decisions, including the decision to have children. So I kind of went from one, and the focus went directly onto another,” says Adams.
“It’s not the same for everyone, I think it is important to point that out.”
To get to the point where she could step out in front of the cameras on a blazing summer afternoon in February and announce that she was “hanging up my size 14 shoes”, Adams says she had spent a lot of time processing the decision.
In the end, her “mind, body and spirit” reached the conclusion for her: she had nothing left to give the competitive arena.
The true test came at the World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Oregon, in July, which Adams attended in her role on the Athletes Commission of the international governing body.
“Everyone asked, did I get the shakes, or did I have withdrawals? I got nothing,” she says.
She says she doesn’t miss the training, and she doesn’t miss the pain. But she still has a sense of romanticism about the art of shot put.
The explosion across the circle, the torque in her body as she transfers the velocity into the shot, the feeling of unbridled power when she launches it into the air. Having toiled away at her craft for as long as Adams has, trying to finetune the complex sequence of movements needed to make a 4kg ball fly, the elation of pulling off the perfect shot is something she still holds on to.
“It's really hard to explain, but when you do something that is very, very difficult technically, it's hard to get all those elements to come together. It feels like your body is always fighting with something,” the four-time Olympic medallist explains.
“But when it all comes together, the timing, the placement, the power, it’s like everything feels effortless. You feel like a ballerina - a big, badass bitch ballerina - everything feels so fluid, smooth and controlled. It takes your whole being to be able to pull out a perfect throw.
“It's just beautiful, like a spiritual experience.”
Adams casually mentions she has pulled off the perfect throw on just two occasions. The first time was at the 2011 World Championships in Daegu, South Korea, where she recorded her lifetime personal best throw of 21.24m; the second, her 21.03m effort at a Diamond League event in Italy the following year.
In an international athletics career that spanned more than two decades, five Olympic Games, and hundreds of titles - including a staggering streak of 107 successive shot put victories from 2006-2015 - and thousands upon thousands of throws, Adams has only twice experienced that feeling of metaphysical transcendence.
And yet, over that time she has achieved another, more permanent, kind of transcendence.
As a person, the global track and field star has come to symbolise more than heaving a steel ball distances that defy physics. She exists in a space where Pasifika achievement and cultural identity and female empowerment and body image and leadership and motherhood all collide.
More Than Gold is in cinemas this week
