Sunrise from the Summit

Introduction

The men are rolling their eyes and wondering how many times they have heard this story before. The women are holding their stomachs and wiping away tears of laughter.

Between fits of giggles, Renee is trying to tell the story of when Melita went down injured in a game, and the physio told her that she had damaged the ligaments in her knee, so she stayed off it for three days, only to find that when she tried to walk on it there was absolutely nothing wrong. Renee points at me: ‘What about the time when you tried to tell your new team in Germany that you were hot, and you said Ich bin heiss, only to find out later that you actually said I am horny.’ More laughter. More girls rolling around on the floor. Husbands and partners get up and head for sanity in front of the television. These women are mad, they think.

This happens every time I catch up with my best friends for a drink or dinner. We end up talking about the ‘good old days’ when we were playing soccer together. The funny thing is, all my closest girlfriends are the ones with whom I played sport. And if you ask many current and former female athletes, it is exactly the same for them.

What you go through together on the sports field—both the good and the bad—lays the foundation for lifelong friendships. Your team-mates have seen you at your worst and at your best. Nothing has been hidden from them—not then nor in the future—because they have learned, and are willing, to accept and love you, regardless of your personal circumstances. They will always be the ones you turn to when times are tough, because you know that without doubt they will be there for you, just like they were when you were playing.

Developing true, lifelong friendships has been the greatest gift I have received from playing sport, but it is certainly not the only one. As a very raw 18-year-old, I was given a chance to play in Germany, where I was exposed to a significantly higher standard of football, as well as things that would never have happened to me had I stayed in New Zealand: the mind-blowing experience of twice playing in the German Cup final in front of 70,000 people at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin as a curtain-raiser to the men’s match; screaming in delight, along with 30,000 others, as six of my team-mates from the German national team lifted the European Cup in Osnabrück in 1989; and reminiscing with some of them later, sitting in a beer garden in Munich. These are memories and emotions that I will never forget.

Likewise, you never forget the lessons you learn through sport—unfortunately some learned the hard way. For example, when I went overseas to play, a member of the executive of our national organisation—someone whom I had grown up with and knew well—rang one of the major newspapers to tell them that it was all a lie that I was playing there, and that I was just on holiday. This incident introduced me to the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ and eventually taught me who to listen to, and who to label a ‘tall poppy basher’ and just ignore.

Another key lesson I have learned through playing sport is to respect and tolerate others. Most sports are a huge melting pot, with participants mixing with a wider range of people than they would usually come across. In one of the teams I played for in New Zealand, we had a player from China, one from Denmark, two from the United States, several Maori and Pacific Islands women, and some New Zealand Europeans. They ranged from university scholars to posties, from lawyers to the unemployed, each with their own views and opinions. Despite this, we learned to respect and understand each other’s cultures and backgrounds. We had to if we wanted to become a winning team.

Respect and an understanding of different cultures are becoming even more important as New Zealand becomes a more culturally diverse society. Sport can contribute significantly in this regard. Through soccer, I have experienced what it was like to live in a country as a foreigner. I remember how upset and frustrated I would feel when people thought I was stupid because I didn’t understand the intricacies of their language. It made me swear that I would never treat people from different backgrounds like that, or tolerate that sort of behaviour from others.

Through sport, I have learned to tolerate individual differences. For example, when we played in the World Cup and Olympic qualifiers in 1999, we stayed in a hotel in Mangere in Auckland for the duration of the tournament. It was a little cramped: in each small suite there was a kitchen, a bathroom, and a living room with three beds. For the three weeks that we were together, we had to tolerate each other’s bad habits. One of my room-mates made ‘monkey noises’ when she fell asleep—if I didn’t fall asleep before her, I had no chance—and the other ate so much that we had to hide food to ensure we got some. I know I drove them insane by taking bites out of food and putting it back in the fridge for later. These are the habits that drive you mad at the time, but, after learning to deal with them—as you do in sport—they become the source of much amusement.

Participation in sport also offers women the potential to develop more general life skills. For example, losing games and being dropped from teams develop coping mechanisms and resilience that can be useful when things go wrong in personal relationships. Adhering to training programmes, day in and day out regardless of the weather, can teach the value of discipline, a trait that not only helps in academic and working careers, but can also create a physical habit for later life. Athletes often maintain moderated fitness regimes long after their competitive days are over, because they appreciate the significant benefits of having a healthy, fit body—in particular, the ability to determine when one’s body is not functioning well. Many women who have never played sport or kept fit cannot do this because they don’t know otherwise.

Along with developing real friendships among women, changing the ‘not knowing otherwise’ is, I think, the biggest contribution sport can make to the life of any woman. For a young girl in a society where the activities of women are repressed, the image of a woman having the freedom to run around a field in shorts and a T-shirt may provide the incentive and strength to push for change, even if her first step is to run in a sari or burkha. For a woman who has started work in a new town, the sight of a team rushing to congratulate the goal scorer may provide the impetus to join a club. The image of a 90,000-strong crowd at a world championship final may motivate a talented athlete to train harder. It doesn’t matter where you are, or the level at which you play—sport can deliver dreams for women of all ages.

As the Head of Women’s Football for New Zealand Soccer and a member of the FIFA Committee for Women’s Football (FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, is the world’s governing body for football and is based in Zurich, Switzerland) at the time of writing, I feel very fortunate that I can communicate these dreams directly with young—and not-so-young—women in many different countries for my chosen sport.

I wrote this book because my dream is to help more women discover the beauty and enjoyment of being involved in any sport—not just through playing, but also through coaching and the administration and promotion of sport. For those who are already involved, my wish is to help you get the best out of it, and to achieve your potential, whatever your level. To do this, I sought the views and advice of outstanding sportswomen who are, or have been, at the peak of their particular sport.

Whether you are just starting out in sport, or are close to the top, these women’s experiences and insights will hopefully help you progress further up your own mountain, so that in time you may sit at the summit at sunset with our role models, and talk about how fantastic the sunrise was.

Yvette Corlett

No excuse in the world counts for squat.

Mark Schubert

FULL NAME: Yvette Winifred Corlett (née Williams)

BIRTH DATE: 25 April 1929

BORN IN: Dunedin

CURRENTLY LIVING IN: Auckland

MAIN SPORT: Athletics

HIGHEST HONOURS IN THAT SPORT:

World record holder in long jump

Olympic gold medallist in long jump

Commonwealth gold medallist in long jump, shot put and discus

OTHER SPORTS PLAYED: Basketball (for New Zealand), netball (for Otago)

MARITAL STATUS: Married to Charles (Buddy) Corlett

CHILDREN: Neville, Peter, Karen and Bruce

CURRENT OCCUPATION: Retired

MAIN INTERESTS OUTSIDE SPORT: Lawn bowls and reading

PERSON YOU MOST ADMIRE IN SPORT: Jesse Owens, because he won four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics and I tried to emulate his long jump performance.

As a pioneer for sporting talent in New Zealand, it is only fitting that Yvette Corlett (née Williams) leads this parade of remarkable women. In the space of just four years during the early 1950s, Yvette won one Olympic and four Empire (now Commonwealth) Games gold medals and one silver medal in several different events. One of these medals was a gold in the long jump at the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki, where she also made the finals of the shot put and the discus. Through these exceptional performances, Yvette not only won the hearts of New Zealanders, but unquestionably also provided an inspirational pathway for talented young female athletes to follow for many decades afterwards.

Born in 1929, Yvette describes a very different life growing up in Dunedin to the one children who live there would experience today. ‘I lived in Dunedin until I was 22 and I had no idea about the warmer climates beyond the city, because we didn’t travel very much back then at all. We didn’t even have a car until I was ten years old, and even when we had it, there were petrol restrictions that meant you couldn’t go that far. Life was generally based around family and school, and for me that meant the local primary school at Caversham, followed by Dunedin North Intermediate and Otago Girls’ High School for four years.

‘At high school, we didn’t have grounds that were big enough to allow us to run any real distance. Consequently, there was no athletics at high school. It wasn’t until I left there that I found I wanted to participate in some form of activity. One of the girls in the office where I was working belonged to an athletics club, and suggested that I go along to try it. It wasn’t that far, so I jumped on my bike and went down to the Caledonian Ground. The first night went quite well and I won a few events. In those days they had a handicap system, and I was given head starts—I had no difficulty winning with those. Unfortunately, as time went on I was moved further and further back, and it wasn’t long before I got to the scratch mark. But I still continued to do quite well.’

It is a definite understatement from Yvette, and a reflection of her modesty, when she says that she ‘continued to do quite well’. In her first year at the national championships, she won the shot put event and broke the New Zealand record. ‘It was marvellous to break the record, but it wasn’t a very long distance. It wouldn’t even get a place in secondary school athletics these days, but it was a long way back then. I also came second in the long jump by half an inch, but for the next six years after that I won the event, plus the javelin, shot put and discus. In the last few years, I also took part in the hurdles, and won that too. Unfortunately there were no heptathlons and pentathlons for women then. If there had been, I would have been a natural for it.’

In addition to restrictions on the types of events that were accessible to women, Yvette recalls that there were significant differences in the level of support made available to female athletes. ‘We didn’t get any support back then at all. We had to pay our own way to the nationals and other athletic meets around the area. The club or centre to which you belonged might give you something towards your fare, but that was it. The cost was minimal, though, when you take into account what we got out of it. It was such a great adventure. We all especially loved the idea of travelling somewhere else.

‘When I was competing for Otago, we travelled to the North Island where the nationals were normally held. There was no air travel in those days, so it often took us three days to get to the competition. We would catch the train to Christchurch in the morning, and then go across to Lyttelton. From there we would catch the overnight ferry to Wellington, then have to wait all day in Wellington for the overnight train to take us north. We didn’t get much sleep at all on the train because it bumped about and kept stopping. I think we even used to stop in Taumarunui in the middle of the night for a pie and a cup of tea!

‘It all sounds like a huge effort, but really it contributed to the fun we had. Everyone was roughly the same age, and you would meet up with members of the other teams, such as Canterbury, because they would all be travelling on the train. This extra time together helped to create a great spirit that I am not sure is there today. Everyone just gets on a plane, and it seems to be all so individual.’

However, one thing that does appear to be similar nowadays is the anti-Auckland sentiment. ‘Auckland always had the biggest team, and there were only five or six of us in the Otago women’s team, but we still seemed to win all the events. We ended up winning the shield at the nationals and beating Auckland, which was a big thing, even back then. Now, living in Auckland, when I go back home to Dunedin, I daren’t say too much about Auckland. It is always about how lovely it is to be home again, la la la…’

Yvette has been living in Auckland since 1952, after she moved there to be with her coach. ‘In my first season, they had the very first national coaching school in Timaru. A few of us from Dunedin went up there and were billeted out, as we always were in those days. All the top coaches from various parts of New Zealand were there, including the man who was to become my coach, Jim Bellwood. He had just completed a scholarship at Loughborough College in the UK, where he had graduated under the guidance of Geoff Dyson, the British national athletics coach, who was considered to be one of the world’s greatest coaches and physical education experts. Fortunately for me, Jim came to New Zealand because his wife, Emmie, was lecturing at the University of Otago. She was an Estonian and had competed in gymnastics at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Due to her poor health, however, they shifted up to Auckland, and Jim said to me that if I wanted to do well in the sport, I needed to shift with them. I did, and together they were a great influence on my career.

‘Being a gymnast and also an expert in physical education, Emmie gave me a lot of exercises, particularly relating to strength and flexibility. At that time, there weren’t any gyms available to women, so we had to invent our own methods. Together with Jim, she got me to lift concrete blocks in different positions to strengthen my arms, and gave me sandbags to hook over my feet and do various leg exercises to build my abdominal and leg muscles. They also had two little girls who were only about three and four years old at the time, and Emmie got me to do exercises with the girls on my back, or to lie on my back and lift the girls with my legs. Later, towards the end of my athletic career, I was able to use the medicine balls at the YMCA where I worked, but until then we had to be quite innovative.

‘Jim also tried to get me to run faster because I wasn’t the top sprinter in the country—I was maybe about the fourth fastest. As well as all the strengthening exercises, he got me running downhill to accelerate my leg movement, which definitely helped. Jim was a technical expert in all of the events, and therefore provided me with good advice in this area. He was a fantastic coach and a great mentor to me.’

Under Jim and Emmie’s guidance, Yvette quickly became national champion. ‘Once this happened, I was invited to all sorts of places, but it was rare to go overseas. A couple of times I was picked with three or four other girls from New Zealand to go to Australia to compete against their national champions. I was once asked to go to Fiji for a demonstration, but that was about it at the beginning. Even my first Empire Games in 1950 were in Auckland. All the teams stayed at the campus out at Ardmore, and we were all in together in dormitories. These days it is mostly two to a room, but in the early days it was 16–20 to a