As Dame Valerie Adams closes the door on a superlative shot put career, she's gifting her big shoes to a new generation of young women throwers, she tells Suzanne McFadden.
Those size 14 shoes.
Of course, they’ll be hard to fill, now Dame Valerie Adams has unlaced them and finally laid them aside.
But a new pair of Dame Val’s shoes will also be the start of at least one young woman’s throwing future.
Now that her remarkable days (22 years, no less) as one of the great competitors in modern-day world athletics are over - her "heart, soul and body" telling her it's time - Adams turns her focus to giving back.
And that means coaching, advocating for athletes, and giving barefoot kids new pairs of shoes.
“One pair of shoes from my PE teacher changed my life,” the 37-year-old shot put legend says. “Let me do that for someone else.”
It means a lot to Adams - four-time Olympic medallist, five-time Commonwealth Games medallist, eight-time world champion - to pass on the myriad pairs of Nikes she receives each year. “Because who can really wear 20 pairs of shoes, right?” she says. But there's more to it than that.
When she first picked up a shot put as a 13-year-old at Southern Cross Campus in Māngere East, Adams didn’t own a pair of sports shoes. Her family simply couldn’t afford them. She broke her first record at the Counties-Manukau championships in bare feet.
“Now I send so many pairs of Nike shoes to kids around New Zealand. It’s me sharing the blessings I’ve been given, things that I never had when I was growing up,” she says.
“I’ve got this now, let me do this for you.”
It’s not just footwear she’s handing on. Adams is also sharing her knowledge and experience with kids up to three times a week at athletics trainings at Bruce Pulman Park in Papakura.
It’s where she coaches her sister, Lisa, the reigning Paralympic F37 shot put champion. “It’s where I help out,” the elder Adams says.
In her impassioned retirement speech, delivered on the edge of the shot put circle at the AUT Millennium on Auckland’s North Shore on Tuesday, Adams called out to the next generation.
“To all those who dare lift the shot – I’m looking at you girl – do so with my blessing. As has been given to me, I give also to you. Strength and courage. There is the dream – good and true. Take it.”
“It’s important to me to help them come through,” the seven-time Halberg New Zealand Sportswoman of the Year said afterwards.
“When I came through the ranks, I didn’t have really someone in my position. It was hard for me, a young girl from south Auckland. I was 15, my mum had just died, and I was trying to find myself.
“But I’m very blessed I’m now in a position where I can reach out to a lot of athletes; make sure I’m there for them.”
She wants to make sure she helps kids in south Auckland, but on their terms. Understanding where they come from, and what they need.
“I know it’s great here [at AUT Millennium] and they want to set up the high performance stuff out there [Bruce Pulman],” she says. “But I’ve told them ‘You need to understand the people out there, we do it very different’. There’s a difference in demographic, a difference in culture. You have to reach deeper than just superficial.
“Because not everybody can afford training gear. They will turn up in school shoes and you’ve got to be prepared for that.”
Adams can already see exciting young female throwing talent coming through. “Do they have what it takes? Only time will tell," she says. "I send them away with my blessing – and my shoes – and I look forward to following their progress.”
Four women will throw for the senior women’s shot put title at the national track and field championships in Hawkes Bay on Sunday afternoon, with Maddi Wesche (the Olympic finalist who threw in sunglasses to be sixth in Tokyo) the favourite. Adams has been New Zealand shot put champion 17 times.
Two young women, Tapenisa Havea and Natalia Rankin-Chitar, have both thrown far enough to compete at the world U20 championships in Cali, Colombia, in August.
Lisa Adams will compete in a field of five for the Para women’s shot put title.
Dame Val famously stayed on in Tokyo after winning Olympic bronze last August, and coached her little sister to Paralympic gold. She can see herself coaching more athletes seriously in the future, once her young children, Kimoana (four) and Kepaleli (almost three), are older.
“It’s something I’d like to dabble in,” she says. “For now, Lisa is a lot, and I have a lot going on with my babies right now.”
Adams adores her kids. She's been open about her fertility struggles - both children were born through IVF - and the struggles with managing Kepaleli's type 1 diabetes, diagnosed during the first nationwide Covid lockdown. She's struggled, too, with the guilt of spending time away from them.
Sister Lisa was there in the background yesterday, helping Adams’ husband, Gabriel Price, watch over the kids as they played on the stadium banks with a green frisbee. It wasn’t her time to talk, she said. “This is my sister’s moment.”
The transition from athlete to fulltime mum/part-time coach won’t be easy, Adams admits. “This is all I’ve known, for 24 years of my life,” she says. But her heart, soul and especially her body, she laughed, was telling her it was the right time to end her competitive days (even if it still chokes her up to say it).
She’s already made a significant change: the backseat of her car, once jam-packed with athletics gear, is now filled with soft toys.
Adams’ physio right through her career, Louise Johnson (otherwise known as “My Louloubelle”) - who knows too well how broken the shot putter's body was towards the end of her career - has no doubt Adams will continue to have “a huge influence” on a new generation of young New Zealanders.
“She has a presence that doesn’t rely on her competing. You go to south Auckland you’ll see murals of her; she will have a statue one day, I’m sure,” she says. (She’ll also be the star of her own feature-length film, due out later this year).
“Why wouldn’t you want to grow up to be Dame Valerie?”
Adams will continue to make her presence felt in world athletics, too. She’s the deputy chair of the World Athletics Athletes’ Commission and chairs the athletes’ commissions for Oceania and Athletics NZ.
Kereyn Smith, the New Zealand Olympic Committee’s CEO, says Adams is in the right stage of her career to speak up for athletes.
“You will always see with great athletes like Dame Valerie, as their career progresses, they become comfortable in their own shoes. They understand the bigger picture of sport. And you can see she’s very aware of what’s going on around her,” Smith says.
“She’s always had interesting things to say, she’s not a scripted athlete, so people listen to her views. She’s a thought leader and an influencer of real gravitas.”
Peter Pfitzinger, a two-time Olympic marathon runner now CEO of Athletics NZ, says he has a lot of time for Adams: “She’s a great advocate for athletes, and we talk a lot.
“She’s also an icon within the sport. You think about the last 22 years, how she’s helped throwing become mainstream now. New Zealand athletics was all about middle distance running for a long time and now throws is our strongest event group.
“We haven’t discussed the details beyond Lisa, but we’re hoping she’ll do more coaching over time.”
But for this Tongan mum, fàmili now comes first. She made a tearful thanks to Gabriel and his mother, Noma, who helped to look after the children when Adams was living and training in Christchurch last year, and when she was away competing.
Will she encourage Kimoana and Kepaleli to do athletics? “No. I’m going to let them decide what they want to do,” she says.
“I will encourage them to be kind, and to serve. Their mum might have done this, that and the other, and I’m sure they will be told that forever, but I want them to be super-kind human beings.”
