Anna Meares was the rookie, the comeback queen, the favourite and the champion with a target on her back across four Olympic Games.
Her extraordinary achievements in the velodrome saw her become the first and only Australian to win a medal in four consecutive Olympics.
But it was the particular experience of arriving in London 2012 as the hated rival to home favourite Victoria Pendleton that most shaped how Meares will lead the Australian team in her role as chef de mission at the Paris Olympics in 2024.
Dubbed in the UK press the ‘broomstick’ to Pendleton’s ‘lipstick’, and under immense pressure at home to convert her world championship title into Olympic gold, Meares virtually went into hiding in Italy in the lead-in to the London Games.
Once there, she hit highs and lows as one of track cycling’s greatest rivalries played out over a feverish two days of competition. The Australian took first blood, Meares and Kaarle McCulloch winning bronze in the team sprint, while Pendleton and Jess Varnish suffered the humiliation of being disqualified in their first outing in front of a stunned home crowd.
Meares stumbled next. The favourite in the keirin as the reigning world champion, she crashed out in fifth spot, while Pendleton claimed gold. But she prevailed in the individual sprint, beating world champion Pendleton to claim her fourth Olympic medal and her first gold. Both women cried with relief in their interviews trackside. Pendleton said she was glad it was all over.
Anna Meares beats Victoria Pendleton to win gold at the 2012 Olympics.Credit:Getty
“London was intense,” Meares told the Herald. “I was fortunate to be in a sport with multiple events, but it did mean I had to keep going back and back and back into the same arena, whether I won or not.”
The Australian team in London, led by chef de mission Nick Green, became a support and refuge for Meares.
“It’s what the team can do or say in welcoming you back that sends you back into the arena in the best possible mind space to compete,” she said.
“At the end of the day, on the physical side of it, you’ve got the best in the world. It’s not going to be what costs you physically, it’s going to be what costs you mentally and emotionally. Feeling safe and backed was really important to me.”
Meares said she wanted to create that type of environment for the athletes who make it to Paris. In a counterpoint to the notion that national teams are artificial constructs at Olympic Games, Meares said being part of something bigger was what made the difference.
“I was very head down, bum up, but I really wanted to feel like I belonged in the team, that I felt comfortable and that they had my back,” she said. “Especially with some of the big competitions and rivalries that I’ve had, the team that I could go back to when I came off the competition track, made whatever happened feel OK. Win, lose, draw, whatever the case may be, how they received me and perceived me was so important to my own self-confidence and self-belief.”
Meares, 39, will be the youngest Australian chef de mission since John Coates in Seoul in 1988. She is also the most recently retired, having hung up her cleats after winning bronze in Rio in 2016.
Her relative youth will give her unique cut-through with the athletes in Paris but it is the experience she has gained since retirement, in a variety of roles, that made her the top target for Australian Olympic Committee president Ian Chesterman.
In between raising two young children and supporting husband Nick Flyger, who this year joined New Zealand as their national sprint coach, Meares put her hand up to deputise for chef de mission Petria Thomas at the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.
Chesterman said he had been impressed with the former cyclist’s leadership skills and was hoping Paris would be just the beginning for Meares as Australia’s team leader.
“One of the greatest attributes you need is to be able to lead and take people with you,” he said. “She’d shown that in what she’d done with her sport and the reports back from her leadership role in Rio were fantastic. Then to see someone step forward again and put their hand up to go to the Commonwealth Games – as a volunteer – with a young family and the complicated life of a young parent with a busy partner. She had the passion to do that. Those things showed she can be really good at this Games and she could also be someone to take us long term into the future.”
There will likely be controversy at some point in Paris. Green had to deal with the Stilnox saga in the Australian swimming team and some drunk rowers in London, while Kitty Chiller found herself in a bruising skirmish with Nick Kyrgios before the 2016 Games began.
Meares raves about Chiller’s approach in Rio, a campaign in which she felt the pressure of being the reigning Olympic champ in her swansong event. She has already made it clear that athletes will be given the freedom to speak their minds. As for when things go wrong, Meares said she would model her style on Thomas’s low-key approach.
“That’s going to be an interesting one for me and I am new to this role, but [managing controversy] is an important part of it,” she conceded. “There are standards and values to being an Australian Olympian. We’re all human, no one’s going to be perfect. I don’t like confrontation, but there’s going to be times when those hard conversations are going to have to be had.”
Again, she is backing a safe-haven approach to help smooth any wrinkles in Australia’s campaign.
“I think the hard conversations are possible when you have the relationship and you’ve put time into those sports and those athletes first, so it’s not just getting called to the principal’s office,” she said. “It’s a connection, person to person, and an understanding.”
