Rio de Janeiro (CNN)She just earned her notch in Olympic history, but Australian rugby star Charlotte Caslick didn't always think a career as an athlete was even possible.
Caslick is part of the Australian women's rugby team, which beat New Zealand this week to win gold at the Olympic debut of rugby sevens.
"It's pretty special. It hasn't really sunk in," Caslick said. "I'm sure in 20 years we'll look back on (this moment) and see how what we did changed women's sport."
Rio de Janeiro: Rocked and seemingly ruined by a crash on the eve of their Rio campaign, Australia's women's team pursuit unit – world record holders in the 4000m discipline last year – will leave the Olympics without a medal.
Melissa Hoskins, who was taken to hospital in an ambulance five days ago after all but one of the five-woman squad tumbled heavily in training, was patched up and did not miss a race after an eleventh hour fitness test before qualifying Thursday.
What on earth was going on at the boarding house of St Ignatius, on Tuesday morning last? Normally at 8am, the dining room would be filled with the human version of a horde of locusts, ravenously wolfing down cereal, toast, eggs and bacon, whatever they could get their hungry teenage hands on. But, no, the dining room is deserted. And so are the playing fields. And the basketball court. Not a soul in the cricket nets. None of them in the library and ... And there!
Some cries in the distance. Getting louder now.
COURAGEOUS Australians cyclists — including Tasmania’s Amy Cure and Georgia Baker — have the chance to ride for a medal this weekend after defying bumps and bruises to finish in the top four of qualifying in the women’s team pursuit.
After a horror crash in training sent the members of our women’s pursuit team flying — leaving teammate Melissa Hoskins writhing in agony — our girls have stepped up in the competition proper.
Cure, 23, and Baker, 21, were shocked, bruised and had “track burn”. Australian officials said the girls were shaken but not stirred.
In the two days following the Australian women's sevens triumph in Rio, Charlotte Caslick's Instagram following rocketed from 6000 to 36,000. Vogue magazine called. An American broadcaster asked for a chat. Nike, already a sponsor, crafted bigger, better plans.
It's the gold-medal effect. Everyone wants a piece of the Australian women. They're gutsy, they're spunky and now, on the biggest stage of all, they're world beaters.
AUSTRALIANS will get to see their Olympic champion women’s team in competition for the first time next year with Sydney Sevens all-but confirmed as a new leg of the women’s world tour.
World Rugby boss Brett Gosper said a combined men’s and women’s tournament was almost locked in for Sydney in February, while also slapping down former Hockeyroos coach Ric Charlesworth for calling Australia’s women’s sevens gold medal as “soft”.
“There were about 90 nations who were part of the qualification process, so I don’t know what he is talking about with soft medals,” Gosper told News Corp.
THE plan to prepare Australia’s women's seven team for the chaos of Rio was going well until the team thought their Rio campaign was screwed.
As one of an array of curveballs he’d thrown at his team, coach Tim Walsh had recruited the team’s best player Charlotte Caslick to fake an injury in the warm-up of their final game of the friendly series against Japan in Sydney.
The problem was Caslick took the task with so much enthusiasm she “deserved an Academy award”, Walsh said last week.
"I was invited to a camp, I was about 16 and there was a girl there who was just massive," the 21-year-old Queenslander recalls. "She was heavier than my Dad. At least 90 kilograms. I remember coming home and I'm like, 'Nup, I can't do this.' That freaked me out because I thought I had to be just like her."
And now?
Sevens rugby players are runners. They’re fit, hard, athletic sports people. Their bodies are fat-less and trim – strong thighs, cut calves. They’re not fit like competitive body-sculptors or cross-fit types. Sevens players are purpose-built to run.
We’re watching the Australian women’s team train at the Sydney Academy of Sport and Recreation in Narrabeen. It’s a couple of days before the team flies out for Rio. And though they’ve been doing this stuff coming up three years, there is alacrity in their work.
Fitness man Craig Twentyman has them leaping over little hurdles, landing and shooting off again – bang. It’s about “reacting to the ground”. Sprinters need to explode out the blocks, to think of their feet shooting off the ground as if electrocuted – crack – creating flinty sparks off the mark.
They run 50-metre shuttles. Techniques are good. They’re not woolly, arms everywhere, heads back like fleeing meerkats. It’s clear they’ve been taught how to run: high knees, piston arms, hands like karate chops. And under pressure of fatigue, techniques hold up. They are runners.
AMY CURE is a world champion and reigning world record holder. Now, the young Tasmanian is chasing the biggest prize of all — Olympic gold.
Cure, 23, of Penguin, is a key member of one of the fastest women’s cycling teams on the planet, the Aussie pursuit team having set the world record in Paris last year.
Cure went to the 2012 London Games and came away empty-handed. She is determined to make amends this time around.
The Aussie team are comprised of top female athletes drawn from many different fields, courts and tracks around the country.
Chloe Dalton played for the Sydney Flames in the WNBL, Ellia Green was a nationally ranked sprinter, Emma Tonegato played rugby league for Australia and several others played touch football for Australia, including Charlotte Caslick, Cherry, Alicia Quirk, Gemma Etheridge and Evania Pelite.
“Everyone has come from different backgrounds and I think that’s why we are such a unique team,” said co-captain Shanon Parry.
“That’s what makes this team so special. Everyone has something unique about them but gelling that all together, that’s been the big thing for us.”
THEY are the reigning world record holders and, two weeks out from the Rio Olympics, Tasmanian cyclist Amy Cure says the Australian women’s team pursuit squad is the strongest it has ever been.
“We’re a big shot,” Cure said of the Aussies’ gold medal chances.
“Mentally and physically we’re the strongest team we’ve ever had. It’s very exciting heading into Rio.”
LEWIS Holland and Charlotte Caslick didn’t need to find the words to describe a first Olympic selection to their significant other.
The other already knew.
Holland and Caslick are a couple and after being selected for the Australians mens and womens sevens teams respectively, both were given oversized boarding passes for Rio on Thursday in Sydney.
What separates this rugby romance from most other sporting power couples is that Holland and Caslick, based on the last year, are the best male and female sevens players in Australia and they’ll both be critical to the chances of bringing home gold medals in rugby’s first Olympics since 1924.
The partnership between Olympic beach volleyball team-mates Nikki Laird and Mariafe Artacho del Solar was sparked long before the pair joined forces on the sand.
They went to the same high school in Sydney's upper North Shore although they were a year apart, and fell in love with the game on the same stretch of Manly beach.
Both played in local beach volleyball tournaments before coaches decided to pair them in 2013 for the way they complemented each other's techniques.
Del Solar has the speed and plays defence in the back court while Laird uses her height to be the blocker close to the net.
LONG-TIME friends Nicole Laird and Maria Fe Artacho del Solar will realise their Olympic dreams on the sands of Copacabana beach in Rio.
The pair confirmed their place last Sunday as Australia’s second female beach volleyball team for next month’s Games with a win over Vanuatu at the Asian Continental Cup in Cairns.
The north shore duo, who have played together since they were teenagers at Killara High School, moved to Adelaide where National Beach Volleyball program is based when they were 18 to pursue their dreams.
AUSTRALIA has set itself a target of winning five to seven medals in Rio next month, and up to three gold, after yesterday announcing the team it hopes will lead it to Olympic redemption.
The cycling team has won just one gold medal from the past two Olympics in London and Beijing which have been dominated by Great Britain that has won 16.
But Cycling Australia (CA) has used its new strategic vision document to reveal it is aiming to surpass the six medals won in 2012 with genuine gold medal hopes on the track, road and BMX in Brazil.
The team for Rio will include at least 11 Olympic debutants but that number could rise if athletes in the men’s mountain bike and women's road programs successfully appeal against their non-selection.
CA would not reveal which riders had launched appeals but confirmed the two cases would be heard by an independent panel in Melbourne today and a resolution was expected in days.
Thee were few surprises in the 25-person team named yesterday which includes:
DUAL Olympic gold medallist Anna Meares for her fourth Games where she will ride all three events — the team sprint, sprint and keirin — alongside Stephanie Morton who won gold at the 2012 Paralympics as a pilot rider.
TOUR de France stars Richie Porte and Rohan Dennis — who will contest both the road race and time trial in Rio — as well as Simon Gerrans. A fourth rider, who will serve as a domestique in the road race, is expected to come from the mountain bike program.
BROTHER and sister Alex and Annette Edmondson who take the total number of siblings on Australia’s Olympic team to eight.
NICOLE Laird and Mariafe Artacho del Solar are set to realise their Olympic dreams – three years after moving to SA with little more than hope.
The pair was on Friday confirmed as Australia’s second female beach volleyball team for the Rio Games.
As far as get-out-of-jail cards go, it has to be said that the Zika virus is pretty much all-encompassing.
No one can say that the virus doesn’t exist and while an athlete might be prepared to take the risk of themselves being infected, what right do they have to accept that risk on behalf of a theoretical unborn child?
So who can doubt the world’s leading professional golfers when they say they are pulling out of the Rio Olympics as a precaution against any future children suffering devastating birth defects?
Except that August isn’t mosquito month in Rio. And when the World Cup soccer was held there in July 2014, there was little or no dengue transmission, which is actually the real airborne worry.
If the golfers were truly concerned, hell, there are plenty of other real problems they could focus on. It’s like the scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where one of them … I think it was Robert Redford … doesn’t want to jump off a cliff into a stream roaring below because he can’t swim.
“Hell,” says Paul Newman, “you don’t have to worry about drowning ... the fall will kill you.”
No one is harping on that it’s flu season in Brazil or that food poisoning might claim them. People might be suspicious of their real motives for withdrawing. But with a nasty virus, particularly one that can also be transmitted sexually, who can blame the golfers for taking such sensible precautions? I’m sure they would have done exactly the same thing had there been an identical risk of contracting Zika in April at Augusta.
Still, golf does have form for mass withdrawals.
When 1904 St Louis Olympic golf champion George Lyon of Canada turned up to defend his title at the 1908 London Games, an internal dispute among British golfers led to a boycott and he found himself the solitary entrant.
Offered the gold medal, Lyon politely declined it and, as they say, that was that for golf as an Olympic sport until all those IOC members got caught up in the Tiger Woods phenomenon a century later and readmitted it.
Not that the other sport set to make its Olympic reappearance this year, rugby, departed the Games stage any more gracefully. France dutifully made the rugby final of the 1924 Games in Paris but there it came up against a US team that, well, didn’t realise it was there just to make up the numbers.
Two French players were injured, tempers frayed, an American spectator was knocked unconscious by a walking stick and when the visitors won 17-3, they were booed all the way through The Star Spangled Banner.
The gold medallists needed police protection as they left the field, and rugby would not be sighted again at the Olympics for another 92 years.
Yet, unlike golf, rugby doesn’t act like the IOC has placed some impossible demand on it. What? Another pseudo-major? And what’s that you say, there’s no prizemoney at the end of it? Are you kidding me?
No, rugby has seen the upside and embraced the Olympics wholeheartedly. Perhaps it helps that rugby has conveniently developed along two fronts, the regular 15-a-side game and sevens.
The World Cup will always be the pinnacle of the 15s game but the Olympics has become the prize everyone wants to win in sevens.
Australians scoffed when the NZ women’s sevens coach announced that no one would remember who won the 2016 World Series (guess what? It was the Australians) when they are handing out the gold medals in Rio.
But there might just be a just a sneaking suspicion he was right. Here’s hoping the TV commentators are shouting “World champions, now Olympic champions” as the medals are presented. The 12-strong Australian men’s and women’s Olympics squads, plus two reserves, will be selected on Monday, although they won’t be announced until July 14. That means two more sleepless nights for the coaches who must name them, Andy Friend and Tim Walsh.
Almost certainly there will be no Wallabies in Friend’s team. Three of them tried out, Quade Cooper, Henry Speight and Nick Cummins, but other commitments and injuries have made it almost impossible for them to be included.
Many will see that as a flaw, that the best rugby players in the country couldn’t come through, but in fact it says something admirable about sevens as a game.
The physical demands are such that rugby talent alone — plus the fitness required to play 15s — aren’t enough. Next time, before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, when the Australian coach insists Wallabies have to spend at least four months in the sevens program, no one will think he is kidding.
But it is the women who are the truly remarkable story.
Of the five women who have featured in every tournament win on the journey to winning the World Series — Emilee Cherry, Charlotte Caslick, Alicia Quirk, Shannon Parry and Amy Turner — only Parry came from a pure rugby background. The rest had made their name in touch football. Others started off in athletics or rugby league or basketball or hockey.
In short, they’ve come from all over, drawn together by a dream, an Olympic dream. Where American golfer Rickie Fowler dissed the Olympics by saying “it would be a dream come true that I never dreamed of”, you don’t get the feeling he was speaking for the Australian women rugby players. Somewhere in their lives, the Olympics touched them. The rest of their story was simply finding a way to make it come true.
Not only are they going to Rio, they’ve been to Rio.
They went there in February — at the height of the mosquito season — for the Sao Paulo tournament and then spent a week in the Games’ host city familiarising themselves.
They’re all women of child-bearing age so the Zika virus wasn’t something to be taken lightly. But they listened to the experts, assessed the risks, wore long sleeves and plenty of repellent — and during the time they were there, saw one mosquito.
Soon, very soon, they will be announced as Olympians. No one, even after they have long retired, is ever a “former” Olympian. It stays with you for life.
So does spurning the title.
Cadel Evans AM. Stuart O’Grady OAM. Bradley McGee OAM. Katherine Bates. These are just some of the high-achieving former Australian cyclists whose images adorn the Champions Walk at the High Performance Unit (HPU) in Adelaide.
Every day, when Australia’s current generation of cycling stars arrive at their training base, they must pass these photos as they descend into the bowels of the velodrome. Inspiration and pressure, in equal measure.
Run by governing body Cycling Australia with funding from the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), the High Performance Unit is a hub for elite track, road, BMX and para-cycling riders in this country. While the demands of road and BMX competition necessitates that these athletes are often based overseas, the centre is Australian track cycling’s undisputed home.
Nestled on the outskirts of town close to the cycling-friendly Adelaide Hills, the facility brings together the nation’s top athletes and support staff with a single-minded focus: sporting glory. Australia has long been a cycling superpower, and track riders are consistent contributors to the green and gold Olympic medal tally. At London 2012 five medals were earned in the velodrome, while the Australian Olympic Committee is expecting the discipline to deliver three golds in Rio this August.
It was one of the highlights of the Sydney Olympics — Natalie Cook and Kerri Pottharst winning beach volleyball gold on the sands of Bondi Beach.
It was a result which put the sport on the map in Australia and made the pair households names.
Now, 16 years on, Australia’s women will lead the way in their sport again with a second women’s beach volleyball team making the cut for the 2016 Games.
