Liza’s Fall from Grace

2010-01-23T14:46:00.000-08:00

I have always despised drug cheats. I saw plenty in my decades of international competition. I cheered when they got caught, stewed when they showed up two years later brazenly standing on the start line to make another team, and became exasperated over the loud whispers about the ones whose stardom gave them enough political pull to ensure immunity. Although things are much improved since I was running, I’ve always thought the ruling bodies were not pro-active enough, that the sanctions were too light, and the athletes themselves were too tolerant of those who were caught. Cheats steal medals, endorsements and fame from honest athletes while setting a falsely high standard that most youngsters can’t aspire to without joining their ranks. They rob the public of an authentic performance, skew expectations and worst of all they put every outstanding achievement under suspicion. When I won my bronze medal at age 37 I heard that the reaction of one of my fellow New Zealand Olympic medalists was “What’s she on?”

So when I received a phone call last June from my former coach, Dick Quax, a 1976 Olympic silver medalist, I was quite disturbed..

“Hey Lorraine, I just heard a rumour that Liza Hunter-Galvan turned a positive drug test.” Dick was calling my Colorado home from New Zealand to. He was referring to the Olympic marathon runner who had battled for inclusion into the New Zealand team for Beijing.

“Really?! What for?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Apparently it’s for the A test so the results are still unofficial. I thought you might have the real scoop.” (Athletes submit two urine samples which are labeled A and B. The A samples is tested first; if there are irregularities it is verified by the B sample. There’s a strict code of confidentiality until the B sample is verified.)

“Oh, that’s awful. Sorry Dick, I know absolutely nothing from this side and it’s been a while since I spoke with Liza. But I’ll ring her right now and see what I can find out.”

Liza was my friend. We had a lot in common: we were both mothers, marathoners, Kiwis living overseas, Arthur Lydiard-followers, late bloomers, and we have both clashed with administration. I had gone to bat for her for her Olympic inclusion on two occasions, something that I didn’t do lightly and certainly wouldn’t have done so if I’d sniffed any hint of shady dealings. In the year leading up to the Beijing Olympics we had shared much and I thought I knew her well. Drugs and Liza – it didn’t make sense. Surely it was a mistake: an unfounded rumour, a false positive, a supplement that contained some natural stimulant like ephedra. There had to be a good explanation.

But when Liza returned my call with an email message that said, “Things are looking very bad for me. I feel you are one of the few people I need to explain myself to, I only wish I could do it in person” – I knew she’d done something very wrong … and yet my heart went out to her.

I first met Liza in December 2003 at the Sunmart Texas Trail Endurance Runs in Houston when I was a guest speaker. Not long before, Kiwi coach Arthur Lydiard had told me to look out for her. He was very proud of her progress on the comeback trail after a long motherhood hiatus. “She’s very strong. She will make the Olympics and could be New Zealand’s next great woman marathoner,” he declared. I nodded in agreement even though I didn’t really think so. If she was that good I would have heard about it before then.

It was a long day at the ultra-races in the forests of the Huntsville State Park but I stuck around to see Liza finish. This 50K race was an endurance training run in her build-up for the marathon distance of 42K. She was hoping for an Olympic berth in Athens the following year. I expected to see a stressed-out, emaciated, dish-rag of a woman - not only was she in training for the Olympics, she worked full-time as a science teacher at an intermediate school and had four young children, including a baby. But I had it all wrong. An attractive, muscular woman crossed the line in first place looking fresh and exuberant. My prejudices were activated – she was Superwoman, seeking to outdo my own accomplishments and making all of us uni-tasking women feel inadequate. I thought of my own mess at home, how I struggled to combine motherhood and career, and how my own running had gone by the wayside. I imagined her designer house was tidy, her children well-behaved, her husband loving, and that she probably had a cute little dog that sat and begged for treats on command.

I introduced myself later in the hotel lobby and we exchanged pleasantries. I have to admit I was sizing her up, looking for the flaws in my perfect picture of her. Now in blue jeans and a tank-top her jet eyes and tan skin presented an even more exotic-looking woman than the figure in the park. She seemed happy after her run and people were vying for her attention. I noted that while her accent was still 80 per cent Kiwi, the end of her sentences dropped and spread out in a bit of a Texan drawl.

How does she do it all? I wondered.

***

Liza’s childhood in South Auckland was anything but materially privileged, but it was filled with adventures and action and she grew up feeling protected and loved. If there were two things that Liza’s parents taught their kids to live by it was to work hard and fight for what you know to be right. Her mother, Lalita, possessed great strength, no less of a force than her husband’s, just quieter, Liza says. The daughter of Indian immigrants, Lalita defied family and cultural law to marry a non-Indian man of her choice and endured ostracism as a result. Like her husband she worked tirelessly, often taking on jobs as a seamstress that kept her sewing late into the night.

Her father, Ron, of fiery Celtic extraction, earned his living through physical labour: diving and fishing. A muscular man with a quick temper and vital physicality, he was a force to be reckoned with and few people dared mess with him. Along with her four siblings and mother, Liza regularly carried her father’s heavy gear on her skinny shoulders and helped to haul it three kilometres or more cross-country to his fishing spots. She never thought to whine. She rather enjoyed it. And in the process she became very strong, just like her father.

In 1983 Arthur Lydiard’s Finnish wife, Eira, a PE teacher at Papatoetoe High School, first spotted the running talent of the 14-year-old student Liza Hunter. Arthur coached their cross-country team and Liza joined them. But when Eira died suddenly Arthur stopped coaching and spent time lecturing overseas. On one trip to the USA he arranged an athletic scholarship for Liza at the University of Texas, which she gratefully accepted. This was her ticket to something grander than New Zealand offered. But it was not the thought of athletic honours that excited Liza – but the fact she’d be the first in her family to go to university.

It was a big, strange, sweaty place for a Kiwi girl but Liza jumped into American college life. On the team she tackled every event from the 800 metres to the 10,000 metres and cross-country, and she was a consistent point scorer for them at collegiate meets. No distance fazed her. But while running was an enjoyable means to a higher education Liza never forgot what she had come to Texas for – a degree.

The University of Texas athletics coach, Shawn Flanagan, liked having her on his team but didn’t think she lived up to her potential. “She would not train enough or do the extra things that it takes to become really good,” he says. “Then she met Ariel and started dating him in her second year and from that point on she was much more focused and willing to do more. However, she still wasn’t as committed to being really good as others I’d worked with. When she left college I knew she had a lot left in the tank.”

The year1993 was one of new beginnings for Liza. She graduated in May with a Bachelor of Science and got married to her American teammate Ariel Galvan that December in New Zealand. A month earlier, encouraged by her performance in local running groups, she decided just a few nights ahead of the San Antonio Marathon to try her feet at 42km. With school over, she’d been on a spotty training regime of just 50km a week and hoped she’d finish well enough to earn a few bucks for the honeymoon. What she got besides a comfortable 2:52 finish in second place and $500 for her efforts was the knowledge the marathon was her true calling.

Over the next 10 years she fit training around four pregnancies and motherhood. Every child made her stronger (she opted to bypass pain medication at the births in an effort to increase her pain threshold) and Liza resumed her running between pregnancies. Her improvement was a true reflection of the Lydiard training doctrine: accumulated miles equals greater aerobic capacity, equals faster times. By 2004, a year after her last child, Tristan, was born, Liza had stair-stepped her marathon time down to 2:36:13, a mark good enough to qualify her for an Olympic nomination. At the ripe old age of 34, under the tutelage of Lydiard himself, Liza finally embraced the aspirations and training of a world-class marathon runner. Everything was going smoothly.

But when the New Zealand Olympic team for Athens was announced on the day of her 35^th birthday Liza’s name was omitted. She was devastated.

Selection is a two-tier process: first the respective sporting federation must select the athletes and then those nominations must pass the scrutiny of the Olympic selectors. Liza had failed the second cut. The New Zealand Olympic Committee (NZOC) had initially adopted a standard of 2:37 that was two minutes faster than the Olympic qualifying “B” standard. After Liza ran 2:36:13 they changed the standard to 2:36:00 leaving no time for Liza to attempt another marathon. Liza was now over their criteria by 0.138 percent and they would not take her. She could not believe it. But I could.

For as long as I remember these selection brouhahas have been going on in New Zealand athletics. And they precede me. Traditionally the criterion for selection has involved taking the Olympics standards – which are set for entry into the Games; the “A” standard for 3 entrants to an event and the “B” standard for one entrant – and making them tougher. The athlete strives and makes it but that is not enough. A group of three men called selectors, who are voted to the job by their federation members, study pieces of paper with data of an athlete’s vital statistics, past performances and rankings. They have probably seen the New Zealand-based athletes perform. Then they pull out their crystal balls and start making predictions of outcome and names are deleted solely at their discretion. As professional psychics they would starve, but as selectors their bases are covered. Behind their closed doors they have only each other to guard against their assumptions, judgments and partialities, and a non-selected athlete cannot prove them wrong.

For the athlete it’s a no-win situation: to fight only uses precious competitive resources during critical training time and for an athlete to concede is to vote against themselves and their aspirations. Many talented athletes have been lost to the sport though this process.

Liza fought back with the help of two Texas attorneys, Bert Richardson and Bill Nash, both runners. They prepared Liza’s appeal pro bono. The stance of the NZOC was perplexing to the Americans. Nash wrote to them: “Liza is a quality individual who is going to bring honour to your country and has exceeded the IOC qualification. Why wouldn’t you want her?”

But they didn’t. Instead they dug in. In reconsideration the NZOC selectors said that they stood by their original decision. Nash then took Liza’s appeal to the Sports Disputes Tribunal. Established in 2003 by SPARC (Board of Sport and Recreation by New Zealand) the Tribunal is an independent body that determines certain types of disputes for the sports sector. A hearing was set for July 29^th a mere five weeks before the Olympics. Debate was raging in the media. Sports icon Peter Snell wrote a letter of support as did I. Arthur was livid, Liza recalls, and took the committee to task. Just six days before the hearing NZOC conceded and added Liza to the team.

Liza won the battle but lost the war. Her competitive attention had already been diverted by the legal fight, her focus diluted. She competed in Athens on a day where sweltering conditions would claim the scalps of many champions, and yet she hung in there and finished 51^st in a field of about 80 of the world’s greatest athletes. It was a solid run but with a 2:52 result, for the first time in years she did not come close to her best performance.

At the end of 2004 Arthur went on his final speaking tour of the US. He was 86. During his stint in Texas he visited Liza. He told her he was so very proud of her making the Olympics. “Go break 2:30,” he urged. “I know you can do it!”

“I knew he was on his way out and so did he,” Liza recalls, her voice cracking. “When he left me that day he told me he loved me. A few days later he was gone.” Liza resolved to make the next Olympics and to run so fast there would be no mistake about making the qualifying time. For Arthur.

In 2005 she trained harder than ever and lowered her personal best another two minutes to 2:33. By the time the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games rolled around Liza was over-trained. The training effect is achieved through a repeated adaptive cycle consisting of two phases: training and recovery. Overtraining results from a combination of too much running and not enough recovery, a common error of the ambitious athlete. The result is tiredness, slower times and susceptibility to illness and injury. Prior to the race Liza was recovering from flu that had knocked her flat for two weeks. It was the first marathon she ever had to pull out of. “I had no choice; my body just wouldn’t go even though the will was there. Everybody at home (NZ) doesn’t realise how devastating it is to have to stop. They just call you a loser.”

For the remainder of 2006 a stress fracture in her leg reduced Liza to aqua-jogging and working out in the gym. Running lore says injury is nature’s way to stop you killing yourself by doing too much. In an Olympic cycle this was probably the best year to take some down-time. By the end of 2006 Liza was consistently clocking 140km weeks and was the fittest she had ever been in her life. In the All American 10K in February 2007 in San Antonio she broke the Kenyan dominance to finish third, clocking her fastest time in a race she had run more than 10 times. She then set her sights on the upcoming London Marathon as an Olympic qualifier.

***

It was February 4 2007 on a typically sunny Texas afternoon. About 100 miles from San Antonio on a highway median strip a man carried a child from a wrecked pick-up truck and laid her on the grass.

“She’s dead.” Ariel shook his head as he looked over at his wife. Liza should have run to her daughter. But those words had frozen the circuits of this Olympic marathoner, and for the first time in her life Liza could not move.

Just moments earlier the driver of an 18-wheeler semi had missed his exit and attempted to U-turn across two lanes to join traffic going the other way. He did not see the white Ford pick-up truck barreling along the highway at 120km/h. Nor did he know his bad decision was about to forever wreck the lives of the Hunter-Galvan family.

Miraculously Amber, 11, was not dead as they had first thought. But she was critically injured with brain trauma. Airlifted to the nearest ICU her life hung in the balance for a week. She then lay in a coma for almost a month with Liza watching over her. The days and nights blended together in a one long haze until Liza lost track. All the while she pleaded with the power of a mother’s yearning for the spirit of her daughter to return. Liza forgot about her own broken nose, lacerations, inner ear damage and the massive bruising on her hip. Instead she massaged Amber’s limbs and back, told her stories, conversed about the day, sang to her and rocked her in her arms. At times Amber thrashed so violently that Liza had to hold her down for hours on end to stop her from hurting herself, but mostly she flopped about like a rag doll. And then one day as Liza tried to sit her up Amber sweetly whispered in her ear, “I want to go to sleep.” Liza lay next to her daughter and they talked a while. Then they rang Ariel, who cried when he realised who was speaking to him.

Amber was back but she was not the same girl. She had brain damage and while functional her prognosis for returning to her pre-accident normalcy was nil. Doctors said she would never be independent, hold a job or have a normal relationship with a partner. Liza railed against the thought. “The doctors have set a limit, just like the Olympic selectors did, and that limit is to be bettered.”

Beneath the busyness of recovery, Liza was haunted by a great guilt. Over and over she relived the accident and always it came back to one thing. When her little girl needed her most, Liza had stood there and done nothing. She had failed. But now she had a second chance and ignoring her painful hip she did what she should have done then. She started running again – for Amber.

The trucking company, on the offensive, had filed suit against the Galvans days after the accident. Liza had to get out and de-stress so she could give her best to Amber. She found herself pushing on with a new-found intensity, running further and faster over the weeks, ignoring the pain in her hip. Visions of herself striding out the front in the Olympic marathon filled her runs and soothed her battered soul. Suddenly more than anything she wanted to make the Olympic team for Beijing in 2008 and put everything not just the way it was before the accident, but even better.

Liza had discovered the secret ingredient that rises out of adversity: it’s the one element that can override all manner of setbacks, the catalyst that singularly funnels a person’s energies to solidify dreams, the inner force that defies analysis – passion. She quit her job as a science teacher and dedicated herself to full-time training and Amber’s recovery. Once again her times began to drop dramatically.

Just five months after the accident in June Liza stood on the start-line of the Grandmas Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota. In hindsight it was way too soon and Liza was running on an injury. That day it was unseasonably hot and halfway through the race Liza’s painful hamstring was causing her pace to slow. Normally she would have ignored it but this race was the means to an end and if she was not going to qualify there was no point in risking further injury. So she did something that given a choice is anathema to the runner’s code of conduct – she quit.

The decision was a smart one. Her accident insurance finally kicked in and Liza had the luxury of daily treatments for her hip and hamstring. A few months later she competed in the prestigious Amsterdam Marathon on a flat fast course that hosts the world’s best runners. This day it all clicked and she finished in 2:30:39 becoming the sixth fastest all-time Kiwi marathon woman and more than two minutes under the Olympic “A” qualifying standard for Beijing. This time Liza was sitting pretty for selection.

Tall Poppy Syndrome exists in most small countries and communities where an individual who excels above the group is cut down to size. In Scandinavia they call it janteloven, in the Netherlands, Maaiveldcultuur. Scotland, England, Australia and Japan all have their versions of it. Its purpose is to safeguard against hierarchal thinking thus protecting the democracy of the group. In our egalitarian society of New Zealand we must ensure that no one person declares their self better than another. The only problem is that when the collective esteem is low there is no means for the individuals within to raise it as they keep getting pulled back down. There is just one way around this. With due humility any winner must attribute their success to the homeland while downplaying their own part in the matter.

In America though, it is a perfectly acceptable pastime to revel in your accomplishments. Perhaps it is because America already sees them self as the leader of the free world that the national psyche readily accepts, even expects, success. Over the years of living there I overcame my Kiwi shyness and became much more at ease being the center of attention. In a climate that urges one to reach for the stars my running career flourished. And being away from home I could weather most of the typical ups and downs of training and racing without public scrutiny.

But every few years an Olympics or Commonwealth Games would roll around and I would once again have to interface with bureaucracy to make the team. Although there was no prize-money associated with these events they always remained my highest goals. There are two doors to get through for first ANZ and then NZOC selection: the first has a high threshold - the qualifying standard. You know by your performance if you will pass. But the second door is tricky. Guarded by the selectors, it may very likely be a short door. The unobtrusive home-grown Kiwi may duck through but those who are perceived as having any hint of bigheadedness about their abilities may not be admitted.

When Liza was not nominated by Athletics New Zealand she says she was “completely blindsided”. Even though she was the fastest qualifier and handsomely under the selection guidelines the three selectors, John Bowden, Barry Ellis and Craig Motley looked into their crystal balls and unanimously declared her unable to finish in the top 16 in the Olympics.

The top 16 finish is a hard-line criterion set by the New Zealand Olympic Committee (NZOC) in 2007 and applies to all sports. In my opinion there is unfairly no distinction made between high participation sports and low ones, individual or team sports. Considering the pool of participants worldwide a 16^th place ranking at Olympic level is a higher achievement for a marathon runner than say for a windsurfer or a hockey team. But NZOC chairman Barry Maister warned that their bottom line is that they wanted to send only realistic medal contenders. "There has to be a degree of hard-nosed reality - we can't allow sentiment to get the better of us." He expected the individual sports selectors to be "pretty realistic in not putting bunnies up to us.”

Liza was seen as a bunny. The main reason for the selector’s assessment: she could not perform well in the heat. Their evidence: her 51^st finish in Athens, her DNF at the 2006 Commonwealth Games and her DNF at Grandmas Marathon. What they failed to consider is that Liza lived, trained and had run many personal best times in Texas, which has a hot, humid climate similar to Beijing. Geographical ignorance aside, heat adaptation is not rocket science. In this time of degreed experts for every aspect of human performance there was never any mention of professional assistance to fill their perceived gaps of her as an athlete. Instead the story that Liza Hunter-Galvan had reached her ceiling had been spun and accepted as truth by three men, and Liza was unceremoniously sent to the recycle box.

During this time Liza and Ariel were battling a lawsuit with the trucking company and had responded with their own countersuit seeking damages for Amber. The case had dragged out for over a year. When it was verified by eye-witnesses that the trucker was the sole cause of the accident the company finally settled out of court in April of 2008. The day she signed the documents that secured a trust fund for her daughter was one of the saddest of Liza’s life. “I wept with emptiness. There was no satisfaction knowing this would not bring my daughter back and that I had yet another fight ahead of me.”

Two days later she began the legal appeal for her rightful place on the Olympic team, once again with Bill Nash as her counsel.

This time there were was no compromising on either side. ANZ stayed resolute. At the end of the phone conference they strongly urged Bill Nash not to take it to The Sports Tribunal. The request went unheeded. “I couldn’t live with such injustice,” Liza says, “I had to fight it, not just for me, but for New Zealand athletes. It was too unfair.” After reviewing the arguments of both sides the Sport Disputes Tribunal established that Liza’s fate was predetermined and nothing she could have done would have seen her selected. It was recommended that the athletic selectors reconsider, a face-saving loss for ANZ. Liza was once again a last-minute addition to the team just a month before she was to leave for the Games.

Since the accident Liza had had no breaks. Her twice-daily marathon training was all too frequently topped by late nights reviewing legal documents. “The worst thing about battling to be nominated was the amount of time it took me away from my family. I was consumed, and neglected my husband and kids.” By the time she joined the team in Hong Kong for training camp on August 1 2008 she was physically tired and emotionally spent.

The lines had been drawn by ANZ and now some of the same people who had fought to keep her from competing were her team leaders. I called Liza before she left for Beijing and told her that she must make her peace with them and not divert her emotional energy away from her race. It was a tall order I know, I had been in exactly the same position in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Initially left off the team I had been included six weeks before the Games after a public outcry and a petition for my inclusion began circulating throughout New Zealand. By the time I got to the race my focus had shifted from the desire-driven goal of performing my best to the fear-driven one of proving my detractors wrong and asserting my right to be on the team. The difference is subtle but profound – desire drives our potential while fear has its limits and does not produce excellence.

For Liza it was no different. She felt like an outcast amongst her team. “There was little effort to make me feel included, certainly not by the High Performance director Kevin Ankrom. The coach John Bowden tried; he offered to be available for workouts but I just felt uncomfortable. I knew he didn’t believe in me and didn’t want me there. Raylene Bates, the team manager, was great but apart from her I felt like the white elephant in the room. It was evident that everyone was walking on eggshells around me.”

Kevin Ankrom is an American who left his position as the department head for the Hong Kong Sports Institute International High Performance Elite Training Centre to take the job of High Performance Director for Athletics New Zealand. According to Athletics NZ his tasks include: “To finalise and implement the current strategy to ensure New Zealand athletes maximise their talent and achieve excellence on the international stage” and, “To reinforce a performance culture that encourages athletes and coaches to train and prepare like winners and that will also facilitate the taking of risks in order to achieve personal excellence.”

It’s a lot of whipped cream on the old mince pie. What it comes down to is the SPARC-generated funding for Ankrom’s budget depends on it. His job description in three words: dollars into performances.

Accounting to a government organization for their sponsorship is no easy task. Individual sports have lost much autonomy since The Sports Foundation and the Hillary Commission amalgamated into SPARC in 2002. With over $100 million delegated to sport and recreation from government and lottery sources there is not only the call from SPARC for accountability of funding to each sporting federation but they have also asserted the right to exercise increased control over individual sports bodies policies. At the end of this chain are the athletes who have dedicated their lives to competing for their country - practical people who resent oversight and oodles of paperwork so that a bureaucratic box can be checked.

But while he is accountable for their performances the high performance director has very little control over the athletes – and even less if they live overseas. Each and every athlete is by nature a wildcard – their individual competition psyches can be delicate mechanisms that require landmine training to tinker with. Very few administrators have the necessary magic touch and Kevin Ankrom is not one of them.

He could have met Liza with a jar of Marmite and said, “We’re here, so let’s get on the same side. How can I help you?” Instead he met her with a legal contract that acknowledged she was expected to finish in the top 16, a new bureaucratic brainchild of ANZ required from all athletes. “I should have torn that paper up. But I signed it without my attorney looking at it just to get rid of him” says Liza.

On Marathon day Liza wrote in her Journal:

“August 17 – into Battle

I have spent the past 18 months fighting for this day. When I say fighting I mean fighting. From the pavement, to the courtroom, and everything you can possibly imagine in between. My running has been what has held everything together, without it I may have crumbled in the hospital. With it I have conquered all but one of my battles in this ongoing war, my one ultimate quest of getting my Amber back.”

That Liza even ran in the Beijing Olympic Marathon was a remarkable feat. That she pulled out a 35^th place finish in 2:36 amongst the 90 greatest women marathon runners in the world was even more remarkable. When she finished she appeared pleased but underneath Liza was angry. Had she been accepted from the start she knows she could have done so much better. This should have been her big day, her life-time opportunity to make everything okay, her one chance at redemption for all her failings – and the very people that she thought were assigned to help her had stood in her way.

The aftermath of the Olympics was a welcome let-down. Back home in San Antonio the family settled back without any lawsuits sucking their life force.

Just three months later an elated Liza called me on her cell phone from the finish line of the San Antonio Marathon. “I did it!” she said. “I broke 2:30!”

Liza had finally fulfilled Arthur Lydiard’s last instruction to her and she had to tell me. Away from the stern eye of New Zealand officialdom she was back to her groove of shaving down her personal bests, a minute or two at a time. The race on her hometown course was intended as training. However, after cruising through the first half she had accelerated home in 2:29 37, making her a contender for the 2009 World Championships in Berlin nine months away.

But Liza was terrified of another selection rejection. As early as a month after Beijing she had been emailing Ankrom for reassurance that she was still considered part of the high performance programme and asking what level of support she would be given.. She had no idea if she was in line for funding or whether she would be in the group of athletes who would be required to pay all their own expenses for Berlin including food, accommodation and even their silver-ferned uniforms. Without her working her family could not afford it. Last year they had had to borrow money from family so Liza could train full-time .And she had only ever once received funding from ANZ of NZ $4000. Through a series of emails that included information about Olympic debriefing and carding status (a grading system used for levels of support for athletes), Liza could not get a definitive answer. Instead she received repeated requests to explain what Ankrom refers to as her “non-performance” in Beijing.

Liza’s reply of Feb 25 was her third attempt to comply with an explanation: “I think my San Antonio Rock n Roll Marathon result proves the significance of the detrimental effects on my Beijing performance due to the legal battle I endured to have myself placed on the team. After some rest, additional training, freedom from stress in a positive supportive environment I was able to post a sub 2:30 performance. I don’t know what else to say at this point. I would like to know where I stand with ANZ?”

Ankrom’s return email was headed “Confidential and Legally Privileged”. Punctuated with bold lettering and underlining, it stated: “… Liza, again and again I am replying to you giving you answers to your questions. In the future if there is ever a question evidence will show that you have been informed via email and that will surface to prove so… There is NO excuse for you to say that you have not received this information or you have had no feedback… Liza, you KNOW and you have signed the “performance expectations agreement” pre-Beijing and you KNOW that your selection and results were based on the results and expectation of finishing in the top 16. I do not give out a “grade or score” but if you must see it in writing, ‘you did not place in the top 16 as expected at the Olympic Games so you failed to meet up to the performance expectations from which you where selected on and the agreement that you signed.’ Your performance in Beijing from a High Performance expectation and view would be, “NOT good – you failed”.

Liza was stunned. “Why doesn’t he just jump though the screen and slap me?”

Her descent was rapid. Liza was filled with dread. She couldn’t sleep, didn’t know how to respond. She was blacklisted, she knew it, and nothing she could do would ever be good enough for them. Her hamstring had flared up again, a compensation injury from her bruised hip, and she was limping. Ariel sat by helplessly. He could see her being pulled into a whirlpool of despair and he could not reach her. “I saw and heard her crying many times late at night she was put through so much mental anguish. These people claim to have been athletes and yet they have no clue. If I have one question, it is why no one ever picked up the phone to talk with my wife. If they made any effort to have a professional dialogue they would have learned that she is quite easy to get along with. I wanted Liza to forget about them but nothing I said got through. I didn’t like what was happening - she was so consumed with being accepted by the Federation that she was self-destructing before my eyes.” Liza just couldn’t let go of her dream to earn distinction wearing the black singlet of her country.

Her thoughts went to the Recormon. A month ago when she had brought it over the counter in a pharmacy in a nearby town she thought it was an amino acid supplement. It had been recommended to her by an elite runner at a race as a surefire way to boost her energy levels and help her hamstring to heal. But once she researched on the net she discovered she had EPO in her hands, and she had nervously stuffed it away in a cupboard until Amber’s next medical appointment where she had access to a needle recycle bin.

Erythropoietin (EPO) is a kidney protein hormone that stimulates the bone marrow to produce red blood cells. The upshot is that it increases oxygen carrying capacity. The synthetic drug, approved for use in 1989, was designed to treat anemia in kidney dialysis patients but it quickly replaced the cumbersome practice of blood doping among dishonest athletes. Undetectable in the blood for a decade, it was probably the means by which many record books were rewritten in the 1990s. A test was finally developed for the 2000 Olympics that could detect the differences between synthetic and naturally-produced EPO, the announcement of which saw a spate of athletes withdraw with last minute “injuries”.

The use of EPO requires skillful administering, especially to endurance athletes. Their circulations become trained to compensate for exercise dehydration by contributing water from the blood and thus they are more prone to viscosity than the average person especially during and after exercise. Add EPO and the resulting sludge-blood can cause stroke or heart failure and accounts for many deaths of runners and cyclists.

From an objective viewpoint what Liza did next makes no sense. She had run a personal best time just a few months ago without it, using a banned substance went against her moral code, and she had no real knowledge on how to administer the drug. Her rationale was that it would be a quick-fix for her hamstring so she could go for a faster time. San Antonio marathon has a lot of turns and she believed that she was fit enough to dip under 2:29 on a faster course if she was injury-free. The day after Ankrom’s “confidential” email Liza locked herself in the bathroom and took her first dose, a ready-to-go jab from a pack of six disposable syringes. Consciously it was lunacy; subconsciously it was running career suicide.

She ran the next week in a half marathon at Disneyworld. It was a low-key event and her hamstring felt much better, so the next week she took another shot. After her third dose, a week later she felt stabbing chest pains. This symptom is described online as one of the “most dangerous side effects”. She became frightened that it might kill her and threw the remainder away and washed her hands of the whole bad idea.

Exactly three days later Liza received a call on her cell phone from the random drug testers under the auspices of the World Anti-Doping Association All professional athletes are subject to be tested any time. She didn’t think to tell them she was out of town camping or in bed with the flu, or to simply hide. She gave them the code to her gate, welcomed them into her home, made tea and chatted with them until she was able to give the sample. She had no elaborate plan to beat the test, like a false bladder with someone else’s urine hidden in her shorts. Because she thought she had taken so little it simply didn’t occur to her that the test would be positive.

When the results came in the mail bearing the verdict of an “adverse analytical finding” Liza had a strange reaction that surprised even her – relief. Still she could not believe that the test was positive and waited for her B sample to be tested. The result was the same and Liza confessed to her use of Recormon. I checked with the lab that performed her test (UCLA Olympic Analytical Laboratory) and was told by the Director, Paul Scott, that the strength of her endogenous bands of EPO – the ones naturally occurring – were consistent with her story of her new and limited use of synthetic EPO. But it hardly mattered, there was only one conclusion to be drawn that Liza herself could not escape. Kevin Ankrom was right – she failed. She failed to finish in the top 16 at the Olympics, she failed a drug test and she failed to protect her daughter. Liza was not Superwoman but a wonderfully flawed human being like the rest of us.

“How do you feel about yourself?” I ask.

“I’m a failure,” she says emphatically and begins to sob. The fight to prove otherwise was finally over.

Liza was banned for two years and barred from competing in the next Olympic Games. On her future in running she says, “I have little hope of ever running for New Zealand again. I think I will finally come to the realisation that I’m not wanted. Trying to be accepted took me to a dark place and I don’t ever want to go there again. If I run it’ll be only for the love of running. But right now my family is more important.”

In the aftermath of the Liza Hunter-Galvan drug scandal, Kevin Ankrom told the New Zealand Herald that he couldn’t remember the email sent to her but said every athlete is under pressure. “By no means has Athletics New Zealand pushed any kind of drug in any kind of way; that’s the athlete’s fault, not ours. We are not putting any pressure on athletes, we’re trying to help and support them.”

Pressure and support – sometimes it’s hard for well-intentioned administrators to tell them apart. Perhaps it’s time to ask the athletes themselves whether the disappointment of being left off a team they have rightfully earned a place on helps them to perform better; likewise a performance contract thrust under their nose, or a harsh email. I know what they’ll say. Athletes put so much pressure on themselves they need no more from the outside. True excellence can never be coerced – any champion will tell you it is essentially an inside job that springs out of skill, daring, heaps of heart and a little luck.

I can’t help but think there’s something rotten in a system where a 35th finish in the Olympic marathon is referred to in official circles as a “non-performance” and a “no-good” failure. Such disparagement of our precious athletes has unfortunately often been an acceptable national pastime. There are always those who succeed despite it but there are plenty of aspirants, like Liza Hunter-Galvan, who get irrevocably beaten down. Perhaps New Zealand sports officialdom has been spoilt by its champions and become too greedy for results. A shift of focus is sorely needed. For starters they would all do well to read and absorb the Olympic Creed - “the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well” – before the next Kiwi kid who dreams of running her heart out for her country is crushed.

Lorrine Moller

Liza’s Fall from Grace