Just four women are coaching Kiwi athletes in Tokyo. Suzanne McFadden talks to Angie Dougal, coach of our trampoline bronze medallist, and Jo Aleh, who’s coached a sailor with a broken leg.
They have must have made quite a sight on Saturday afternoon. Inside a car parked up outside the Olympic village, Angie Dougal and her trampoline athlete Dylan Schmidt – with his gleaming Olympic bronze medal around his neck – screaming at a phone screen.
As the two Kiwis left the Ariake Gymnastics Centre, where Schmidt had just become the first Kiwi to win an Olympic trampolining medal, Dougal had texted ahead to the New Zealand team and told them to delay the rousing haka that’s become tradition welcoming back medallists to the camp.
Because just as they pulled up outside the village, the Black Ferns Sevens kicked off their gold medal match against France. And Dougal had special reason to want to watch it.
Outside her role as Schmidt’s coach, she also works with the Black Ferns, as their player development manager at the New Zealand Rugby Players' Association.
“So, yeah, it was a great day,” Dougal says, no doubt smiling under her mask.
Dougal boarded a flight home to New Zealand on Sunday night, prepared to spend two weeks in MIQ before being reunited with her husband and two teenage kids.
On top of coaching a bronze medallist, the Aucklander has been part of another exclusive group in Tokyo - as one of only four female coaches (of at least 66) in the New Zealand team in Tokyo.
With Dougal have been sailing coach Jo Aleh, weightlifting coach Tina Ball and swimming coach Sue Southgate.
Southgate helped guide Taranaki freestyle swimmer Zac Reid to a new New Zealand record as he won his 800m freestyle heat at the Tokyo Aquatic Centre (but didn’t progress to the next round).
Two-time Olympic sailing medallist Jo Aleh coached Erica Dawson and Micah Wilkinson, the mixed crew on the Nacra 17, to a final placing of 12th on Sunday. Five weeks ago, Aleh plucked Dawson out of the Pacific Ocean after she’d broken her leg falling off the flying catamaran.
Ball will be at the side of her Te Kauwhata housemate, Commonwealth Games champion weightlifter David Liti, when he competes in the 109kg+ class on Wednesday.
With bubbles within the NZ team under the strict Covid regulations, Dougal had no idea she’d been part of an elite quartet. “Oh really? Far out!” she said, chatting by video call the day after Schmidt's largely unexpected success.
But she can see why it’s such a small group. “It’s a bit of a bugbear of mine. I don’t think there are very many of us because of the time needed and the sacrifices that being a high performance coach demands,” she says.
Dougal is a former world champion trampolinist in her own right who comes from a teaching background. She started coaching Schmidt when he was six years old, after his family moved north from Te Anau.
She saw the star quality in him early. “We started talking about his Olympic dream when he was 10," Dougal says. "Then he went to world champs and won a world title in the 11-12 age group. From there you could just see he had the physical attributes, but also had the mental attributes."
The week before he went into those world age group championships in Russia, he rolled his ankle. “He couldn’t jump on the tramp, so he spent the week doing the preparation in his head,” she says. He called on those skills again for Tokyo.
As Schmidt’s potential grew, Dougal decided it was time she took a break from the sport.
“With a young family, I couldn’t do every night, all weekend and go overseas for weeks on end. I couldn’t do that to them,” she says. “I feel proud I made that decision, and I’m a better coach because of it. Being a mum brings a whole other lens to coaching too.”
Last year, when Schmidt asked Dougal to come back and coach him for Tokyo, she agreed but with one proviso. “I said ‘You need to know you’re not my priority. My kids are teenagers now, but they are still my priority’,” Dougal says.
“That’s the challenge of being a high performance coach – you’re expected to put sport first. And I’m not sure that’s the right idea.
“I think we have to explore that and be curious about it and figure out if there are better ways. I’m not sure it’s serving the men coaches well either.”
She says Schmidt told her he’s glad she has a life outside sport. Their new approach means they’ve been “fluid and flexible” - in their training times and in their philosophy for the Olympics.
“This year we’ve focused on being like water,” she says. “We just go with the flow, whatever comes our way we’ll be okay. We knew Tokyo would be tricky, but we would be like water.”
“We just worked on that mindset all year: enjoy the journey, you’re better, we’re going to Paris [the 2024 OIympics]. Whatever happens, happens. It’s been quite lovely.”
It worked so well for the duo on Saturday, as some of the world’s top trampolinists fell by the wayside, and Schmidt stuck to his plan.
“It was like clockwork really, which was weird when everyone around us wasn’t following a plan,” Dougal says. “He’s a dream to coach.”
Schmidt is focused on returning for the Paris Olympics in three years time, and Dougal has committed to be there too, next to the trampoline holding the spotting mat for him.
But the coach knows she will need quite a lot of energy over the next few years. There’s a home World Cup coming up for the Black Ferns next year. She also helps her husband run an earthmoving company. And their 18-year-old son, James, is a highly promising trampolinist too.
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In the weeks leading up to the Tokyo Olympics, Kiwi coach Jo Aleh had to jump on board a fast and furious foiling catamaran to fill in for one of her young sailors, Erica Dawson.
Dawson, one half of the New Zealand mixed gender crew on the Nacra 17 boat, was undergoing intense rehabilitation, trying to make an astonishing recovery from a broken leg.
A month before the Games started, Dawson fell overboard while she and skipper Micah Wilkinson were training off Australia’s Sunshine Coast, and she smashed her leg on the rudder. Aleh saw it happen.
“I got there in 10 seconds and pulled her into the RIB. Then I went with her to hospital. I’ve pulled a few of them out of the water now – it’s the dangerous nature of the boat,” she says.
“So then I did a bit of sailing with Micah while she did her rehab. It was hilarious! It was good for my understanding of the boat, and getting a closer look at what she has to go through too.
"It’s a brutal boat. I mean, I’m still pretty strong, but you finish a race and you’re just gasping. I have so much respect for what Erica does.”
Especially as Dawson was back on the boat within a month, even after being told by specialists she had a 20 percent chance of sailing at the Olympics.
Simply getting Dawson and Wilkinson on the start line had to be considered success. She sailed all 12 races in the regatta, where they were consistently in the middle of the fleet. And she never used her injury as an excuse. "She's an amazing human," Aleh says.
Aleh was also surprised when she discovered she was one of four female coaches in this NZ Olympic team.
But in sailing, she says, it’s a situation that’s improving. These have been Aleh’s fourth Olympics; the first three were as a sailor, winning gold in London and silver in Rio with Polly Powrie in the women’s 470 dinghy.
She came into her role in an unconventional fashion – straight from Olympic athlete to high-performance Olympic coach. She tried to work in the corporate world straight after the Rio Olympics, but found her heart was still at sea.
“Coaching is weird because we haven’t had a real pathway for women before now,” she says.
The government has, however, recognised the serious shortage of women coaches at elite level in New Zealand sport, and in October 2019, poured $2.7m into a Women in High Performance Sport pilot project.
Olympic sailing gold medallist Jenny Armstrong – a Kiwi who won her 470 gold sailing for Australia – has been part of the Te Hāpaitanga strand of the project, as has Yachting New Zealand's women's sailing manager Rosie Chapman, who's coaching laser radial sailors.
While having an Olympic medal isn’t a necessity in your coaching resume, “it helps you to be taken seriously sometimes," Aleh says.
“But it's getting better. In the boatpark, there are more female coaches than there were eight years ago. In Beijing [2008 Olympics] and London [2012], I don’t remember there being any.”
Aleh is buoyed by seeing a lot of young women taking up coaching at youth and development level in sailing, and she believes it will become easier for them to make the transition into elite coaching.
“It’s a real pathway option now,” she says. “I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s been a great way to switch from sailing but using all those skills I developed as a sailor.
“It’s not an easy job, and I can see why it would put a lot of people off. You don’t see a lot of women with families coaching, because it’s just so hard with travel.
“And it takes a lot of energy. We give a lot, we care. I know the male coaches care too, but we seem to care a lot. You really give everything. It’s really draining, but at the same time, it's been really rewarding.”
