It should’ve been the best moment of Steve Hooker’s life.
But all he was thinking about when the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games gold medal for pole vault was bestowed upon him was his family.
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Hooker had just edged out Russia’s Yevgeny Lukyanenko to become the first Australian man in 40 years to win gold in track and field, setting a new Olympic record at the time with a vault of 5.96 metres.
It was the culmination of half a lifetime of hard work all coming together at the right moment.
But there was a lingering family secret that had been kept from him in the lead-up to the event, which was done with his best interests at heart.
Then 26 and in the prime of his career, his family wanted him to direct all his focus towards what was the biggest moment of his life — but there eventually had to come a time when he would be told.
The competition finished well after midnight in Beijing, so the medal ceremony didn’t take place until the next day — by which time he was dealt the news, which made the following day bittersweet.
“One of the common questions (I get) is: ‘What was it like to get your medal?’ For me, it was a very mixed day,” he explained on The Imperfects podcast.
“We’d had something happen in our family five days before my final and no one told me.
“The day after I won, my mum called me up and she said, ‘Look, this is what’s happened’. Someone was having a really hard time in our family, and (she said) ‘we couldn’t let you know in the lead-up (to the competition)’.”
The ecstasy of winning was soon tempered by the agony of his family heartache.
“When I was up there on the podium, that was my main thought, about this other person in my life that was having a really, really, really shocking time,” Hooker went on.
“And that I felt an element of responsibility for it as well. Because when that’s happening, it’s not just my life, but lots of people around me are heavily invested, as they should be, because they’ve been a huge part of that journey, and everyone’s focused on it, and there was someone that really struggled through that.
“So, that was mainly what I was thinking about when I was up there.
“And then there was an ongoing working through all of that once I got home as well, so you spend half your day celebrating and spend half your day trying to be with this person who’s not having a great time.”
Hooker stopped short of detailing exactly what the family issue was, saying it wasn’t his story to tell.
But he lamented the selfish nature of his job and how it distanced himself from his family during the peak of his career, which was brought into sharp focus after his gold medal.
“They’d really dropped off,” the 41-year-old said of his relationships with his family during his career.
“While it’s going good, you don’t really realise because it’s so busy around you.
“Certainly, from that period from 2008-2010, I nearly didn’t lose a competition. It was going so well, life was going so fast, that I kind of didn’t realise that all of a sudden, all of these relationships were dropping away in terms of how meaningful they were.
“Part of that was I was away from my family, I was living in Perth, they were all in Melbourne. But even part of it was in the training environment I was in over in Perth.
“When I first moved over there, two of my best mates were training with me, so it felt quite similar — that collegians training environment that I’d had in Melbourne. And then really quickly, because that was a high performance training environment over there, not a club environment, when their careers weren’t going as well as they previously had been, they slowly disappeared and I ended up being the only one there left. And with the real measure of success just being your results.”
He said that was hard to deal with for two major reasons.
“Part of it is you just start feeling a little bit of guilt when things aren’t going great at home with people in your family,” Hooker explained.
“And then the other part is you just don’t have that first-person support with you in that environment with people who really understand what’s going on — which was the complete contrast for (when) I had periods of time when it really didn’t go that well when I was younger, but around me I had my family, I had training partners and, your performance, whilst important because it’s a sport, really was not the number one measure by which people valued you.
“Whereas in this environment, it 100 per cent was; it’s all or nothing on that, and then all of a sudden all of my mates that I’d been training with were gone. And then when my performance started to drop off, which started happening during that 2010 season and was really bad in 2011, that’s when you’re just like, ‘What’s going on here?’
“It took a long time to build up, and then all the value that you see in yourself, through no fault of your own and without design, was all of a sudden around this version of you that could win big competitions.
“But in retrospect, what I’d been working towards was relatively shallow. It was: ‘Win that Olympic gold medal, that’s going to be enough’ … ‘OK, but what if you win all of them? No one’s ever done that before, no one’s ever held (all the major gold medals) at the same time, if you do that, that’s going to be enough’.
“And then when I had it, it was like, ‘Then what?’ Your brain naturally just goes, ‘OK, that’s done’.”
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