Olympic dreams

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If it wasn't for the latest running shoes, the lycra swimsuit and the Kevlar fencing uniform, Angie Darby could be mistaken for a 17th-century swashbuckler. Each day, she wields a sword, shoots a pistol, rides a horse, runs for miles and swims for all she’s worth. Indeed, the 20-year-old student from Melbourne is preparing to go into battle using each of these skills, but it is not to defend the honour of any king… rather, it is to honour her country at the 29th Olympiad, being held in Beijing, China, later this year. After just two and a half years of training, Angie is the only woman to qualify for Australia’s 2008 Olympic team for the modern pentathlon, and she’s working around the clock to make her coaches, her family, her country and herself proud.
5am: Angie’s alarm goes off and she makes herself get out of her cosy bed and head to the swimming pool at either Melbourne Grammar School or Melbourne University, where she’s completing a degree in architecture. “I cope with the early mornings by not thinking about them. As soon as I hear the alarm, I just get up and go... I’m a bit like a robot,” she says with a smile.
5.30am: At the pool Angie’s swimming coaches, Buddy and Dave, are waiting to put Angie through her paces in preparation for the 200-metre freestyle swim that forms one component of the modern pentathlon course. “I competed in swimming at state level in high school, but I was a backstroker so I’ve had to work hard on my freestyle to get up to speed,” says Angie. It was Buddy who first suggested Angie go into pentathlon three years ago. “When I was doing my HSC I couldn’t dedicate as much time to swimming as I needed to if I was going to go anywhere with it, and by the time I started uni I was needing a new focus to keep me motivated. That’s when Buddy told me about another swimmer he’d been coaching who’d gone into pentathlons,” she recalls. “I thought he was joking at first because the only other thing I could do was showjumping, but it was this unusual combination that actually made me the perfect candidate for the sport.”
Angie decided to call Modern Pentathlon Australia’s (MPA) national coach, Gerry Adams, to arrange a meeting. “I thought it was a bit weird to be mixing swimming and running with horse riding, let alone pistol shooting and fencing, but when Gerry told me the story of why the sports were combined, I was hooked,” recalls Angie. The story begins with the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who based the modern pentathlon on the tale of a Napoleonic military messenger. Legend has it the soldier’s horse was brought down in enemy territory and he was forced to defend himself with his pistol and sword, then swim across a raging river to deliver the message on foot. “The story mightn’t be true, but it’s a good one,” says Angie.
7am: With swimming training over, Angie has a quick shower and a bite of breakfast before making her way to a fencing lesson with Gerry. “I was pretty nervous when I first tried fencing, but I was lucky that two other girls were starting with me. We had no idea how out of our depth we were, and it was all just a lot of fun,” says Angie. “I don’t think I would have liked it so much if I’d had to spar with more advanced students right from the start because it is true physical combat, and it can hurt.”
Even though Angie is still considered a junior pentathlete because of her age, when she goes to the Olympics she’ll be competing against senior women. “I wish they had a junior division, but it doesn’t work that way, unfortunately,” she laughs nervously. On the big day, Angie will fence 35 women over a three- or four-hour period in bouts that will last for one minute or until one of the fencers makes a hit, which registers on their electronic fencing suits. Angie might get a minute’s rest between each bout, if she’s lucky. “It’s a pretty intense few hours, but it’s not as physically hard as the training I do where I’m fencing almost constantly for a couple of hours,” she says. “And it wasn’t the physical side of things I found most challenging anyway; it was
the emotional side. It took me a while to build up the courage to actually hit someone because I come from a very placid family and I’d never dreamed of fighting anyone before.”
Nevertheless, Angie took to the épée sword quickly, and impressed Gerry from the very start. “She had natural ability and she’s committed and passionate - that’s a talent in itself; that’s why she’s going to the Olympics after just two and a half years in the sport… not many pentathletes have achieved that.”
9am: With the sweat pouring off her and her adrenalin still pumping, Angie climbs out of her fencing suit and grabs a quick bite before driving across town to the Melbourne International Shooting Club, where she’ll spend the next few hours standing as still as she can, calming her nerves and focusing on a tiny target 10 metres away to practise for the pistol shooting section of the modern pentathlon. “This is the other one I was really nervous about because I’d never even held a gun before, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to,” she recalls. “I thought it would be a really aggressive sport because guns are associated with so much violence, but it’s completely the opposite.”
To her surprise, Angie discovered target shooting was more akin to meditation than anything else. “I can spend an hour or more looking through my sight [the device on a firearm that guides the eye], concentrating on my breathing, bringing my heart rate down and adjusting my grip on the gun before I even fire a live shot,” she explains. ”When I’m in the right zone, all I can see is my sight, and all I can feel is my heartbeat and my hand around the grip.” During competition, Angie will only have 10 minutes to focus before taking her 20 shots, and only 40 seconds to take each shot. “A big part of my training has been learning to zone in and block out the outside world quickly so I can cope with the pressure of competition,” she says.
11.30am: Angie takes a break from training and heads across town to attend one of her architecture lectures at Melbourne University. “I started studying veterinary science, but when I became serious about pentathlon training I had to dedicate 35 hours a week to the sport, so something had to give. I’d always been interested in architecture and it only required six or seven face-to-face hours a week, so I knew it was right for me,” she says. Even so, Angie often needs to study for six hours a night and when assignments and exams are due, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. “I’ve had to pull a few all-nighters to fit in the training and the study at times, but it’s all worth it,” she says.
It was at university two years ago that Angie met her boyfriend, Brett. “People ask me how I find time for a boyfriend, but we seem to see each other a lot. I think I fit everything in by compartmentalising my life so I know I have free time to see Brett, and we go out to dinner for our monthly anniversaries, which is really nice,” explains Angie. “He’s very supportive of my sport, but if we’re together watching a video on the couch, I do find it hard to tear myself away for training sometimes.”