Deceit, despair and death of an Olympian

• Published date: 27 November 2021
• Publication title: Weekend Herald

Fresh off an exuberant, boozy weekend in Queenstown, a running gag from the night before was tauntingly picked up again with her housemate and friend.

“Hey sugar daddy thanks for a great weekend. I’ll send you some foot pics later,” the text read on Sunday, August 8.

Now in his Cambridge home and separated by 1000km, Andrew McLean smiled at the message in his phone. He had caught a flight home early, grappling with a hangover felt among all their ski group.

The text sender, Olivia Podmore, was somewhere in the South Island, flying from Queenstown to Christchurch, where she would briefly unite with her mother before also returning to Cambridge, where she flatted in McLean’s house.

“We went out on the Saturday night and I look a decent 39 and she looks beautiful,” McLean says.

“So we’re out at this bar and there’s random dudes, and they said, ‘What’s your deal?’ and I said, ‘I’m her sugar daddy’ and they said, ‘Oh, how does that work?’ and I said, ‘Well, she sends me foot pics and I give her money, take her out for dinner, she’s come down here learning to snowboard.’

“Liv was playing along with it, we’re toying with these guys, we’ve got them on the line.”

The one true part was Podmore learning with a small posse of friends rounded out by two-time Olympic gold medallist Eric Murray and his partner, Thea.

The days leading up to their night on the town had been spent on the slopes of Coronet Peak with a novice Podmore already traversing the top mountain runs after a single lesson on the Friday morning.

“We had this great afternoon on the mountain. She learned how to snowboard.

“She was nailing it, she was having a great time,” McLean says.

Down in the cafe, McLean ran into an old Christchurch friend and his wife, who were charmed by Podmore’s attention to their 5-year-old daughter, Florence, while the rest of them chatted.

“Just asking questions that you ask a 5-year-old: ‘What school do you go to? Who’s your teacher? How old are you?’

“She was super-engaged with her. She wasn’t off ... withdrawn.”

But what Murray remembers of that more sombre Sunday alongside the 24-year-old Podmore on the same flight out of Queenstown was, in retrospect, a bit erratic.

“Just her mood in the last [days]. Like even when we were down in Queenstown,” Murray says.

“I thought she was just hung-over from our big night on Saturday. But, of course, she was real quiet and she was real happy and then real quiet and then real happy. So it was just up and down a lot.”

That Sunday also marked the end of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

Sprint cyclist Podmore had trained for four years but failed to qualify. Less than 24 hours later, she was found dead in the renovated sleep-out garage of McLean’s home.

In a post on Instagram she described Andy McLean as a lifeline of friendship and support that allowed her to get through an extra year.

But the 400-word message also revealed the pain and anger she only opened up to the world 10 minutes before she left it. The angst in the words was so palpable it sent local friends rushing to her address on the outskirts of Cambridge.

Podmore’s life was in many ways a messy accumulation of personal burdens she hid with her ambition and verve.

“You know a lot of people said to me, ‘What a nice thing that she said she lasted a year — that’s basically down to you,’” McLean says.

“It means nothing now because she’s not still around. So I just sort of look at it and think it’s an absolute mystery and always will be.”

Two months on, McLean can still not make sense of Podmore’s final days. He is at least resigned to the lack of warning signs.

But he keeps revisiting that cheeky final text message from Podmore as an encapsulation of his confusion.

“You don’t send that f***ing text message and 24 hours later you’re not even on earth. That’s not normal.”

NIENKE PODMORE says her daughter always had an advantage at competitions in her junior years cycling in Christchurch because she didn’t take it all that seriously.

She didn’t over-train and, perhaps as a consequence, she didn’t get nervous on race day. The start-line adrenaline was all part of the fun.

Her beginnings on a bike at about 13 years old were disproportionately divided between “a little bit of track racing and riding out to Sumner for an icecream and back”.

Podmore’s relaxed attitude may have been propped up by a natural ability for powerful athletic feats. Both parents, Nienke and Phil, were keen cyclists and there was an elite sporting family pedigree too.

Her great-grandfather, Cornelis Gerardus Tabak, was an Olympic weightlifter for Holland in the 1928 Amsterdam Games.

From Nienke’s perspective, her daughter had a typical teenage social life that balanced out an undeniable ambition emerging gradually from underneath all the smiles.

“From the age of 13, she wrote a list of her goals in life and that was absolutely in there to be the world champion, the best in the world at sprinting,” Nienke says.

“I always tried to make sure there was a bit of balance. She had a boyfriend for the first couple of years but she was always really social and it all just fitted in so there was a good mix, and always a wide network of lovely friends coming and going.”

But the frivolous teenage fun was quickly consumed by Podmore’s easy talent for cycling — winning most junior national events for her age.

One fellow student from Middleton Grange Christian School in Christchurch, which Podmore attended, described the cyclist as “literally, the star of the school ... very much the golden child”.

Podmore was often drawn away from socialising by her training and international competition.

Her success was relayed back to the school in updates on the Middleton Grange website with proud headlines like “Cycling on Gold” and tallies of her medal collections at international tournaments.

It was not necessarily wanted attention for the popular but laid-back teen who had to deal with a degree of innuendo in her final school years, triggered by a silent ordeal few knew about.

At age 16 she had an abortion.

It was a decision she seemingly confided in depth to no one. And possibly no one at all before the event.

“I didn’t know she’d had it done until the day she’d had it done, and as a mother I had huge empathy for her having to go through that, and that she didn’t tell me,” Nienke said.

“But I really supported her, and said to her I would do the same thing. I don’t think that screwed her up.”

One of Podmore’s best friends from Middleton Grange, Ruby-Rose Shingleton, said it was hard to gauge the toll the abortion took.

“She definitely kept it a secret,” Shingleton says.

It was a decision that, in Podmore’s head, she would lament in later years.

But, for the moment, there was the fuel of the cycling to perhaps keep such reflection at bay.

AFTER FINISHING school at 17, Podmore went to train at High Performance Sport NZ’s centre in Cambridge.

Knowing no one other than the rival teenage cyclists she’d run into at national track meets, Podmore struck lucky with her new residence in the North Island.

A woman now known as her North Island mum, Raywin Pierce, had offered to be a home-stay for young girls who had relocated to train at Cycling NZ’s High Performance Cambridge base.

Pierce was a widow. Her own three older children had moved out and from 2014 onwards her home was filled with Cycling NZ athletes Podmore, Emily Shearman and Brea Roderick.

Pierce describes the town of Cambridge as “broken” by the memory of Podmore over the past three months. “It’s tough. Nobody around here can believe it.”

“It’s in my head every day. I still call her bedroom ‘Liv’s bedroom’. She broke my heart. She was my third daughter. I was her North Island mum. I was here for her 24/7.”

Pierce says Podmore from 17 to 19 was above all preoccupied with her cycling.

“She was always out there, up and gone, morning to dark on that bike. If not, she was in the shed pumping music on that cycle thing [exercise bike].

Podmore’s stay at Pierce’s Cambridge home lasted four and a half years and it is separated by the defining midpoint of the Rio Olympics.

Even Pierce, who vowed not to comment on any negativity in Podmore’s life, or the dramas of her cycling career, hinted at the contrast in the then 19-year-old when she returned home from the 2016 Games.

“I just want to remember how she was in my home.

“I don’t want to think about when she got home from Rio ...” IN A May 2020 interview with one of her sponsors, sports brand Recovery Systems, Podmore describes the enthusiasm of her Olympic lead-up and the disappointment of the Games.

“I think when I was 16 myself and [personal coach] Hamish Ferguson started to think let’s go for the Olympics, two and a half years away.”

The 19-year-old was selected for the individual track sprint, the team sprint and the precarious keirin event, in which up to seven riders jostle behind a pace-setting electric bike before exploding to the finish line in the final two laps of eight.

With a modest grin on her face, Podmore sums up the entire Olympics competition: “It wasn’t a great experience for me.”

She describes round one of the keirin with just over a lap to go “I’d started coming round the bunch and there was a crash happening in front of me.

“The Russian rider went underneath me instead of going under to avoid the crash just freaked out and swung up and took me out. Instead of sliding down the track the way it angles, I flipped over and landed on my head.

“So I was knocked out, I think for about 45 seconds.”

In the daze of her concussion, Podmore decided to ride the next race minutes later to try to qualify for the second round of the event.

Almost four years on from it, Podmore was well aware it was more than just a little spill.

“After that came the delayed concussion, which was a lot,” she says in her May 2020 interview.

Friends McLean and Murray have only looked back on that Rio crash with any suspicion since Podmore’s death.

It stemmed out of concerns that Podmore repeatedly expressed over her...