Editor Madeleine Chapman meets an old rival and wonders what could’ve been.

Mōrena and welcome to The Weekend, where dreams and regrets have time and space to flower. What’s the thing in your life that you wish you had given more energy to? It could be a relationship, an exam, a job or a dream abandoned. For me, it was the definitive decision to stop pursuing athletics in favour of writing. The moment I stopped trying to get better at throwing the javelin was the moment I began pondering whether or not javelin was in fact my true path and I’d made a huge mistake.

So a few weeks ago, I finally sat down and spoke to Tori Peeters, 2024 Olympian and someone I used to compete against. She’s a star, who you should absolutely watch out for in July, and I wanted to see “what could’ve been”. Athlete profiles are relatively common, but every time I read them I feel like they struggle to fully capture the sheer strangeness of athletes’ lives, and the very specific set of characteristics required to succeed as a professional sportsperson. And one thing that is often ignored is the fact that the vast majority of Olympic athletes dedicate their lives to their sport with no financial incentive. These are not multi-millionaire athletes who earn big bucks and set themselves up for life with their bodies. Instead, they’re people so committed to an action that they’ll dedicate time, money, everything to it with no promise of reward.

That’s what I wanted to figure out with Peeters. Why was she able to do that and not me? And was my assumption that Olympians are simply those willing to suffer, all wrong?

There was a lot that didn’t make it into the story but I hope it allowed for a deeper understanding of the singular nature of high performance sport, and stops even just one person (me) from thinking “I reckon I could do that” while watching the Olympics in July.

This week’s episode of Behind the Story

Wellington editor Joel MacManus appreciates that those we might not agree with can still make for an interesting and worthy story. Last weekend, he attended an anti-trans conference to hear speakers like Brian Tamaki, Posie Parker and NZ First MP Tanya Unkovich speak about the “dangers” of gender ideology. Joel’s feature was a chance to report on a culture war, rather than react to it, and prompted an intense response from the speakers themselve. He joined me on Behind the Story to talk about reporting in hostile environments and how to deal with feedback when it becomes abusive and personal.

• One of the ways we gauge how readers feel about our work is by keeping an eye on how long people spend reading a story. People have spent longer reading Joel’s story (above) than anything else we’ve published this year.
• “Munted” always works well in a headline, but in the context of Asia Martusia King’s story on the health of our fish stocks, it’s not great.
• Is a return to LOTR the best or worst thing for Wellington? I (Gollum) argue with myself (Smeagol) about it.
• As Alex Casey mentioned last week on Behind the Story, after working on a big story, it’s nice to be able to dive into some reality TV coverage. She caught up with a Married at First Sight NZ groom who only just finalised his divorce.
• High school teacher Alastair Crawford finds the silver lining to the Ministry of Education job cuts.

Comments of the week

Some bad memories of fake bacon on Hera Lindsay Bird’s fake bacon ranking

Very heartening to see these kinds of comments on Alex Casey’s story last week about Adam and the landmark human rights case he’s bringing against Corrections.

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