Parents gobsmacked at daughter?s success

She may be their flesh and blood but Garry and Maureen Snowsill are still "gobsmacked" at the success of daughter Emma, three-times world women's triathlon champion and just crowned the 2006 Australia Sportsperson of the Year.
Even to them the way in which the 49kg and 1.55m 25-year-old has dominated a sport which requires such extreme excellence in swimming, cycle and running is difficult to comprehend.
"Honestly, we find it as hard to believe as anybody else?gobsmacked is probably the best way to describe it," Garry Snowsill said yesterday during the final throes of his latest visit to his old home town of Masterton.
"You think how tough the sport is and how small Emma is, it's amazing how she keeps doing it as well as she does"
A former West School and Wairarapa College pupil who left Masterton at the age of 20 and now lives on Australia's Gold Coast, Snowsill has watched his daughter compete in numerous races and remains in awe of both her mental and physical capabilities.
"She has a remarkable will to win, she doesn't seem to know the meaning of pain," he said.
And beneficial too is a strict training regime, developed in part during her own visits to Masterton as a youngster when she often went for runs around the local streets.
"She's covered a few miles here?you can give Wairarapa some credit for where she is now," her father quipped.
Last year was huge for Emma Snowsill for it was then that she won the gold medal at Melbourne's Commonwealth Games as well as her third world triathlon championship in Lausanne.
That latter success made her the most successful woman in the history of the world champs with no other female ever having chalked up three titles whilst competing over the Olympic distance.
Those victories obviously played a big part in Emma Snowsill winning the premier prize, the Dawn Fraser Award, at this year's Australian sports awards.
It is a trophy which recognises not only one's individual achievements but also sportsmanship and contribution to the community.
And it honours by name one of Australia's greatest female athletes, Dawn Fraser, who was the first swimmer to win the same event, the 100m freestyle, in three Olympic Games, the first woman to break the one minute mark for that race, and who became the holder of 39 world records (27 individual and 12 team).
Fraser won four gold and four silver Olympic medals as well as six gold and two silver Commonwealth Games medals with her Olympic haul representing the highest number of medals won in that competition by any Aussie in any one sport.
Snowsill was accompanied to the awards function by her partner, coach and fellow world-class triathlete Craig Walton, the man who helped her overcome the death of her first boyfriend, another talented triathlete in Luke Harrop, who was killed in a hit-and-run incident on the Gold Coast some five years ago.
In an interview after receiving the Dawn Fraser Award, Snowsill said her Commonwealth Games and world title wins stood out in her mind for very different reasons.
"At the Commonwealth Games we had the home conditions and support. It's the atmosphere I will always remember, having everyone cheering for me the whole way," she said.
Snowsill arrived in Lausanne for the world championships to find the airline had lost her luggage and she had contracted an energy-sapping illness just days before she was due to compete on what is a notoriously difficult course.
She is prouder of the mental strength she showed to win, than she is of the wider significance of becoming the first woman to have won three world titles over the Olympic distance.
"Getting sick and losing my bags, getting off the plane with nothing but the clothes I was wearing.
"I was thinking what else can happen to stuff up my preparation," she said.
"So I just decided to treat Lausanne like a local race and I learned a lot about not getting stressed out over a big event.".
Snowsill will be looking to kick start her 2007 world triathlon championship campaign when she competes in the opening rounds of that competition at Mooloolaba in Queensland next weekend.
But longer term her focus is very much on qualifying to represent Australia at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, an achievement which would be part consolation on her being a controversial omission from the 2004 Sydney Olympics squad despite her being ranked number one in the world.