Herald Classics: 2004 - Ulmer looks back at year she'll never forget

Sarah Ulmer remembers the final lap of her Olympic final vividly.

The moments after crossing the line on August 22 in Athens to win the gold medal and establish a world record for her individual 3000m specialist cycling event, yes, but also that last exhausting lap with a packed velodrome roaring her on to glory.

So what was running through her mind as she duelled with Australian Katie Mactier in those final frantic seconds?

"The pain, to be honest," she said. "Not being able to breathe and just thinking, 'My God, I hope I don't fall off my bike in front of all these people and all these TV cameras'."

She knows there should be a pat answer. Perhaps something about feeling she had it in the bag, or something about preparing for a final late burst, or hearing the swelling of 5000 voices.

But there it is, the pain.

"It's terrible that that's my overriding thought from the Olympics. Not getting control of my breathing and the pain.

"When I stopped it was more disbelief. We'd just been so focused on 3km on August 21 [qualifying day] and being as fast as I possibly could."

So four years after the anguish of missing a bronze medal in Sydney in the same event by less than a blink, the 28-year-old Ulmer stood on top of the world.

She had her gold, she had regained her world record, with a crushing 3m 24.537s, a year's planning and a lifetime's ambition had been achieved.

In a sport which deals in milliseconds, no woman had ever come close to what she had achieved. The cycling world was her oyster.

To understand how it was done, it's necessary to go back to the start of the year. These things don't just happen overnight.

Ulmer and her coach and partner, former New Zealand pursuit rider Brendon Cameron, mapped out a path to the Olympics. They kept it simple, no talk of winning here or there, and certainly none of medals.

"We had a project of where we were going, what races we were going to do; the Mexico and Sydney World Cups, the world championships and the Olympics, basically bettering myself every time."

But there was no time discussed, no benchmarks along the lines of, 'If we can do this time we'll be on track'.

"I never contemplated results at all, never thought medals or anything. Never have. And everything pretty much worked out according to plan."

Unlike some athletes self-centred enough to insist luck played no part in their success, Ulmer makes no bones about the fact someone was smiling down on them this year.

"Totally. I didn't get crook, didn't crash, didn't have an injury. Everything went so smoothly.

"There is luck. Sometimes you get sick at the wrong time and miss two weeks' training. Sometimes you get the rough end of the stick and that's life.

"Most years you get something. This year miraculously hardly anything went wrong. We were just waiting for something to turn to custard."

First off, there was a strong performance in Aguacalientes, Mexico in March when she won the pursuit in 3m 37.697s, nearly four seconds clear of the field.

So far, so good.

On to Sydney in May and a 3m 31.157s, good enough for another World Cup title, and that was just 0.3s outside the world mark of Dutch star Leontien Zijlaard van Moorsel.

A fortnight later it was Melbourne and the world champs. 3m 30.604s. World record and world title. At which point everyone sat up.

Time for a blowout perhaps, put on the dancing shoes for a day or two? No, heads down on to the next phase of the operation. But the big plus out of Melbourne came in boosting Ulmer's confidence.

"It was huge. I'd never been able to crack that sort of time.

"Incrementally I was getting faster, but to knock 1.5s off my personal best - although it sounds tiny - for me it was a big step because from then on we thought, 'Man, we must be doing something right'."

She looked about at her toughest rivals - van Moorsel, Mactier, a couple of the Russians - and allowed a thought that just maybe she had their number.

"It's funny what confidence does for you, knowing what you're capable of.

"You spend so much time training, but if you've never beaten those people, never done those times, then once you've done it, sweet."

But did it mean she could see the finish line in Athens and getting there fastest?

"No. I never thought I must be favourite, even though I was world champion. It's just our mindset.

"We never got complacent. It was all very much, 'That's done, the deadline is still August 21, now on to the next project'. In hindsight we were ridiculously focused on what we were doing."

Athens brought the first fly in the ointment - a curveball in the form of news that the velodrome was open to the elements at both ends.

"We had heard the Greeks might be slow off the mark and not have it completely closed. With my style of riding, the less consistent the conditions the worse for me.

"Ten days before the Games we got a call saying, 'Guys there's no walls on this track and everything is blowing an absolute gale'.

"We dropped everything and flew to Athens."

Ulmer admitted a measure of turmoil, unfounded as it turned out but enough to set nerves jangling.

Any fears they had about how close they were to obtaining the optimum performance and where they stood in comparison to Ulmer's rivals were dispelled in qualifying.

She flew around the boards in 3m 26.400s, regaining her world record after van Moorsel and Mactier had trimmed her Melbourne time earlier in the day.

The gold-silver medal ride was the same story, the event having the perfect finale with Ulmer reclaiming her record. The best of the best winning the gold with the best ever time.

Ulmer remembers racing harder and faster than at any time in her career that day. "Under normal circumstances I never would have been able to maintain that pace.

"The fact it was an Olympic final, despite us trying to make it as normal as possible, allowed me to not detonate.

"It was so painful it was ridiculous that I was able to maintain that pace for as long as I did. When I saw that time at the end, I couldn't bloody believe it. Crazy."

Depending on the topic, Ulmer can be funny, expressive, thoughtful and angry (and no prizes for guessing which issue triggers that last emotion).

SINCE Athens, she's become used to people recognising her in the street. Essentially she is a private person. Despite an appealing outward demeanour she insists she's not comfortable in the limelight - and hopes to stay that way.

"I've always said my ideal situation would be to do my sport and I wouldn't need to tell everybody about it and do it for what it is. That's the way I started out.

"But I know that's not the real world. I'm lucky enough to have sponsors who have supported me and given me the profile I've got.

"I try and maintain as normal a life as possible. I'm looking forward to Christmas so I can stop talking about myself," she laughed.

Mention drugs to Ulmer and you need to tie her to a chair. It's black and white to her.

"And that's what's so ridiculous, it's almost become a grey area, people not wanting to talk about it and not wanting to crucify people who are cheating."

She cannot abide any position which hints at giving the dirty riders a break.

"Why feel sorry for them? It's the nasty, nasty side of sport, and mine in particular."

She has been at the startline and known she's alongside people who have tested positive.

Like Elena Tchalyk, a leading Russian caught bringing steroids into Australia last year.

"If you thought about it too much and took too much on board and [wondered] how many competitors might be on it or not, it's a whole waste of energy for a start. But you might as well pack your bags and go home.

"I don't think, 'I got beaten because that person's on drugs'.

"You have to be innocent until proven guilty and that's the mindset I take - but there's a lot of people who've been proven guilty."

New Zealand rider Jeremy Yates copped a two-year ban this month for failing a drug test. He gets no sympathy from Ulmer, who this week has agreed to help the New Zealand Sports Drug Agency with its anti-doping policies.

"It's so sad sport's got to that, where people would honestly believe they can't make it to the top without taking drugs.

"Does that mean Hamish Carter's on drugs, or the Evers-Swindells? It's bollocks."

Ulmer is going through the longest break from being on the bike she can remember and is, she laughed, 'the unfittest I've been for a while".

If she is to have a serious crack at a third successive Commonwealth Games gold in March, 2006, she reckons she'll need a year's hard work. The deciding factor will be whether she believes she has what she calls "the drive to attack another project with a vengeance".

And that can change quickly as she discovered last year. In October she had had "a gutsful. In November nothing could stop me".

What about the old argument that you only live once, stop too early and you'll live to regret it? She's heard it, respects it, but ...

"That's going to be the stuff that's ringing in my ears when I sit down to make the decision.

"I don't think that's really a reason to be living the life. And that's what I'd be doing, as opposed to living the dream." For sure, there's some hard thinking ahead.