Kiwi Olympians: David Phillips

By SUZANNE McFADDEN

A hot-water bottle is firmly strapped to the back of David Phillips, Olympian.

His spine is fractured in two places. And yet he throws himself around the pommel horse, flips across the floor, contorts his body over the vault and slams down, perfectly, on to the mat.

Phillips grimaces through five hours' training a day. He abhors drugs, so he wears the hot-water bottle to ease the pain that is with him around the clock.

He is a gymnast with a ticket to the Olympics - the first New Zealand male in his field to go since 1972 - and there is no way he is going to give it up.

You cannot discern the pain in the 22-year-old's taut frame - he literally bounces, even when sitting down.

The country boy made good on the high bar sparkles at the thought of competing in Sydney, before a crowd 40 times the size of the loyal flock of followers he gets at home.

The constant ache in his lower back will be drowned out by the screams of 20,000 - even if they are not for him.

Phillips suffered his first stress fracture just before the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur two years ago.

He was in the middle of a tumbling routine and felt something go wrong. A scan showed a fracture in L5 - the last of the lumbar vertebrae in the spine.

But he gritted his teeth, kept on flipping, and came out with a bronze - the first Kiwi man to win a Commonwealth medal in gymnastics.

When he returned a hero to his hometown of Onewhero, a farming district south of Auckland, he took three months off to rest his back.

He seriously thought about quitting gymnastics - a dilemma that was to dog him again over the next couple of years.

He even considered it when he qualified for the 2000 Olympics at an event in Las Vegas: the pain was worse and he had suffered another stress fracture in the same vertebra.

"It is so frustrating. I will train really well to a point, then my body says, 'No, that's enough.'

"But it's not a perfect world. My back is just a fact of life now."

Phillips will not be taking any pain-killing injections before he bounds across the mat in the Superdome at Homebush in September.

He shies away from drugs - although he will swallow a mild anti-inflammatory tablet if the pain becomes too intense.

"I'm so against drugs - I'm such a moral athlete," he says.

"Even when I was a kid I saw my favourite gymnast smoking outside after a competition. I said to myself, 'That's it. He's not my hero any more.' "

He puts heat on the injury before he trains, and ices it afterwards.

"All the mothers at the gym think it's hilarious, seeing me walk around with my hottie strapped to my back. It's like, 'Hey, old man, don't you think it's time to retire?' "

Not yet.

But it is no surprise that Phillips' body is crying, "Enough."

He knows gymnasts are notorious for bad posture: "We have really weak lower abdominals, but no one had really figured that out when I first started. Most clubs are working to prevent that nowadays."

But he adds: "Even if I had known at 14 that I was going to get stress fractures at 22, I would have kept training, because I love it."

Phillips has promised his body he will never push it so hard that he risks his health long term.

"There are other things I want to achieve in my life. My gymnastics career is definitely coming to a close."

Phillips does not expect to win a medal in Sydney - his aim is a top 50 finish on any of the six types of apparatus.

But his main goal is to overcome his biggest fear - falling off something.

"You never want to mess up, especially not at the Olympics," he says.

"Gymnastics is such a precision sport, and it's so obvious if you mess up - you fall off.

"My goal is to cope with the pressures that go hand-in-hand with the Olympics."

There is the noise of the crowd, all 20,000 of them, compared with the maximum 500 he competes in front of in New Zealand.

And the expectations of his band of fans at home, the people of Onewhero, and young gymnasts around the country who look up to him and New Zealand's only woman gymnast going to Sydney, Laura Robertson.

"Suddenly I've become the role model for New Zealand gymnastics, and it's kind of weird," Phillips says. "I would rather just be a country boy doing good in the city.

"But I've come to appreciate that what I do affects other people. I see a lot of sportspeople don't acknowledge where they have come from or the people who have helped get them where they are."

He singles out his parents for praise. "They used to drive three hours from the farm to Mt Roskill and back, three times a week, so I could train.

"I know it's not just my Olympics, David's Olympics. It's David's parents', David's friends', David's church, David's town. It's not just a selfish endeavour."

Phillips is already giving something back, not only coaching gymnastics but working with under-privileged kids at an after-school care programme run through his church.

This year he has had to give up coaching the future Phillipses because he was getting too tired and cranky with two-hour sessions before his three-hour training.

But there has been a time when he got sick of gymnastics.

For eight months before the Commonwealth Games he lived in a corner of the Tri Star gym in Mt Roskill.

"I paid $40 a week for two little rooms, and I didn't have to pay for power or the phone so it was great.

"But I was coaching there, training there and living there. It all became a bit too much."

Now he flats in a smart little townhouse in St Lukes, does some "dogsbody" work for New Zealand Gymnastics, and trains the national aerobics team twice a week.

There is no guarantee that when Phillips returns home from Sydney, he will retire.

"I haven't made any decisions about my future in gymnastics. The Olympics will be such a life-changing experience, no matter what happens, that I won't decide anything until afterwards."

Unfortunately, David Phillips' aching body is likely to make that decision for him.

The Olympics – a Herald series

Official Sydney 2000 web site