Olympic rower Sonia Waddell, also a competitive national athlete and cyclist, is now coaching her highly promising daughter’s school athletics team, and loving it. She speaks to Sarah Cowley Ross.
In a full-circle moment, Olympic rower Sonia Waddell is back entrenched in the sport of athletics — the first of three codes in which she’s worn the silver fern.
“Athletics will always be my passion, even though I ended up rowing at the Olympics,” says Waddell, laughing, at home on her horse farm in Cambridge.
She has coached all three of her children — Sophie, Hayden and Madeleine — in athletics, rowing and cycling: the three sports in which she’s represented New Zealand.
But it’s athletics where she’s spending time now coaching the St Peter’s Cambridge school team who include her talented long sprinter and hurdler daughter, Madeleine.
And now Madeleine, 16, has qualified for the world junior athletics championships in Peru in August — in the same event, the 400m hurdles, her mum competed in 34 years ago. Talk about full circle.
Waddell reckons Madeleine is “one hundred times more talented” than she was at the same age and predicts she will break her mother’s best time in the next few weeks as they travel through the United States.
Raised in Taranaki on Brookdale Stud Farm, Waddell reflects on how being involved in a working farm shaped her as an individual and an athlete.
“Growing up on a farm getting everything done, you’re often cold, hungry and tired. You just get comfortable with being uncomfortable so it’s no big deal,” she says.
“I never found sport uncomfortable. Absolutely, there are sessions where you feel incredibly uncomfortable, but I enjoyed that feeling.”
Sport was certainly encouraged in her family. From a young age, Waddell attended Te Whare Matangi Athletics Club every Tuesday night in summer with her brother Hayden and sister Amanda.
“Mum [Yvonne] used to traipse us round to every ribbon day and Colgate Games,” Waddell recalls.
Even though her father Alistair was an All Black — a flanker who played 17 matches for New Zealand — it was Olympic triple gold medallist Sir Peter Snell who became her biggest sporting inspiration, after hearing her parents talking about him.
“From the age of 10, it was my dream to go to the Olympics and be Peter Snell winning a gold medal for New Zealand,” she says.
As a teenager, Waddell made the New Zealand team for the world junior athletics championships in 1990, competing in the 400m hurdles in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
From that outing, she was scouted by American Collegiate recruiters, and eventually settled on the full scholarship offered by University of Minnesota.
While she was there, she was converted into a heptathlete, which was problematic for Waddell, given she had to attend multiple training squad sessions daily, covering all the various events.
“I was not prepared for the level of training that I was doing,” she says.
On reflection, Waddell is grateful to her Kiwi coaches who prepared her patiently and carefully back home as a junior athlete — in stark contrast to being thrust into the US college system.
“I spent my first winter running on snow and ice or on an indoor track — it absolutely ruined my legs,” she says.
Shin splints developed into stress fractures in both of Waddell’s tibias. She returned home broken.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but running was never going to be an option for me again.”
But the end of her running career provided the opening in rowing that would eventually lead to her travelling the world, meeting her future husband, Olympic rowing champion Rob Waddell, and competing at two Olympics.
After only three weeks of rowing training, Waddell collected a gold medal at the nationals with her crew, and that led to a New Zealand trial. “It was a shock to everyone, including me,” she says.
Waddell remembers highly respected former New Zealand rowing coach Harry Mahon saying at the time: “You can’t really row right now but you’re an athlete. We can’t teach people to be an athlete, but we can teach you how to row.”
A year later, Waddell was the reserve at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics for the women’s double sculls combination of Brenda and Philippa Baker (who finished sixth).
Following a big exodus of athletes post Atlanta, the opportunity to row in the single scull was presented to Waddell and she absolutely thrived in the individual boat.
She went to the 2000 Sydney Olympics where she finished sixth in the single scull (Rob won gold in the men’s single scull).
“In Sydney, I didn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve, so I retired straight after because it was the expected thing. I was almost 30,” she says.
That was the first time Waddell retired.
But after she had her first child, Sophie, in 2002, “I realised there was just no way that I was finished as an athlete.”
Mentally, Waddell still had the monkey on her back and still wanted to win an Olympic medal. Physically, she felt strong and ready for a new challenge as a mum athlete.
“I felt coming back was a good way to be a role model to Sophie — rightly or wrongly,” she says.
Seven months after Sophie was born, Waddell was back with her daughter watching from the bank at a rowing world cup. Ten months later, she rowed at the world championships securing the boat a spot for New Zealand at the 2004 Athens Olympics.
Breaking the glass ceiling of being a mother and competing at the Olympics is one of Waddell’s career highlights.
“Twenty-one years ago, it wasn’t really considered an option to have a baby and go back into fulltime sport,” she says. “So it was a privilege to go back into sport to see what I was capable of doing.”
Waddell is quick to acknowledge her incredibly supportive family — Rob and extended family who helped with Sophie during training and competition times.
In the single scull boat in Athens, Waddell finished fifth, and retired again with “absolutely no regrets”.
Her path in rowing wasn’t easy, she says. Often seen as too short and too weak, Waddell says she had to fight a lot of fights that were unnecessary. She makes no excuses: “If you want something bad enough, you’ll find a way to make it happen.”
During her second retirement the Waddells welcomed Hayden and Madeleine to their family, and also spent time living in Valencia and San Francisco supporting Rob, who was a grinder in three Team New Zealand America’s Cup campaigns.
When Madeleine was 10 months and the family were on holiday, Waddell saw an advertisement for Cycling New Zealand’s Power to Podium — a campaign to attract endurance track cyclists through an open trial a few weeks later.
“I remember reading this out to Rob saying ‘I wish there was something like this five years ago’. His response was ‘You’re not too old and you can do that’,” she says.
In half an hour, Waddell had filled out the expression of interest and the next day was on her bike training. She scored highly in testing, but didn’t make the final cut due to her age.
Disappointed but never down, Waddell had a point to prove and in 2011, won the New Zealand time trial title in a stacked field of those selected in the Power to Podium programme.
She went on to be a pilot for visually impaired para-cyclist Jayne Parsons, wining multiple world titles in the tandem — a journey that Waddell loved.
She enjoyed a “fun few years” in cycling but knew the exact moment when it was time to finally retire — for a third time.
“I was about to travel to nationals and I had to leave the family holiday early — all three kids were crying because they didn’t want me to go,” Waddell recalls. “I realised I didn’t really want to go to. I knew I was done.”
Eventually, Waddell got into coaching and when LockerRoom spoke to her she was on her way to a three-week athletics trip with the St Peter’s Cambridge team to the US, ending with the athletes competing at the well-regarded Penn State Relays.
“I got so much out of sport. I was so fortunate to have so many incredible people in my life through sport, so coaching feels like such a great way to pay it forward,” she says.
Waddell feels lucky to have been able to coach all three of her children and right now focus on Madeleine, who won the U20 400m hurdles and U18 400m national titles in March. It’s not an easy job, she admits.
“That’s been the biggest challenge for me, sometimes those conversations I have to have challenge me as a mother. It’s finding that balance,” she says.
Besides coaching and family life, Waddell runs the family farm business Riverdale Farm, offering horse agistment services. They moved to the property in 2009.
In both her worlds of sport and business, she has returned to her roots — days filled with caring for and managing horses and their sporting paths.
Waddell looks after horses for clients in New Zealand, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong.
“In some ways it’s a coaching role with horses and a mother role looking after these equine athletes,” she says.
Once an athlete, always an athlete, but now a coach — of horses and humans.
Waddell’s illustrious, varied and successful sporting career grounded in her rural background, and combined with supporting her husband Rob’s career, find her content in this next chapter of her life.
“I love how exciting and varied our life has been.”
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.
