Dame Valerie Adams has called time on one of New Zealand's greatest sporting careers. Photo / Jason Oxenham
As much as any sports person I've ever known, Dame Valerie Adams can be the steely eyed competitor when it's needed, then leave that mental zone behind and become the loving, decent, funny, hard working, sometimes vulnerable, person behind the image.
Watching her in the shot circle she is Amazonian,tall, fearless, and magnificent. But there's so much more to her than the public face.
Let me freely admit I'm hopelessly prejudiced. It may sound weird to some people when I say my wife Jan and I love the girl, but it's just the truth.
She came into our lives in 2011, to work on her biography "Valerie". Not long before Jan was diagnosed with an especially virulent form of breast cancer.
Her treatment, thankfully, was successful, but the medical means to combat such a brutal illness has to be brutal too. In the months while Jan was unwell there were two new rays of sunshine.
One was a beautiful grandson, Cooper, born to our daughter Emma and her husband Mark just a fortnight before Jan was diagnosed.
The other was Valerie, who would come through the door of our home, radiating goodwill, and sweeping Jan into a hug and a kiss. Just as she raised spirits with her kindness, she took me away from day-to-day realities while we taped her remarkable story.
The wonderful bonus is that the relationship has deepened in the decade since. Val and I wrote a book, and Jan and I gained a third daughter. Valerie calls us her Palagi parents, explaining to a Pacific Sports Awards dinner in 2013 that we "were like FOBs (Fresh Off the Boat) anyway, so it's all good." I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when Val took Jan with her to choose her wedding dress and, knowing how it would confuse him, told her dress designer, "This is my mother." When we're together Val and I happily talk sport (Jan claims it's gossiping, but we prefer to see it as being informed). Jan and Val, on the other hand, plunge into areas of the female experience that can see me fleeing the room.
We have seen with delight the love she receives from her husband, Gabriel Price, and his endlessly warm and kind family. Without the limitless support of Gabe's mother, Norma, it's possible Valerie wouldn't have been able to train for, and compete, at the Olympics in Tokyo last year.
The next chapter of Valerie's life will involve raising two beautiful children, Kimoana, born in 2017, and Kepaleli, born in March 2019. Kepaleli was born with Type One diabetes, and the silver lining of such a devastating diagnosis is that he'll grow up in a hugely caring, and highly organised, household.
What makes Valerie unusual, bordering on unique, is that she's a world class sportsperson who is also considerate towards other people. Before the 2012 Olympics in London several fellow Kiwis came to her training base in Switzerland to prepare for the Games. She spent so much time worrying about the other athletes her coach, Jean-Pierre Egger actually had to tell her to be more selfish.
Valerie was a champion who never sacrificed empathy on the altar of her career
Her life story is extraordinary.
The best of the true tales in sport are so amazing no writer of fiction would dare to be so melodramatic.
Valerie's back story as a prime example. Picture a 13-year-old kid, who walks the playground in Mangere in South Auckland with stooped shoulders and her head down, trying to look shorter because she's already 6 feet 3 inches tall. Some of the meaner kids call her Bigfoot.
A teacher at her high school, Southern Cross Campus, tells her she has to compete in the athletics sports day coming up. Valerie plays basketball, but she's never been involved in track and field. She asks what she can do. The teacher says she should throw the shot.
On the day of the school champs, in bare feet and footy shorts, Valerie picks up a shot for the first time in her life. She breaks the school senior record by a couple of metres. Two weeks later at the Counties-Manukau championship, still in bare feet, she breaks the area senior record.
Only six months after she's first thrown the shot, having just turned 14, Valerie's on a plane getting ready to fly to Poland for the world under-18 championships, the only Polynesian in the squad. "My Mum had bought me Big 'Uns chips, and a big bottle of a budget brand fizzy drink. I felt like the most spoilt kid in the world." By the time she's 16, she's the world under-18 champion.
To become the all time great she is there have been challenging times that tested every ounce of her resilience.
After winning her first gold medal in Beijing in 2008, Valerie had to look to the next Olympics in London without her coach from high school days, Kirsten Hellier.
Jean-Pierre Egger, who had first seen Valerie at a coaching clinic in Auckland when she was 15, and told Kirsten, "You have gold here", was her new coach of choice. He offered huge technical knowledge, and a kind, paternal presence, but he had to say to Valerie that he could only coach her if she moved to his native Switzerland.
So she had to live for three years in a tiny room at a Swiss Olympic training centre in Magglingen. Egger was uncertain she could make it, that she would find living alone so far from home too hard.
How small was her room? So tiny that when she made tearful Skype calls to her family in Auckland ("I found myself bursting into tears during the early months") she had to perch on her bed on her knees, with her laptop sitting on a ledge that ran over the foot of her bed.
But no matter how miserable it got, she stuck it out. His training techniques, which could include making, from a standing start, two footed jumps over five full sized hurdle placed just a metre apart, worked for her, and so did the relationship with Egger, who once told me, "after all, what is coaching, if it is not an act of love?"
Her mother, Lilika, will always be a massive influence in Valerie's life. Lilika died in the South Auckland hospice in 2000, surrounded by family, cradled in 15-year-old Valerie's arms.
The first thing Valerie has always done when she flies home from competing overseas is visit her mother's grave at the Manukau Memorial Gardens.
Lilika, a deeply devout Mormon, made the teenage Valerie promise that she would do everything she could to fulfil the talents God had given her. If ever a child has obeyed, beyond reasonable expectations, her mother's wishes, it is Valerie.