Commonwealth Games: Where Are Our Elite Females?

By Cindy King.

In April after the national athletics championships, Athletics Australia (AA) announced its first round of nominations for the Australian athletics team for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in

The purpose of this article is not to debate whether or not the “A” qualifiers are too difficult.  Based on world records and times that are being run around the world, 2:01.00 for the 800m, 4:09.50 for the 1500m, 15:20.00 for the 5,000m and 32:10.00 for the 10,000m certainly seem reasonable.

Good on the women who are out there competing and trying to make the team, but the question seems to be, why don’t we have more elite Australian female distance runners?

Elite distance coach and manager Nic Bideau does not think that things are as negative as the team named in April suggests. “This year we've had Nikki Chapple run 68.37 for a half marathon, Lisa Weightman win a marathon, Eloise Wellings place 2nd in Osaka 5000m, Kaila McKnight place 2nd in Daegu 1500m and Benita Willis place 17th at the world cross country.  Throw in Lara Tamsett, Lisa Flint, Becky Lowe, Zoe Buckman and Melissa Rollison and we certainly have produced some talent that is still active.  Most Commonwealth countries would be proud of those stocks. Perhaps the AA high performance team didn't look closely enough at what is required to compete for the medals at the Commonwealth Games when they wrote the selection criteria. Of those mentioned, only Eloise and Lisa are confirmed in the team but in my opinion at least 4 of the others, possibly 5 could be contenders for Commonwealth medals in October - if they manage to get themselves into the team.”

Athletics Australia National Distance Coach Tim O’Shaughnessy agrees “the situation is not as dire as it appears”.  He notes that in the Zatopek 10,000m race in December of last year, 6 women got under the “B” Standard for the Commonwealth Games.  And “the women’s 1500m is a mystery to me.  I believe that the talent is there but that they just have not had the opportunities or made the opportunities to be aggressive enough to make the times happen. We’re still hopeful that they will make the times. And in another case, Nikki Chappel’s injury has come at a bad time.”

Injuries appear to be the biggest hurdle he faces in developing our femaledistance stars.  “We not only lose them at the top end – we also lose them in the development phase.  At the end of 2009 I came across a picture of a development camp that was held at the beginning of 2008.  There were ten girls in the photo with Sonia O’Sullivan, many of whom had competed internationally, and within that 2-year period every single one of them had suffered a major injury, most of them stress fractures.”

This begs the question of why girls are so susceptible to stress fractures. Again, this is not an easy question to answer, but we know it is related to diet (getting adequate calcium and calories) and that a disproportionate number of elite female runners suffer from clinical and sub-clinical eating disorders in their efforts to achieve what they believe is the ideal female running body. But when they get too thin they lose both fat and muscle, and muscles work to protect bones from the stresses of elite running.

O’Shaughnessy notes that the boys coming through get injuries, but that they tend to be shorter-lasting. “It could be eating, or it could be a lack of general sport in the girls’ younger ages.  Their bodies do not seem to be conditioned well enough to handle the stresses and loads of training.  We need to do more work around this area.”  Eloise Wellings, who has qualified for the team in the 5,000m and the 10,000m, concurs with this theory. “Beyond nutrition, one of the reasons why I have suffered 10 stress fractures is that my muscles were not strong enough to support the impact of running. So I focus on lots of core work and a little bit of lower body work to build lean muscle in my legs.”

Anna Thompson, who ran the 5,000m at the Commonwealth Games in 2002 and the 10,000m at the Commonwealth Games in 2006, also notes that we need to get a greater base of runners into the sport, on the theory that only a few of those who compete will become champions.  She ran a cross country race in Chiba, Japan in February of this year, and there were over 300 junior Japanese girls in a cross country race – “all fast!”

We are achieving the mass numbers of females competing at the non-elite level.  Approximately half of all Little Athletics participants are female, and in 2006 more women than men registered for The City to Surf Fun Run in Sydney, which is the largest in the world. It is in the area of elite female runners that we need to improve, not necessarily mass participation.

What can The Runner’s Tribe readers do to help ensure that the 2014 Commonwealth Games have a full complement of female distance runners?

1.      Encourage any girls that you know to compete in all sports, including athletics.

2.      Be a real track fan!  Go to track meets and support the athletes so that athletics becomes a popular sport for girls.

3.      If you are a parent or role model of a developing female athlete, encourage them to focus on strength and fitness, not leanness.

4.      There may still be more additions to the team, so cheer on all the athletes who do make it to India – it hasn’t been an easy road for them to get there!