Sports Factor - 21/12/01: Doing It!

Radio National's The Sports Factor

With Amanda Smith
21/12/01

Doing It!

Summary: Is it better to play a sport badly, or watch others do it well? Players of mid-week ladies tennis and D-grade park cricket, who’ve been playing badly for years, offer their views. Plus, a group of older women who’ve taken up figure skating. Not the easiest of sports to tackle when you’re getting on in years, but these women are undaunted!
Details or Transcript:
THEME

Amanda Smith: On the sports factor summer - is it better to play a sport badly, or watch others do it well? We'll hear from a couple of people who've been playing badly for years - in mid-week ladies tennis, and in D-Grade suburban cricket.

Plus, we'll meet a group of women who've taken up ice-skating later in life, much to their surprise and delight.

MUSIC

Judy Bosler: Keep those heads up, girls. The next one ready? Come on, don’t rest on your laurels girls.

Pat Glenn: I get a buzz out of doing this, that I really thought that I wouldn’t get at this time of life. To get this sort of degree of enjoyment and excitement, and a kick out of it. You kind of think that when you’re older you just sit down and let the world go by, but no, you don’t. (laughs)

MUSIC

Amanda Smith: And we'll also meet a teenager who felt he didn't fit in anywhere, until he stumbled on a sport at which he found he could excel.

But first to this question for the rest of us: which is the more worthwhile and enjoyable - watching other people play sport well, or doing it yourself, badly.

Jim Young spent 12 seasons playing cricket with a team called the Naughton's Old Boys. He says that they weren't the worst cricketers to ever take to the field, but they were down there with them. And Jim's chronicled the story of that team in an extremely entertaining book called "Any Old Eleven". And in a year of controversy and bad behaviour in international cricket, Jim Young celebrates the down-to-earth, no-frills version of the game he played - Park Cricket.

Jim Young: Park cricket is the anonymous thousands that you see on grounds scattered all across the suburbs and country towns of Australia. No-one ever watches it, but the 22 players who participate find it of desperate importance.

Amanda Smith: And what level was your team playing at in this park cricket competition?

Jim Young: Pretty much the lowest there is. The competition that we played in was called The Northern Combined Churches, and the grade that we participated in was called D-1, on the basis that it was too humiliating to the participants to call it E grade.

Amanda Smith: So park cricket I suppose sits at the base of the cricket pyramid, Jim, but it’s not really a competition where players are on their way up, is it? Park cricket is not really a breeding ground for Test players.

Jim Young: Not in the least. Anyone who has any ability has been weeded out and dispatched to serious competitions long before they arrive at park cricket. In fact park cricketers are generally broken-down hacks, rather like me, who fell in love with the game as boys and can’t bear to give it up.

Amanda Smith: And yet is it in these kind of anonymous strivings in parks around Australia, that the place of cricket has been consolidated in a way, as much as or even perhaps more than the success of our Test team?

Jim Young: Well I think the fortunes of the Test team wax and wane, but the place that cricket has in the Australian imagination I think goes more to this depth of participation and the passion that people can bring to something that is in any objective terms, of absolutely no importance whatsoever.

Amanda Smith: Well your team, The Naughton’s Old Boys, or NOBS I think, as the team was generally known, was a pub team playing in a church’s competition. Was that in itself in any way an anomaly?

Jim Young: Well we were certainly viewed with suspicion by those in authority, and there was one other pub team that participated briefly, and certainly brought the whole competition into disgrace and disrepute, but we were actually a very civilised and well-behaved team. But it is a sign of the struggle to keep these sorts of associations going, that a pub team should have found itself competing in what was essentially a church competition.

Jim Young: Well it also sounds like your team actually just about kept the association afloat financially in terms of the regularity of fines imposed on you for things like late starts or for not attending association meetings, or for players wearing red socks.

Jim Young: Well the small paraphernalia of the game often eluded us. We were less than punctilious in starting on time, but we were not generally one of the clubs that was fined for threatening to spear the umpire with a spare stump and that sort of thing.

Amanda Smith: And that happened?

Jim Young: Which did go on.

Amanda Smith: Well who made up your team, Jim? How did you recruit players?

Jim Young: Well my own experience was that I was recruited on Friday night in the public bar of Naughton’s Hotel. I’d run into an old friend I hadn’t seen for quite some time who’d played in the team, and they were scratching to make up the Eleven the next day, so I helped.

Amanda Smith: And that was a common experience for recruiting players?

Jim Young: Very common, which meant that a large number of players were not officially registered, and would have to play under false names. We’re a team of ring-ins most of the time.

Amanda Smith: So tell me about that.

Jim Young: Well my own experience was that the game I was close to the end of the season and I was of course not registered, so I was told behind the back of the hand before the game started that for the day’s purposes my name was Craig Price. As it happened, at the end of the day I was one of the not-out batsmen taking off the pads. And a wicket had fallen in the last over, and the new batsman had come in. Whoever was in charge of the score book hadn’t caught up with this small detail, and so the opposing Captain came over to where we were both sitting down taking our pads off and asked us our names. I’d completely forgotten who I was supposed to be, but I’d been in for some time and the other batsman had only come in and faced a couple of balls before the end of play, so his was the missing name. So I waited for him to supply the information. What I wasn’t aware of was that he was also a first gamer playing as a ring-in, and he had no idea who he was supposed to be. So when we were asked our names, neither of us knew, and it’s very difficult to cover that sort of confusion.

Amanda Smith: Well despite being a pretty hopeless and disorganised team, from the sound of it, playing at a level probably not that much above backyard cricket, your team did adopt all the trappings of professional corporatised sport. For example, you had a club owner?

Jim Young: Yes we decided to follow the American pattern. We needed a new set of mats which was going to cost more than we had in the kitty, and the publican, Simon Byrne, said ‘Oh I could throw that in for you’, so we immediately made him club owner. And then we thought we’d set up the full apparatus. Charlie Doherty who drank in the public bar, we made him coach so that we could sack him; that proves that you’re a serious sporting organisation.

Amanda Smith: And I believe that Charlie Doherty never actually attended a match?

Jim Young: Oh no, but he would always ask us how we’d gone, and if we ever we able to report that we’d won, his standard response was, ‘What, did they take the bell out of the ball?’ It was a joke that was never lost on Charlie himself.

Amanda Smith: And along with the owner and the coach and various other honorary positions, you had a club philosopher.

Jim Young: This was about the time that serious sporting organisations began to employ sports psychologists. That seemed a bit serious for us, so we appointed a club philosopher who could adjudicate on the finer moral points of the game for us. He was, from time to time, called on for an opinion.

Amanda Smith: In what sort of matters?

Jim Young: Well there was the occasion where one of our team gave another member of the team out leg before wicket when he was on 99.

Amanda Smith: This was when one of your team was umpiring?

Jim Young: Which was the general mode of operation. And so we asked the club philosopher to rule on this extraordinary behaviour, and he decided that the appropriate categorical imperative was that charity begins at home, so the offender would have to buy his own beer for the night.

Amanda Smith: Well now the joy that your team seemed to take in its own incompetence I think is reflected in the statistic that was the most carefully kept in the team score book. Tell me about that, Jim.

Jim Young: After every day in the field, discussion in the bar afterwards would revolve around dropped catches. Frequently, someone in the team would dispute the fact that they’d been guilty of such a sin, but once the accusation was made, it was always sustained. Sometimes it would come to a vote; whether or not an incident counted as a dropped catch, the vote was always carried and usually there was only one dissenting voice.

Amanda Smith: And what was the match record for dropped catches for your team.

Jim Young: We did have one day where we dropped 13.

Amanda Smith: And you also after each match, awarded a Useless Dive of the Day Award.

Jim Young: Well the club found that Patrick O’Connor was particularly fond of the Useless Dive of the Day. Pat comes from Halifax, and speaks with a broad Yorkshire accent, and he particularly liked to analyse the game in terms of ‘ilights and a fieldsman spreadeagled on the ground futilely clasping after the ball particularly amused Pat. He also liked to see batsmen stranded mid-pitch, threatening each other with their bats as the wicket went down, but the Useless Dive was one of his favourites.

Amanda Smith: So what kept the team together for so long? I think you played about 12 seasons?

Jim Young: Well in large part it was the amount of beer that was consumed, but there was a great deal of camaraderie in the team. I think everyone enjoyed more than anything else, watching these humiliations and despair of their colleagues.

Amanda Smith: Now that’s not camaraderie as most of us know it!

Jim Young: Well there are few things more enjoyable than being able to point out to a team-mate exactly the deficiencies in his technique that brought him to earth that particular Saturday.

Amanda Smith: Jim Young, whose account of his years playing park cricket with The Naughton’s Old Boys, a kind of everyman team of no-hopers, is further detailed in his book, ‘Any Old Eleven’.

Now, another long-standing Australian sports institution is that of the Mid-week Ladies’ Tennis Competition. Sandy Jeffs has been playing in the Mid-Week Ladies’ for 20 years, and she’s just published a collection of poems celebrating her years of playing sport badly, called ‘Confessions of a Mid-Week Lady’.

TENNIS COURTS

POEM

We have been through a lot, the team and I;

The husband's affair!

The bereft, stranded wife, playing her heart out

With the perennial tears streaming down her flushed cheeks.

The tennis-ball becomes an object of hate,

A victim of the revenge she wants to take on the unfaithful cad.

Wham! It is struck with venom.

‘This is John’s head’ resonates around the courts.

How she expels energy with that volley.

And we all know the settlement is not going well.

Sandy Jeffs: Well I play Section 9. Now there’s probably about 20 sections in the competition. So it’s middling, middling. We can hit a ball, but the thing is we’re really inconsistent. So we do a fabulous shot one moment, and of course the next three are out or they’re into the net, or they’re off the sideline. And of course if we could play our best game all the time we wouldn’t be Section 9 we’d be Section 1.

Amanda Smith: Is the standard of the competition in some ways irrelevant to the enjoyment of playing, perhaps even in inverse proportion to it?

Sandy Jeffs: Look it depends whether you’re competitive or not. There’s two sorts of women who play mid-week tennis: those who are really competitive and love to win and will win at all costs, like me; or those who are there just for the fun of hitting a tennis ball. So I get fussed over people who just laugh and hit and giggle, I’m shocking; I prefer to play a rugged game and I prefer to win, but many people don’t bother about winning, they don’t care. They’re there to have fun and I think they’re also there to get away from the husband, and I think they’re there to have peace from the kids as well.

Amanda Smith: Well then to what extent do mid-week ladies become each other’s confidants? Is the tennis a place where you talk through family or other problems?

Sandy Jeffs: Look, sometimes you have a really deep and meaningful discussion and I think I can recall over my 20 years of experience of tennis, probably about three or four conversations that I thought were really worthwhile. Now a lot of the time it’s superficial, I think, and like you’re not there to air dirty linen, people don’t air their abusive husband or their kids out of control, but you hear a lot about the kids at school, a lot about teachers and what’s happening at the school, and I find that endlessly fascinating because there’s a lot of teacher-bashing goes on sometimes. And I think that’s really interesting. But the conversation I think can vary, but if we’re going to give it a tag it would be more superficial than anything else, because you’re there for fun.

Amanda Smith: Now a constant name that crops up in your poem, Sandy, in ‘Confessions of a Mid-Week Lady’ is that of Sara Lee, who is not a player of course, but a brand of cakes. Tell me about the importance of the food and the lunch after play.

Sandy Jeffs: Look, the food is the highlight of the day as far as I’m concerned. If they don’t win, they like to at least sit down to a good lunch. So the food is the highlight of the day and a lot of women, and I haven’t done it myself but I’ve seen it happen, get into competitive cooking.

Amanda Smith: Well I was going to ask you is the standard of who provides what to the luncheon is as competitive as the morning’s tennis has been.

Sandy Jeffs: Look, it can be, it can be terribly competitive, and of course I don’t cook at home, I’m not a cook. So I really have this terrible thing where I’ve had to rely on Sara Lee, or I have had to have help in making the food, and of course in the book Sara Lee is a bit of fun, it’s fun having Sara Lee as the theme going through it, but I’ve eaten many a Sara Lee at tennis, and I’ve taken many a Sara Lee to tennis.

Amanda Smith: Confessions of a mid-week lady; and Sandy Jeffs, whose book of poems under that title elaborates the rituals of the Wednesday morning tennis she's been playing for twenty years.

Now, have you ever thought about taking up a whole new sport, one you've never ever tried before? Or, going back to a sport that you left years and years ago? What about if it's one as technically difficult as figure skating? At the Macquarie Ice Rink, in Sydney, Judy Bosler is coaching a group of adults, most of whom had barely put blade to ice before before they started with her.

Judy Bosler: OK, heads up, butts in, come on I want the butts in. Come on, lovely, lovely heads, face the other way just up for me now, and down you go again; as low as you can get. I want pain, come on! There's smiles there, I need pain, come on! Good girls. OK, up you come. All right. No I want you to do that across the ice, yes, keeping the heads up and smiling please. Off you go. Would you lead off please Sue? Off you go, please.

Amanda Smith: Judy Bosler is the President of the Australian Professional Skaters’ Association. She’s been an ice-skater for over 50 years, and she’s coached many Australian championship skaters. These days, her main role in the sport is training other coaches. But Judy also coaches this one special group of beginners every Tuesday morning, a group she’s nicknamed after a brand of shampoo.

Judy Bosler: My nickname for them is the Pantenes. The story is, it won’t happen overnight, but it will happen. That’s why they got called that. They really love that name. It was a funny story, we had one gentleman in the group who was totally bald, and he never understood why we had this name for them. And one of the girls had to take him aside and just explain to him, and then he was quite happy about it.

MUSIC

Judy Bosler: Just try it, three-turn there, good girl, cross in front, you had a good three-cross in front, cross in front again. Now you’re ready on the other foot.

Pat Glenn: My daughter used to skate, and I thought it looked wonderful, so when I retired and was looking for something to do, I started playing golf, and it rained every Wednesday and I wasn’t enjoying it much, so I thought I’ll do something indoor; I’ll try skating. And one lot of skating and I was hooked for life. (laughs)

Amanda Smith: And had you done any ice-skating before?

Pat Glenn: I’d skated just once as a child, on holiday when it rained. And once when I went to Canada, I staggered around, but that’s all.

Amanda Smith: So how difficult have you found learning to skate as an older adult?

Pat Glenn: Well it is difficult, it is a bit daunting, but the sense of achievement that you get when you can actually do something, is just wonderful. It’s all beautiful movement, there’s nothing sort of upsetting or hard on the joints or anything like that, it’s all nice and smooth.

Amanda Smith: When you see young children who’ve obviously had lessons, skating around this rink, does it make you feel a bit frustrated and wish you’d taken up ice-skating when you were a child, or when you were younger?

Pat Glenn: Yes, I wish very much. I’m madly jealous, and wish I had taken it up many years ago. Yes, I would love to have done that.

Amanda Smith: Still working at catching up.

Pat Glenn: Well that’s right, yes, because it’s so tremendously enjoyable; I get a buzz out of doing this, that I really thought that I wouldn’t get at this time of life. To get this sort of degree of enjoyment and excitement, and a kick out of it. You kind of think that when you’re older you just sit down and let the world go by, but no, you don’t. (laughs)

Amanda Smith: Well what level of skill do you hope to achieve with the ice-skating? Do you have any idea or goals about what you want to be able to do?

Pat Glenn: I just want to be able to do a beautiful three-turn and finish it off beautifully with my leg extended behind and my toe pointed.

Amanda Smith: That’s Pat Glenn, one of this group who’ve taken to ice-skating later in life.

Unlike Pat, Ann Lane did have lessons as a child; she even skated in an ice follies show when she was in her 20s. But Ann hadn’t skated for more than 40 years when she got back on the ice with the Pantenes.

Ann Lane: Yes, I’ve been coming along now for quite a few years, because I started skating again in my 60s, having left it for many, many years.

Amanda Smith: So what brought you back to ice-skating when you were in your 60s?

Ann Lane: I was widowed actually in my 60s, and a neighbour of mine said to me one day, ‘I’ve started ice-skating’, and she was a beginner. I said, ‘Oh, I’d love to do that again’. So I came along with her, put on some skates and hopped on the ice and off I went.

Amanda Smith: Do you find yourself coming back to it at an older age, fearful at all of falling, anything like that?

Ann Lane: Yes, I didn’t like falling at all. And that does happen, and it really is concentration. The minute you stop concentrating exactly on what you’re doing, you can just sit down, or people can bump into you and you just trip. Fortunately I have strong bones, so I haven’t had any disasters, but I certainly don’t like falling on the ice, it’s not nice. And I think if I did have a very bad fall, I think I probably wouldn’t continue.

MUSIC

Judy Bosler: Two Swedish threes with cross; mohawk. You do two Swedish threes first, then two mohawks. So you’ve got the Swedish threes, cross in front, twice …

Amanda Smith: In the past, coach Judy Bosler has trained many promising young competition ice-skaters. But Judy says that she has to take a quite different approach to teaching these older skaters.

Judy Bosler: Most of them are quite worried about falling over. Consequently if they do fall they tend to tense, which is not good, because once you’re tense, you have rather nasty falls. So I usually suggest to them that they put cushions all down on their floor at home, their lounge-room floor, and just flop everywhere. So I mean learning to fall is part of learning the art of skating.

Amanda Smith: So practice falling?

Judy Bosler: Absolutely, yes. We often at the beginning, the first lesson you have is learning to fall.

Amanda Smith: And other differences or approaches that you need to take? Are they quicker or slower on the uptake for example?

Judy Bosler: They probably take a little bit longer getting to where they need to go, but they are so much more dedicated and so much more ready to attempt the technical side of it, and I find that they work together, and they know my method of teaching and where I want them to go, so they get together as a group later on and they sort of pick each other to pieces, and they help each other, which is fabulous.

Amanda Smith: How much improvement have you seen in this group?

Judy Bosler: Terrific. I’ve seen an enormous improvement. I mean when I first started working with them, they didn’t know the feel of an edge, and that’s what skating’s about, an edge, is skating.

Amanda Smith: You have to describe that to me, what’s the feel of an edge?

Judy Bosler: Umm. The feel of an edge, it’s where your body is defying gravity. With an edge, you should be on an angle, your whole body, not just part of it, not like skiing. When you ski, your bottom half of your body is laying into the mountain, the top half is counterbalancing you. In skating, when you take an edge, the entire body is laying at the same angle as the edge. So in some respects, it’s quite death-defying, and to have a really beautiful edge, to feel the edge cutting the ice, gripping the ice and holding you secure, and just taking you through with the wind in your face, and all that sort of thing, it’s just lovely. It’s one of those things that gets you hooked.

Amanda Smith: Well what standard can you expect this group to reach? Are they going to feel that?

Judy Bosler: Eventually, eventually. Maybe some of them will. Some of them maybe not, but a lot of them have improved that much that they really are starting to feel it now, and there’s a special sound with an edge that you can hear. You can hear the cut of the blade through the ice, it’s lovely, I mean it’s very special, a really good sound. Yep.

MUSIC

Judy Bosler: Let your free leg relax on you a bit more. You’re getting it so caught up behind you that you’re tying yourself up in knots. So when you do it, let your free leg extend a little bit as you’re doing the turn, and then you’ve got freedom to let the leg come forward to do the cross in front. Whereas if it’s tucked right in behind you, you’re stuck. So just give yourself a bit more freedom in it. It’s not a dance movement. It’s a freeskating movement, so let it roll.

MUSIC

Amanda Smith: Coach, Judy Bosler, and her group of mature-age ice-skaters, the Pantenes, at the Macquarie Ice Rink, in Sydney.

Now to a 17 year-old schoolboy, whose outlook on life has also changed remarkably, since pure chance led him to take up the sport of weight-lifting. Jonathon Derrick has always been much bigger and heavier than his peers - the kind of kid who was always bumping into things, and the butt of many a joke. But since he's discovered weight-lifting, life has changed for Jonathon Derrick. It all started, quite by accident, two years ago.

Jonathan Derrick: I was at school and it was the Schoolboys Championships where the schools can compete, and I was in the crowd, I skipped maths to go see it, and this guy came up to me and said ‘Do you want to lift? Because one of our lifters is out’, and I go, ‘Yes, no problem.’ And he set me up in a woman’s suit and it was like right up my crutch, and I was wearing boxers and you had to take your boxers off, so, but it was good fun, and he said, ‘I want to see you down here’, and I’ve been doing it ever since, so it was really good.

Amanda Smith: How did you go that first time?

Jonathan Derrick: Well I came last, but it was just to get some points on the board.

Amanda Smith: Well you compete in the 105 plus kilo weight class, which is I think the heaviest division there is in weightlifting. How much do you weigh and how tall are you?

Jonathan Derrick: I weight 140 kilograms and I’m about 194 centimetres tall.

Amanda Smith: Right, so that’s in the language about 6 foot 3 and about 22 stone.

Jonathan Derrick: About that, yes.

Amanda Smith: Have you always been the kind of kid who, because you are physically different from the average, got teased for it by others?

Jonathan Derrick: Yes, quite a bit actually. So since prep I was teased and still am to this day, not as much as I was but it’s still going on, which is pretty sad.

Amanda Smith: Did you care about it? And do you still care about that?

Jonathan Derrick: I did used to care about it, but not any more because I’ve come so far in this sport and it’s really helped me, so I don’t really care what people think.

Amanda Smith: Martin Leach is Australia’s Olympic Weightlifting coach. He thinks Jonathan Derrick has the potential and ability to go a long way in the sport.

Martin Leach: Every few years an athlete appears out of nowhere, and they display a certain characteristic which shows that they’ve got some potential that is beyond what you normally see in boys and girls when they come into a sport like weightlifting, and Jono’s displayed that. He has always find life not particularly easy because of his size, he was a very big boy at school and picked on a little bit because of that, and he’s come into a sport where size doesn’t really matter because we cater for people of all different sizes, and he’s found acceptance and something where he can excel, and his enthusiasm has grown as a result of that.

Amanda Smith: What did you think the first time you met him, Martin? Did you immediately see the potential or did it take a little time to emerge?

Martin Leach: Whenever you see anyone coming to the gym for the first time you try and assess them, and after 25 years in a sport you get pretty good at picking whether somebody’s got something special or if they’re just going to be a battler. I guess pretty much straight away Jono came across as somebody who had the potential to be something special, but I’ve seen many athletes or boys and girls come in who have that and the difference between having that potential and actually achieving your potential involves the desire to be able to work and Jono’s displayed that he’s got that desire and that ability to work hard.

Amanda Smith: Well in weightlifting, what is that potential to be special though, aside from the hard work that obviously is required once you’ve been identified as having some talent. What is that raw talent that’s required in a weightlifter?

Martin Leach: Well physiologically you need to be flexible and you need to be fast, and obviously, lifting weights, you need to be strong. The strength factor can actually be built, people can get stronger by lifting weights. The flexibility can also be improved, but the natural ability to be fast is something that you’re born with, you’re either fast or you’re a slow person, and Jono has that speed and obviously he’s going to get stronger as he grows, and he’s just a bit of a puppy at the moment, but as he gets older he will get stronger and he’s very supple, he’s got good flexibility. So he has the innate skills that are necessary in a physiological sense.

Psychologically, you need to be something a little bit special as well, because it’s no good having one side of an athletic ability without having the other side of athletic ability, and that is really being intelligent about your sport and being brave and being able to perform under pressure. And John, even at this very early age, has shown that he has the ability to perform under pressure, he’s a better competitor than he is a trainer, he trains very hard but his best results always come out on competition day.

Amanda Smith: Well Gay Derrick, you’re Jono’s mum; what difference has finding something that your son is good at, and where his out of the ordinary height and weight is an advantage, made to Jono?

Gay Derrick: It has made … I cannot believe … it has made so much difference, it really has. He’s always been over-sized. He wasn’t a big baby, but he was as big as the primary school teachers when he was in primary school, and just so enormous really. But once he got into weightlifting he was with people his own size, and he wasn’t the odd bod out. It’s just made the world of difference, his whole temperament. He’s always been a happy-go-lucky sort of guy, but really he was picked on, early on, and I don’t want keep going on about that, but he’s got a lot of self-esteem now where he had no self-esteem and I just think it’s made the whole world of difference to him, it’s just wonderful.

Amanda Smith: Well how has life changed for your family, having a weightlifter amongst you now?

Gay Derrick: Well I’m not working as much as I did before because I’m basically in the kitchen. I’m either at the market, at the supermarket, in the kitchen. Now Jonathan’s been put onto a fabulous nutritionist, Terry Martinez, and at first it was very hard, you know, the porridge and all that sort of thing, well, and we can’t quite come at the porridge. But it’s an amazing amount of food that he does eat. But he’s having eight pieces of fruit a day; before he wouldn’t even look at the fruit bowl and he’s just keen to do the right thing. I couldn’t tell you, it takes me hours a day just thinking about food and this is for the rest of the family too. They’ve got to eat what he eats, so we’re all going to be unbelievably healthy. But I enjoy every bit of it, and I’m just happy to help him out, because really it’s hard for them to do it by themselves, they’ve got to have some family involvement and the cheer squad behind, and the chief cook and bottlewasher, and we’re lucky that I can stay at home and help him to do that, because really it’s a full-time job.

Amanda Smith: While Jonathan Derrick’s got a very supportive family, there’s one thing that’s hindered his progress to date in weightlifting: his size 17 feet.

Jonathan Derrick: Yes that is very correct.

Amanda Smith: Because you can’t get weightlifting shoes big enough to fit you, is that right?

Jonathan Derrick: Yes, we’ve actually found someone who could make them for us, so I’ll be getting them pretty soon, so that’s very good for me.

Amanda Smith: Well Ian Thorpe, who also has very big feet, doesn’t have to find special shoes to do what he does in the swimming pool, so what’s special about weightlifting shoes?

Jonathan Derrick: Well the weightlifting shoe is to support your foot. You can’t have a soft sole because you need to use a wooden sole to get the full power of your legs, because if you don’t have that your feet will just sink and you wouldn’t be able to lift properly, and that’s why I’m not going up much from what I am doing. So as soon as I get them I’ll be going much better than I am now.

Amanda Smith: What sorts of weights are you lifting now in the snatch and the clean and jerk?

Jonathan Derrick: My best snatch is 110 kilograms and my best clean and jerk is 135. So that qualified me for these nationals.

Amanda Smith: And what does that need to build up, say over the next three or four years, if you’re to compete in the next Olympic Games say, and/or be internationally competitive?

Jonathan Derrick: Well it would be a big challenge because I would have to do a total of 365 which would be a 160 snatch and a 210 clean and jerk. So that’s quite a bit of travelling to do. Hopefully I’ll get there.

Amanda Smith: You reckon that’s do-able?

Jonathan Derrick: Yes I do, and my coach does too, so hopefully we do get there.

Amanda Smith: A young bloke who's found his place in the world - Jonathon Derrick. And I was also speaking there with Jono's mum, Gay, and the Australian weight-lifting coach, Martin Leach.

And that's the Sports Factor Summer for now. Michael Shirrefs is the Producer, I'm Amanda Smith. Thanks for your company, and a happy Christmas to you.

Guests on this program:

Jim Young
Former park cricketer and author of 'Any Old Eleven'.

Sandy Jeffs
Recreational tennis player and author of a collection of poems entitled 'Confessions Of A Mid-Week Lady'.

Judy Bosler
Skating coach and President of the Australian Professional Skaters Association.

Pat Glenn
Member of the Pantenes figure skating group.

Ann Lane
Member of the Pantenes figure skating group.

Jonathon 'Jono' Derrick
Competitor in the Super-Heavyweight division of the Australian National Weightlifting Championships.

Gay Derrick
Jono Derrick's mother.