Calder at large: Big fella walks away from a golden career

By Peter Calder

The big hands, dusted with powder to improve the grip, close around the bar. The knuckles are marbled with old scars, the legacy of many scrapes in an accident-prone childhood.

The big man pauses, bending his 140kg frame over a bar loaded evenly with round weights adding up to 200kg - the equivalent of five washing machines, say, or the 500cc jetski he likes to ride at weekends.

The manoeuvre by which he will hoist this unholy burden above his head is evocatively named the clean and jerk. With one grunting heave, he will set the bar flying upwards towards his chin.

As it ascends, for an instant appearing to defy gravity, the man will drop into a crouch, his elbows will swoop forward and his forearms, thick as a baby's torso, will stand to attention. The hands will snap back to delicately balance the monstrous load. He is half way through the lift. Or should be.

But today, something dreadful is happening. As his elbows swoop, the right one brushes heavily against the bulging thigh. It's scarcely a touch, really, but it's enough to upset the crucial symmetry of the movement.

The hand, bent back at a right angle, reaches the horizontal late and out of kilter with the rhythm of the lift. Balance dissolves. The crushing weight comes down on the hand, wrenching away from the bone a ligament in the arm of 24-year-old Darren John Liddel.

"I felt a snap and I thought I'd broken my wrist," Liddel remembers. "But they x-rayed it and didn't find anything. I had an operation and they couldn't really reattach the bit that was busted so they just cleaned it up to stop any bits catching and it slowly came right."

On that May day in 1995, when he injured himself in training, the name Darren Liddel may not have been one to conjure with. But it would become so.

For a magic moment in September 1998, in the Mines Weightlifting Centre in the clammy heat of Kuala Lumpur, Liddel held aloft a 203kg bar to take the Commonwealth Games gold medal for the clean and jerk. His 165kg snatch - another aptly named movement in which the weight is hoisted above the head in a single movement - had given him another. He earned a third gold because his combined total was the overall highest. Those medals, earned before a vocal crowd including his parents, doubled the New Zealand tally of the Games' most coveted prize.

In succeeding months he came 9th in the world championships in Finland, increasing his total lift. Yet all of it was done with the wrist ravaged by the 1995 accident.

A second operation and injections of the potent anti-inflammatory cortisone would see him through those 3 1/2 years. But this week it all caught up with him. The weightlifter announced what he had spent a year coming to terms with: he was retiring.

Liddel's rise and fall are overlapping episodes of the same story, one in which his success sowed the seeds of his destruction. More than any other sport, weightlifting makes superhuman demands on superhuman figures (Liddel competes in the super-heavyweight class, which starts at 105kg and has included competitors of almost 180kg).

From the day when, as a 75kg third-former at Rutherford High School, he first grasped a weightlifting bar, he was working towards tasks most of us find unimaginable, hoisting the weight of three beefy men to an arms' length.

As each peak was achieved, another loomed. When, almost a year before the Games victory, he had lifted 205.5kg in the clean and jerk, breaking Don Oliver's 29-year-old record, his coach, Doug McConnell, had predicted there was better to come. Darren had it in mind to be the first New Zealander to lift 400kg total.

"I would have done it, too," he said on Thursday, sitting in his new home in Glendene, Waitakere City. "But that all depended on being injury-free and that's just not what happened."

Liddel is more philosophical than might be expected. He knows that if the end was sketched in '95, it was etched in hard outline within weeks of the Kuala Lumpur games.

"The whole year of '98, I pushed my body beyond the limits," he said. "Out of 12 months, I competed seven times, when you should compete three, maybe four. In retrospect I think I probably blew myself apart mentally and physically."

What followed was a journey through hell. A year ago this month, his father succumbed to gall bladder cancer ("It's meant to be one of the rarest you can get," he says, underlying the bitter injustice of it). Barely five months later - he can remember the day: it was his mother Wendy's birthday, August 26 - McConnell, his longtime coach, was felled by cancer too, diagnosed only a month before it took him.

Liddel's eyes cloud when he thinks of the man who had steered his career since he left school.

"He was the one who got me there. He'd make you feel so guilty that it actually made you train. He was sort of like a second father."

Wendy Liddel, Darren's number one fan, the woman who always called him "the little fella," acknowledges she's probably sadder than he is about the end of a shining career.

"But I'm disappointed for him. I know how much he wanted to do 400 [kg total] for Doug and his Dad."

Perhaps unconsciously, she chooses a piercingly apt metaphor when she says the decision has been "a huge weight off his shoulders."

"It's been very hard for him. It's time for him to get a life."

Those who were there the day Darren Liddel won three gold medals remember what happened next. Long after most of the crowds had left, dozens of Malaysians, moved by the medallist's delight, were begging to have their pictures taken with him.

Though dazed by his success and doubtless tired, the genial giant obliged for around 20 minutes. By the time fans half his size had had enough, the hall was deserted.

He did it though he probably didn't want to. In the weeks after his return, school kids turned up at his house asking to see him.

"It was a real buzz," he says, "but there were days when I just wanted to be quiet."

He'll have plenty of quiet now. Sport has a way of forgetting yesterday's heroes. Liddel says he's not sad about the end, just frustrated about what might have been. And he's had a year to adjust.

"I think," he says simply, "I've had my 15 minutes of fame."