The death of 24-year-old cyclist Olivia Podmore the day after the Tokyo Games shocked the nation. Over the four months since her death, reporter Tom Dillane has spoken to family, friends and numerous sources inside and out of Cycling NZ. Podmore's own life was both exceptional and ordinary. An outstanding athlete, she also faced many of the trials of an ordinary teenager and young adult. Flirtation with drugs, abortion, and the battles to rise to the top of her sporting field. The crushing disappointment often part of that ambition and a string of personal misfortunes all silently converged to a tragic end.
She was full of playful jokes to the end. They never let her down.
Fresh off an exuberant, boozy weekend in Queenstown, a running gag from the night before was tauntingly picked up again with her housemate and friend.
"Hey sugar daddy thanks for a great weekend. I'll send you some foot pics later," the text read on Sunday, August 8.
Andrew McLean smiled at the message in his phone now separated by 1000km in his Cambridge residence.
He had caught a flight home early, grappling with a hangover felt among all their ski group.
The text sender, Olivia Podmore, was somewhere in the South Island in transit, flying from Queenstown to Christchurch airport, where she would briefly unite with her mother before also returning to Cambridge, where she flatted in McLean's house.
"We went out on the Saturday night and, I mean, I look a decent 39 and she looks beautiful," McLean says.
"So we're out at this bar just her and I and there's random dudes, and they said 'oh, what's your deal?' and I said 'oh, I'm her sugar daddy' and they said 'oh how does that work' and I said 'oh well she sends me foot pics and I give her money, take her out for dinner, she's come down here learning to snowboard'.
"Liv was playing along with it, we're toying with these guys, we've got them on the line."
The one true part of their story was that Podmore was learning to snowboard with a small posse of friends rounded out by two-time Olympic gold medallist Eric Murray and his partner, Thea.
The days leading up to their night on the town had been spent on the slopes of Coronet Peak, with a novice Podmore already traversing the top mountain runs after a single lesson on the Friday morning.
Pleas from the more experienced group of skiers to stand up straighter as the Olympic athlete descended were blissfully ignored.
"We had this great afternoon on the mountain. She learned how to snowboard. She was nailing it, she was having a great time. As we used to joke about, she's 'living her best life'," McLean says.
Down in the cafe, McLean ran into an old Christchurch friend with his wife, who were charmed by Podmore's attention to their 5-year-old daughter, Florence, while the rest of them chatted.
"Just asking questions that you ask a 5-year-old: 'What school do you go to? Who's your teacher? How old are you? Blah blah blah.' All those sort of questions she was super engaged with her. She wasn't off … withdrawn."
But what Murray remembers of that more sombre Sunday alongside the 24-year-old Podmore on the same flights out of Queenstown was in retrospect, a bit erratic.
"Just her mood in the last [days]. Like even when we were down in Queenstown," Murray says.
"I thought she was just hungover from our big night we had on Saturday night. But of course she was real quiet and she was real happy and then real quiet and then real happy. So it was just up and down a lot. And it wasn't until obviously after, my partner said 'man she was real up and down on that Sunday'. Of course, at the time we're all just having a great time, we're not really analysing everyone's behaviour. It's not until you get back and you see, [she's] just sitting there not really chatting much. Maybe it was like the decision-making going on in her head. So yeah, it's just one of these things you look back on and you do the old hmm … "
That Sunday also marked the end of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
Sprint cyclist Podmore had trained for four years but failed to qualify. Less than 24 hours later, she was found dead in the renovated sleep-out garage of McLean's Cambridge home.
In a post on Instagram she described "Andy" McLean as a lifeline of friendship and support that allowed her to get through an extra year.
But the 400-word message also revealed the pain and anger she only publicly opened up to the world 10 minutes before she left it.
The angst in the words was so palpable it sent local friends rushing to her address on the outskirts of Cambridge.
McLean pauses, then repeats a version of the mantra about suicide that there are often no easy single explanations.
Mental health experts stress the reasons are varied and complex. Podmore's life was in many ways a messy accumulation of personal burdens she hid with her ambition and verve.
"You know a lot of people said to me 'what a nice thing that she said she lasted a year -that's basically down to you," McLean says.
"And I mean, yeah … it means nothing now because she's not still around. So I just sort of look at it and think it's an absolute mystery and always will be."
Two months on, McLean can still not make sense of Podmore's final days he had such proximity to. He is at least resigned to the lack of warning signs.
But he keeps revisiting that cheeky final text message from Podmore as an encapsulation of his confusion.
"I'm just thinking f***ing hell, the coroner is going to be looking at that and just think 'what was their relationship?'" McLean says with a sigh of sad, exasperated black humour.
"But you know what I mean, you don't send that f***ing text message and 24 hours later you're not even on earth. That's not normal."
The golden child
Nienke Podmore says her daughter always had an advantage at competitions in her junior years cycling in Christchurch because she didn't take it all that seriously.
She didn't over-train and, perhaps as a consequence, she didn't get nervous on race day. The start-line adrenaline was all part of the fun.
Her beginnings on a bike at about 13 years old were disproportionately divided between "a little bit of track racing and literally just riding out to Sumner for an icecream and back".
"I used to help with a bit of coaching of school kids. Most other kids would be flustered and petrified before the race. She was just never, it just didn't faze her," Nienke Podmore says.
"What was unusual about her was she just didn't have to do a whole lot of training to do well, whereas a lot of other kids their parents had them out doing all these miles. I felt that is why she did well was a) she had natural ability but b) she just wasn't worn out at the race. She turned up and she'd be ready to race.
"Whereas most kids she'd see them at the start line and it actually looked like they had to be tucked in bed. She was always just grinning away and having a ball."
Podmore's relaxed attitude may have been propped up by a natural ability for powerful athletic feats. Both parents, Nienke and Phil, were keen cyclists and there was an elite sporting family pedigree too.
Her great-grandfather, Cornelis Gerardus Tabak, was an Olympic weightlifter for Holland in the 1928 Amsterdam Games.
From Nienke's perspective, her daughter had a typical enough teenage social life that balanced out an undeniable ambition emerging gradually from underneath all the smiles.
"From the age of 13, she wrote a list of her goals in life and that was absolutely in there to be the world champion, the best in the world at sprinting," Nienke says.
"A lot of other kids who did it, they seemed to dump their social life and focus on the sport, which I think is no good. So I guess from a mother's point of view, I always tried to make sure there was a bit of balance. But yeah, she had a boyfriend for the first couple of years but she was always just really social and it all just fitted in so there was a good mix, and always a wide network of lovely friends always coming and going."
But the frivolous teenage fun nevertheless was quickly consumed by Podmore's easy talent for cycling - winning most junior national events for her age.
One fellow student from Middleton Grange Christian school in Christchurch where Podmore attended described the cyclist's status there as "literally, the star of the school … very much the golden child".
With a wide friendship group across her school year, Podmore was often drawn away from socialising by her training and international competition.
Her success was relayed back to the school body in newsletter updates on the Middleton Grange website with proud headlines like "Cycling on Gold" and tallies of her medal collections at international tournaments.
Phrases such as "Olivia's form is tracking well" would litter such posts with an obvious and mildly overbearing investment in her success.
It was not necessarily wanted attention for the popular but laidback teen who had to deal with a degree of innuendo in her final school years, triggered by a silent ordeal few knew about.
At age 16 she had an abortion.
It was a decision she seemingly confided in depth to no one. And possibly no one at all before the event itself.
"I didn't know she'd had it done until the day she'd had it done, and as a mother obviously huge empathy for her having to go through that, and that she didn't tell me," Nienke said.
"But I really supported her, and said to her I would do the same thing. I don't think that screwed her up."
One of Podmore's best friends from Middleton Grange right from year 9, Ruby-Rose Shingleton, said it was hard to gauge the toll the abortion took.
She was understandably guarded about it amid the conservative Christian school environment.
"She definitely kept it as a secret," Shingleton says.
"She did mention it to me but it was very lightly mentioned, because I guess we were young and at a Christian school abortion's not really accepted or whatnot and I think that was a huge thing as well. I think she got bullied as well by people in the church and the school who did know as well. I think she wasn't very accepted so that would have been just as traumatising."
It was a decision that, in her head, she came back to look on with a greater lament in later years.
But for the moment, there was the fuel of the cycling to perhaps keep such reflection at bay.
'Morning to dark on that bike'
After finishing school at 17, Podmore went straight to train at High Performance Sport NZ's centre in Cambridge, 25km southeast of Hamilton.
Knowing no one other than the acquaintances of rival teenage cyclists from around the country whom she'd run into at national track meets over the years, Podmore struck lucky with her new residence in the North Island.
A woman now known by all as her North Island mum, Raywin Pierce, had offered to be a home-stay for young girls who had relocated to train at Cycling NZ's High Performance Cambridge base.
"She was just turning 17 I think. I put my name down at velodrome, because I used to do Cambridge high school and I thought I would change to velodrome and have some girls because I've got a lovely home and two bedrooms downstairs."
"She [Podmore] saw her bedroom and she was over the moon. I can see her. She came in and checked the room and I said think about it, and get back to me in a couple of days. You may want to look somewhere else."
Podmore moved in the next day.
A widow, Pierce's own three older children had moved out and from 2014 onwards her home was filled with Cycling NZ athletes Podmore, Emily Shearman and Brea Roderick.
"Honestly they all got on so well. They cooked. When they baked every saucepan came out of that damn cupboard, but they cleaned up, they had the music pumping, always the music, they loved music, they sang."
"She [Podmore] chilled out. She was very much into beauty and hair. She was into beautiful clothes. Go to the Mount, swimming, come back home again. She had lots of visitors. She was just a normal teenager. She had nothing bad or stressed about her. She was totally gorgeous.
Pierce describes the town of Cambridge as "broken" by the memory of Podmore over the past three months.
"It's tough. Nobody around here can believe it. She [Podmore] had her red car out there and everybody knew it was her. It ran on no oil. It ran fast like her cycling.
"It's in my head every day. I still call her bedroom 'Liv's bedroom'. You can never shake that out of your head. She broke my heart. She was my third daughter. I was her North Island mum. I was here for her 24/7.
"My three kids just idolise her and it's really broken them. So she was very much part of our family functions, every time we went out to family functions she was there. She brought glory to our home. I can't fault her in any way."
Pierce says amid a constant stream of socialising - be it at cafes, restaurants of visitors at her home - the teenage Podmore from 17 to 19 was above all preoccupied with her cycling.
"She was always out there, up and gone, morning to dark on that bike. If not, she was in the shed pumping music on that cycle thing [exercise bike].
"Cycling on that thing for hours. She just went on it hard-out. An unbelievable spirit. She was just so happy. Her focus was that bike."
Podmore's stay at Pierce's Cambridge home lasted four and a half years and it is separated by the defining midpoint of the Rio Olympics.
Even Pierce, who vowed not to comment on any negativity in Podmore's life, or the dramas of her cycling career, hinted at the contrast in the then 19-year-old when she returned home from the 2016 Games.
"I just want to remember how she was in my home. I don't want to think about when she got home from Rio, she was okay … I'm not saying too much. I just want to remember the beautiful times that we have had here, and other people can talk about the harder part of life out there.
"I wanted to stay on the positive because she's my daughter and everybody has crap in their life and I just think we focus on her happiness."
Crashing out of an Olympic dream
Podmore herself describes those first two years in Cambridge as characterised by a narrow and intense focus on cycling that came to a whirlwind climax at Rio.
In a May 2020 interview with one of her sponsors, sports brand Recovery Systems, Podmore describes the enthusiasm of her Olympic lead-up and the disappointment of the actual Games.
"I think when I was 16 I think that's when myself and [personal coach] Hamish Ferguson started to start thinking, let's go for the Olympics, two and a half years away. Let's give it a crack. We started writing a list, and if I can beat this person and do this time and get this result we can make it happen.
"By the time I'd turned 19, I think I got the news in July [2016] that I was going to the Olympics. That was really exciting. I was already overseas at that point on campaign with the team who knew they were going. So I was surrounded by like-minded people."
The 19-year-old was selected for the individual track sprint, the team sprint and the precarious keirin event, in which up to seven riders jostle behind a pace-setting electric bike before exploding to the finish line in the final two laps of eight.
With a modest grin on her face, Podmore sums up the entire Olympics competition: "It wasn't a great experience for me."
After a false start in the first team spring event by a whole second on her first day of racing - "which is a lot in track cycling", Podmore laughs - it quickly got worse.
"The next day was the keirin and round one it was just over a lap to go and we were really gearing up," Podmore says.
"I'd started coming round the bunch and there was a crash happening in front of me. The Russian rider went underneath me instead of going under to avoid the crash just freaked out and swung up and took me out. Instead of sliding down the track the way it angles, I flipped over and landed on my head.
"So I was knocked out. After watching the video, I think for about 45 seconds."
In the daze of her concussion, Podmore decided to ride the very next race minutes later to try to qualify for the second round of the event.
"I sort of stood back up and decided I was going to race the next repechage, which in hindsight … yeah hindsight's a great thing."
"It wasn't great and that was me for the keirin day done. The next day I had to get up and we had sprint day. I went out there and I think I did an 11.3 (sec). Nowadays I'm doing a 10.7 to put that in perspective. I didn't qualify. I think I came in 20th maybe, something like that, I can't even remember."
But hindsight also brings a bit of perspective - and leniency on oneself too.
"I was in a lot of pain and I didn't really want to be there but some of my coaches and the physios and the support staff were just so supportive and they helped me on my bike and I got out there so I was really proud of myself for that."
Almost four years on from it, Podmore was well aware it was more than just a little spill.
"After that came the delayed concussion, which was a lot," she says in her May 2020 interview.
"So I was vomiting for two days straight and felt terrible for about a good month to maybe … I honestly want to say I had symptoms for six months after that. I just wasn't myself. So, yeah, it was a pretty traumatic time looking back on the whole experience but it's made me who I am today."
Friends McLean and Murray have only looked back on that Rio crash with any suspicion since Podmore's death.
Straining their memory for moments of dejection amid the good-humour, half-formed theories arise. But this one's stuck for both of them.
It stemmed out of concerns Podmore repeatedly expressed over her inability to concentrate.
"She turned round to me one time and said 'look, I think I've got ADHD'," McLean says.
"I said 'what makes you think that', and she went through some symptoms. Dr Google, no good. But I said 'look Liv all these things could be the result of a long-term head injury'. She was out cold in Rio. It's a ripper of a crash.
"But she was on her bike the next day and like, that doesn't happen in rugby - for like the past 20 years, you can't do that. So part of it I think, could possibly have been a long-term head injury. She's like 'I'm not depressed but there's something not right, because I don't feel depressed'.
"I sort of think about, f***, was there something there? I don't think it was her only crash. She said 'oh that's not the only time I've been knocked out on my bike' and I thought 'wow'."
Murray is equally compelled by the silent erosion that Rio concussion may have had on Podmore's state of mind over the years.
"We never really even put two and two together," Murray says.
"Obviously, after a tragedy you're always searching for answers and the what ifs. She was seriously knocked out in Rio and then back to it like tomorrow. What does that do to a young brain and what does that do going forward? But she quite often would be like 'I'm just so dyslexic'. And we were like are you actually dyslexic? 'I don't think so, but I just sometimes confuse myself and I just say the wrong things, or I write the wrong thing down'. So maybe there was something there. Maybe there were long-term issues that we don't know about.
"We're never going to know, but it terms of the whole equation, this big jigsaw puzzle, that's another piece to actually seriously consider about the why?"
There is a growing body of research around repeated head injuries to athletes leading to a condition called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), and inconclusive theories it has a connection to athlete suicide.
Neurologist and expert in traumatic brain injury at the Auckland Medical Specialists clinic, Dr Kiri Brickell, says she does not think Podmore would have had CTE. But the further disruptive impact of that Rio concussion at a highly stressful period would have been real.
"No I would expect recovery [from Podmore's Rio concussion], but the psychological … It's the other factors which prolong concussion symptoms," Brickell says.
"It's the chronic pain, which can be transformed from an episodic headache to chronic daily headache by the use of drugs. It's the sleep disruption. It's the depression and anxiety that can develop. The cognitive effects of a concussion can reduce the resilience to be able to respond to the ongoing stresses in your life."
Brickell says predicting the severity of concussion needs to be viewed in the "holistic context" of that person's life circumstances.
The less likely they are to be resilient because of other stresses, the harder and longer a concussion could hit.
"I would say the impact that would have been significant would have been the disruption of her Olympic dreams," Brickell says.
"If she had a crash, that would have knocked her confidence for anything else and then you see how things just snowball.
"It's just an additive complexity in someone's already complicated life. Drugs don't help. Alcohol doesn't help. Not sleeping doesn't help. That whole competitive toxic relationship doesn't help. So it's really messy.
"It's not causative, it's accumulative. If you are on a knife-edge when you get the concussion, when you stumble, you fall off the cliff, then you do the circle of death - depression, not sleeping, chronic pain."
Brickell insists concussion is not simple "because people aren't simple".
It would be rare to find a more complex and compromised life than Podmore had in the years following Rio.
Aside from the monumental physical toll of the Games, what Podmore was never at liberty to say was that behind the scenes, the antics and dysfunction in Cycling NZ's camp weren't "a great experience" for her either.
'She thought she'd been kidnapped'
Even in the moment of her greatest cycling success, things quickly became overcast by politics.
Podmore was in Europe training alongside the already selected Cycling NZ 2016 Olympic squad when the hoped for, but also half-expected, news arrived.
She would be competing in Rio.
The validation of many teenage years of sacrifice, but little time in the moment to savour the realisation of a dream.
"That was really exciting for me to get the news overseas, but I also pining to be at home with my family to share that news," Podmore said in 2020.
"So I stayed overseas and we made it over to the Olympic village and it was very, very full-on as you can imagine. Just people everywhere and you've got to walk 2 kilometres for the food hall a few times a day. And then it came time for racing."
Not only was celebration for team selection quickly sidelined. It turned out that time and mental energy to focus on Podmore's actual performance would quickly be sapped too.
What she failed to mention in that briefly edited account of joining the Cycling NZ team was the infamous Bordeaux training camp in France six weeks out from the Games.
It contained an incident that would in many ways define the rest of her life, despite her not actually being directly involved in it.
A night out among the athletes and coaches left Podmore minus a room-mate in the early hours of the morning in the middle of a country she'd only recently arrived in.
The 19-year-old first time Olympian reported the missing athlete to Cycling NZ management that night which then exposed a relationship that was going on between the room-mate and coach Anthony Peden.
According to mother Nienke and her partner Chris Middleton who were being relayed the drama of the situation in snippets back in Christchurch, Podmore reported the incident out of innocent concern.
"She thought she'd been kidnapped," says Middleton.
Nienke says as far as she understood, her daughter was the first person who had officially raised the athlete/coach relationship to Cycling NZ management. "She was the first person alerted that this was going on, so she told one of the other coaches."
In real-time, mid-2016, Nienke Podmore and Middleton were just hoping the incident would be formally addressed by management and the team could focus on the Olympics.
"You kept hoping that the normal corporate-style response would deal with the situation. You didn't have any ability to affect anything," Middleton says.
"Because it was so close to the Olympics, you just had all your fingers crossed and hoped they would solve the issue. In retrospect, a girl's run off with a bloke, that's not the end of the world, it's not a first-class crime of any sort. So at that time you weren't really thinking Olivia was going to end up being the scapegoat. You kept assuming, they'll tidy this, this is minor, there are big people in charge who are trusted to be doing this stuff with kids, this should be easy. So you didn't worry too much."
However, as it became evident that Cycling NZ was allegedly pressuring Podmore to keep the relationship quiet, the roll-over impacts on unintentional whistle-blower Podmore became apparent.
"We were [now] worrying. It's a few weeks to the Olympics. This was a tough kid who didn't ring up moaning and crying. She was just like 'I'll keep my head down, I'll work hard, it'll get solved'. She unfortunately, was too strong for her own good. But we knew she was worrying. From the top it was an embarrassment, something they just wanted hushed up. It wasn't a solve, it was a hush."
Middleton says the impact of that event set Podmore's cycling career on a different course.
"That was the first point of any negativity that then changed the pattern of everything. When she was in France everything was good up to that point, 100 per cent happy, training, wanting to train harder, wanting to race, wanting to get stronger, not one complaint. Then, in France, it went bad and that was a while before the Olympics, six weeks and that totally screwed her up. Cycling was easy, that was no problem."
From reports of those close to Podmore, the next two years within Cycling NZ following the 2016 Rio Olympics and leading up to 2018 Heron investigation she was marginalised within the Cambridge training environment.
The 2018 Heron report found there was "favouritism from Peden to the athlete" with whom he was in an inappropriate relationship, who had also been seen "regularly at [Peden's] house from October 2017 onwards".
Some Cycling NZ athletes are also understood to have resented Podmore during those years for raising the inappropriate athlete relationship with Peden to Cycling NZ management.
The sporting organisation came under heavy media scrutiny from May 2018 onwards after the allegations of Peden's behaviour became public, and the independent Heron report was commissioned in response.
Nienke says her daughter was "big time" feeling antagonism from within the organisation for the storm some felt she had created.
Speculation from the public outside Cycling NZ that Podmore herself was the athlete in a relationship with Peden was also a burden she bore during that 2018 period.
"She got that and even I got that all the time from people. 'I don't want to ask, but is Olivia the one?' So, that alone was just awful," Nienke says.
This internal Cycling NZ pressure is also understood to have extended to the interview process for Podmore during the Heron report undertaken in mid-2018.
When the report itself landed in October 2018, it said the "allegations which emerged in the media recently are well-founded" - referencing a string of articles alleging toxic culture at Cycling NZ following the departure of Peden in May 2018.
Heron QC concluded there was a lack of accountability and leadership throughout the Cycling NZ operation and a reluctance to raise issues, including "instances of bullying".
It references that then Cycling NZ CEO Andrew Matheson was "made aware of the allegations that an athlete and a staff member were pressured not to tell the truth about it [the Peden relationship]".
It is understood Podmore was this athlete referenced - and there were claims she had been told by those within Cycling NZ management to not tell the truth about the coach/athlete relationship when it was exposed during the Bordeaux training camp.
A "formal investigation process" into this alleged pressure on Podmore to lie by Cycling NZ was not taken further because "no formal complaint was laid and the athlete did not want her identity revealed".