KEY POINTS:
Mark Spooner's competitive nature was borne out of heaving desks. As you watch this 23-year-old strongman hoisting hunks of solid metal above his head in the basement of Auckland's Millennium Institute, you can picture him as a schoolboy, balancing a couple of office chairs on each hand as
he took them to load on a removal truck.
It was inevitable Spooner would grow up lifting heavy stuff. His father Graham, a former top cyclist, owned an office furniture company, and the youngster would spend school holidays helping out.
"It was always a competition to lift more chairs and help out older guys in their mid-20s lifting big desks. I was always quite competitive and wanting to do more and more," he says.
At 15, Spooner was squat, stocky and obviously strong, and his dad suggested he might be good at weightlifting. They knew Precious McKenzie - one of the legends of the sport - lived nearby so Graham Spooner rang the four-time Commonwealth Games gold medallist to see if he would help introduce his son to the sport. Under the master's tutelage, Spooner took to lifting weights like a natural, breaking records and fast-tracking into the New Zealand team.
Now he is Beijing-bound - but the path from office furniture to centrestage was not straightforward.
In the basement gym of the Millennium Institute, barely a shard of natural light squeezes through the small windows at the top of the yellow, concrete block walls. Steel beams brace the roof, chalk dust is smattered on the floor. The old radio blaring out music in the corner has to compete with the clanging of weights crashing to the floor. Think the Olympics are glamorous?
Each afternoon, Spooner drives here from Pakuranga to train. In the mornings, he works out at home in his parents' garage. Day after day, it's the same. This is the monotony of top-class sport.
But Spooner is there without question: "You've just got to remember you're doing it for a reason. This is what is going to get you to those goals."
One of those goals now lies in front of him. This month he will compete in the Olympic Games in weightlifting's 69kg division, a prospect he can hardly believe. "There have been a few stages where that dream has been coming close and you get a little bit teary-eyed." He will be joined there by teammate Richard Patterson, competing in the 85kg class.
Two years ago, after competing at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, Spooner almost gave up.
Down off the high of finishing sixth with a clutch of NZ records in the Commonwealth Games, and swamped by work, he stepped away from the sport for about two months.
His long-time coach, Richard Dryden, had shifted to Christchurch, so Spooner had started training with other coaches. But he found the new regimes did not work for him. He was also busy at work, finishing his boatbuilding apprenticeship, working up to 110 hours a week at the peak.
"I thought if I don't step back, think about weightlifting, I'm going to throw it away for good," says Spooner.
He turned to Dryden for advice. The relationship between coach and athlete can be tough. The coach has to know when to push and when to back off. Dryden had first met Spooner when he was a schoolboy lifter. Over the years they had built a relationship of complete trust. In competitions, some lifters will fret over the weights they should be attempting, disputing what their coaches advise. Not Spooner. He left everything to Dryden, accepting his judgment completely.
Now, as his sporting career hung in the balance, he needed that advice even more.
Dryden remembers their conversations: "Athletes of numerous sports and mostly individual sports go through some highs and lows. Frequently, following major competitions they've been training for, they can experience a dip in enthusiasm and they sit back and say 'where to now? I've expended so much time and energy' and there's a little bit of, 'What about me? Where is the rest of my life going?"'
Dryden says he simply laid out the possibilities and opportunities that lay in front of Spooner; ultimately it was up to him to decide whether to walk away or not. "My role was as a coach and friend. Weightlifting is a fairly low-profile sport. It's low in lots of ways - number of athletes, low on the radar of funding agencies. It's one of those traditional Olympic sports that it is very, very hard for athletes to stay with. [Mark] could be out there waterskiing or doing other things that he loves but we don't all get opportunities to represent our country and get to Commonwealth and Olympic games."
Spooner returned to the sport as enthusiastic as when Dryden first encountered him as a Pakuranga College student.
"My first impression was his keenness and excitement to be involved in the sport and his eagerness to do well," says Dryden.
"He didn't just want to come in and be another athlete, he wanted to go places. I've never ever had to ask him to go to the gym or wonder where he is. He knows what needs to be done and is very dedicated in terms of his rest and recovery. He doesn't necessarily go out and socialise. He has made a lot of sacrifices to ensure that he puts himself in the best possible place to achieve his goals."
He adjusted to the heavy training regime required, but has always found that he prefers to keep up work rather than train full-time. During the build-up to Beijing, he has cut back to Fridays only at Lloyd's boatyards, to save himself from the physically-intensive labour, and works from 11am to 3pm on Monday to Thursday for a boat designer. "It's good to have your weighlifting but you need something else to take your mind off it."
Other than that, he enjoys hanging out with friends on the weekend and boating, especially water-skiing.
Sometimes he thinks about what might have happened if he hadn't returned to the sport after his break.
"Yeah, I could have continued working and just turned into the average worker - you know, coming in and doing your 45 hours a week - forgotten about training, and gone out at night with my mates. It was just that goal that you have in the back of your mind ..."
* The Olympics, which begin next Friday, are the pinnacle of sporting excellence, but they are much more than that - behind each athlete is a tale of courage, determination and inspirational will-power. This is the final in our four-part series on members of the New Zealand team, all from different sports and backgrounds but each with something in common: to achieve their Olympic dream, they've had to overcome major obstacles.
