Alicia Hoskin: 'I absolutely love what I do and I love the girls.' Photo / Supplied
Angela Walker for LockerRoom
It’s a mild spring day, yet Alicia Hoskin sits with a blanket draped over her knees, wrapped in several layers.
“The lake was cold this morning,” she explains, having just arrived home from early morning training on Lake Pupuke. “It’s always a bit chilly when we train K4. There’s a lot more water splashing going on, so that, combined with the wind, means it takes time to defrost.”
There was nothing chilly about Hoskin’s wide grin, though, after spending time with her teammates who’ve become like family to her.
“I absolutely love what I do and I love the girls,” the 25-year-old kayaker says.
For Hoskin, team is everything. The special bond in the K4 team, she says, played a major role in how they overcame the dominance of Hungary and Germany to win Olympic gold in Paris last year.
Now, as the double gold medallist works towards the LA28 Games, she’s also sharing her teambuilding know-how at corporate speaking engagements, and looking out for the wider team of Kiwi athletes as well – in her role advocating for clean sport and responsible supplement use.
Sometimes she can be involved in all those things in the same 24 hours. The previous day began with a 5am knock on the door for a random out-of-competition drug test, before she headed to training and then spoke at a corporate conference.
It’s clear Hoskin thrives on her action-packed life. One of her highlights since returning from the Paris Olympics last year – where she won gold in the K2 500m and K4 500m – has been public speaking.
“I’ve always had a love of storytelling, and I know public speaking isn’t for everyone. But I love sharing the stories of what we learned on our Paris campaign about teamwork, mindsets, and performance,” says Hoskin, who isn’t fazed speaking at primary schools or big corporate conferences.
She finds it beneficial to step into other industries and environments, too.
“I’ve realised many people deal with different types of pressure and teams and high-performance environments, and so I can learn a lot from people I meet, as well as sharing it from a sporting context,” she says. “It gives me a different perspective on how to incorporate things into what we do.”
Hoskin believes deeply in the power of an authentic team bond and is convinced that gave the New Zealand K4 – with Dame Lisa Carrington, Olivia Brett and Tara Vaughan – a performance advantage.
“With the dominance of Germany and Hungary in the K4 at previous Olympics, we knew we couldn’t do it on pure physicality. Our success wasn’t just going to come from more hours in the gym or more laps around the lake. We knew we had to find something more in our team,” she says.
So every week, Hoskin and her K4 teammates dedicated hours to building their team culture off the water.
“A team bond doesn’t just happen by accident,” Hoskin says. “We put many hours into sharing vulnerably within the team, sharing our unique stories, the moments and people that had shaped us. Then we knuckled down on what our vision was as a team, our deeper purpose that we all connect to.
“The closer we got to the Olympics, the more we did because we knew that’s where our purpose, our enjoyment and also our performance was going to come from. In the K4, being in sync on the water comes from being in sync off the water.”
The deep ties they forged made victory all the sweeter, says Hoskin, one of only three Kiwi sportswomen to have won two Olympic gold medals at a single Games, alongside her K2 partner Carrington, and cyclist Ellesse Andrews.
“I remember standing on the podium in Paris when we won the K4 and holding the medal in my hand and thinking, ‘It’s just a piece of metal but it’s so significant because I got it with these girls.’ Having that team connection, being on this mission together, it just meant so much more.”
In the immediate aftermath of their win, the team had no option but to spend even more quality time together – this time in the drug-testing rooms.
“Straight after our event, we got drug tested, before we could even see our family and friends. So we initially celebrated our victory behind the scenes,” says Hoskin.
Having competed internationally for many years, Hoskin was no stranger to submitting to drug testing – both at major events and randomly throughout the year.
“It happens quite often at this level,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll go through a month where I get tested every second week, and then I might go through a patch of not getting tested for a couple of months.”
While she takes it all in her stride, and is grateful to see clean, fair sport upheld, she remembers being on a learning curve at the beginning of her high-performance journey.
“When I first heard about drug testing, I thought it was purely about catching the people taking performance-enhancing drugs. In my mind, it was a very intentional thing. But it’s not as simple as that. You can get caught out without intentionally cheating.
“It wasn’t until I learned about cross-contamination of products or things not being on the label that I realised there are risks. Even over-the-counter multivitamins can catch out athletes,” she explains.
Hoskin now shares the benefit of her experience with others – advocating responsible supplement use in a new educational video from the Sport Integrity Commission Te Kahu Raunui.
“It’s about making sure athletes are as informed as possible. The more we talk about it, the more athletes know what’s going on, and why it’s important. And they’re more likely to be glad when the drug tester turns up at 5am, knowing it’s for a really good purpose.”
Hoskin says she regularly takes protein and creatine supplements, and mitigates any risk by ensuring the products have been batch tested.
“I won’t go anywhere near something that is not batch tested and doesn’t have a specific batch number on it,” she explains. “It’s 100 per cent the athlete’s responsibility on the supplements they decide to take, so we must do our research and know what we’re putting into our body.
“When you’ve worked so hard – you’ve trained on the rainy days, the thundery days, you’ve had tough sessions, you’ve learned new skills – you’re not willing to put it all at risk just because you didn’t check your supplements.”
From advocacy work to public speaking, Hoskin values variety in her day-to-day life. And she takes a similar ethos into training especially at this stage of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic cycle.
“A four-year cycle is a really long time, so it needs to be sustainable,” she explains. “I find things I love to do. Maybe it’s paddling on the ocean as well as the lake or going for a bike ride with my fiancé [Elliot Snedden] – finding little pockets of pure enjoyment to ensure I have longevity in the sport.”
Characteristically, one of Hoskin’s key priorities at training right now is teambuilding.
“We are building towards Los Angeles 2028,” she says. “We want our pinnacle performance to happen there. So everything we do leading into LA is with that in mind. But at this stage we’re building the team, strengthening the team.”
With an eye to the past and the future, Hoskin says they’re continuing to “build the mana of the black boat”.
“We’re the caretakers of our seat,” she explains. “It’s not my seat in the boat. I’m currently sitting in the seat, but I want someone else to sit in that seat after me. It speaks to the girls before us, building that performance so we could do it in Paris, and it also speaks to the girls who’ll sit in it after us.”
When Carrington won her first Olympic gold medal in 2012, Hoskin was just 12, and slept in the lounge with her sister so they could get up in the middle of the night to cheer her on. Now it’s her turn to help ignite the dreams of the next generation – a responsibility she doesn’t take lightly.
“Little girls out there were braiding their hair with us,” she says. “So it’s about building something that’s bigger than just the four of us.”
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.