This Tour de France champion swears by Zone 2 training, but making it work for the Average Joe is not so simple

This Tour de France champion swears by Zone 2 training, but making it work for the Average Joe is not so simple

Post By World abc sport, cycling, exercise, heart rate, Sport, UTS, Zone 4

If you’re a cycling nerd like me, or perhaps into running or other endurance sports, you’ve probably come across the concept of Zone 2 training.

The idea has exploded in the past couple of years, with countless YouTube videos and articles written about the benefits of low-intensity training.

Put simply, Zone 2 is the metabolic state where you burn the most fat to power your exercise. It’s also a zone where it’s easy enough to exercise for a long time without blowing up.

The Zone 2 idea is that low-intensity training should make up the bulk of your training volume and by doing this you’ll increase your overall cardiovascular fitness without having to smash yourself.

It’s in direct contrast to the concept of high-intensity training and interval training, which were all the rage for a time, particularly for time-poor people. The idea being that short, sharp, high-intensity sessions could make up your entire fitness regime.

One of the biggest proponents of Zone 2 is Inigo San Millan, a professor in Colorado University’s Department of Family Medicine, who specialises in physiology, metabolism, mitochondria and cancer research.

Dr San Millan is the director of performance with UAE Team Emirates, the cycling team of two-time Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar.

Dr San Millan says Pogačar will spend about 80 per cent of training at Zone 2 and he says that should be the same for all of us.

What exactly is Zone 2, how does it work, and just how easy is it?

In order to answer that question I subjected myself to an experiment.

My guide is Antony Stadnyk, a lecturer at the School of Sport, Exercise, and Rehabilitation at the University of Technology Sydney, and a former physiologist with the New South Wales Institute of Sport’s cycling program.

David Mark on a stationary bike, completing Zone 2 testing at the University of Technology Sydney.(Supplied)

“So this is what we for a long time have called the aerobic endurance training zone,” Dr Stadnyk says.

“It’s got this fancy new name, Zone 2, but it’s basically the top end of the low-intensity training zone.

“So it should feel easy, you should be able to have a conversation, but towards the top end, that’s when you’ll start to lose that ability and need to talk in shorter sentences or a couple of sentences before taking a breath of air.

“Zone 2 and our base conditioning, the aerobic base conditioning, is really the foundation of all our training.”

Dr Stadnyk and I are talking after he’s performed a series of tests on me to determine my metabolic thresholds and VO2 Max.

We did the tests in October last year.

My experiment is to commit to an extended block of training – the bulk of it in Zone 2 – to see if I get fitter and build my endurance.

I need a goal, so I’ve committed to riding in the Snowy Classic – a Gran Fondo in the Snowy Mountains in March.

There’s a 170-kilometre version, which I think is going to be a stretch too far for me – this year at least – so I’m doing the 107km loop from Jindabyne, which takes in around 1,500 metres of climbing.

Back to the tests — I’m at UTS with my bike on a stationary trainer wearing a heart rate monitor.

Dr Stadnyk’s strapped a mask over my head to capture the amount of oxygen I’m breathing in and carbon dioxide I’m exhaling.

After a warm-up, he asks me to ride for three minutes at a particular power output – which is measured in watts.

Dr Stadnyk is capturing all my data in real-time and has made a small pin-prick in my ear to collect a blood sample to measure my lactate levels as I go.

Then I’m off and pedalling. Dr Stadnyk starts me off at a leisurely 80 watts and then every three minutes he asks me to increase my wattage by 20. Each time I go up in power, he takes a blood sample to measure my lactate.

It’s pretty easy at first of course, but after 24 minutes I’m at 220 watts and my heart’s beating at 153 beats per minute (bpm) – about 91 per cent of my maximum heart rate.

I could go for a bit longer, but Dr Stadnyk now has enough information to determine my various metabolic zones.

And for the data nerds out there, this is what a moderately fit and slightly overweight 56-year-old is pumping out.

Time (minutes)	Power (watts)	Heart rate (bpm)	Lactate (millimole/litre)
3	80	102	0.5
6	100	107	0.6
9	121	112	1.0
12	140	120	1.0
15	162	130	1.5
18	180	139	2.4
21	199	147	4.0
24	221	153	5.8
Two-minute max effort	322 (265)	169	9.9

After I take a breather, I warm up again for an all-out three-minute effort, which Dr Stadnyk is going to use to determine my VO2 peak and maximum heart rate.

At least it was meant to be a three-minute effort, but I made the mistake of going out far too hard and then had to hold on for dear life, while Dr Stadnyk quickly recalibrated it to a two-minute effort.

I’ve recorded an average wattage of 322 but he warned I should be cautious about the wattage because it was only a two-minute effort – which meant it was mainly anaerobic. He estimated that I would have averaged around 265 watts if I continued for another minute. Next time around I’ll go for a more paced three-minute effort and expect a lower mark.

But at least now he has the numbers. My VO2 peak was 45.6 and my maximum heart rate was 169bpm. I’m hoping that at the end of my training block, the VO2 peak, at least, will be higher.

Dr Stadnyk determined that my Zone 2 is somewhere between 115-130bpm or between 130-160 watts.

Ideally, we’d be using power as a metric during my rides, but I don’t have a power meter on my bike, so I’m going on heart rate alone.

He came to those numbers by looking at both my lactate and ventilatory responses. You can see that above 120bpm and 140 watts, my lactate levels jumped from one millimole per litre (mM) to 1.5mM. There’s another big jump after 130bpm and 162 watts to 2.4mM.

ABC journalist David Mark's data from Zone 2 testing — ABC journalist David Mark’s data from Zone 2 testing.(Supplied)

This graph shows that while my heart rate steadily increased in a straight line with my wattage output, the amount of lactate I was producing increased slowly and then started shooting up at that 162 watts mark – an indicator that I’m starting to burn more carbohydrate and less fat.

So, what exactly are we talking about with all this lactate, heart rate and zone stuff?

Remember that during Zone 2 we’re in the metabolic state where we are burning the most fat to fuel our oxygen.

“So, what we have is free fatty acids floating around the body, in the blood,” Dr Stadnyk says.

Those fatty acids are converted by the mitochondria in our cells into Adenosine triphosphate or ATP.

“ATP is what our body uses to produce the actual muscle contractions and physiological processes that we need to sustain life,” Dr Stadnyk says.

Now, at Zone 2 and below, our exercise intensity is such that the mitochondria can keep pace with our energy demands – burning fat consistently to keep powering our exercise.

Dr Stadnyk explains that when we consistently exercise in Zone 2, over time we get an increase in the number of mitochondria, which means our bodies become more efficient and have a greater capacity to oxidise fat for fuel.

We’ve been talking a bit about mitochondria, so Dr Stadnyk is taking us back to school:

“Probably back in high school, you’ve heard of mitochondria referred to as the powerhouse of the cell — that is absolutely true,” he says.

“So the greater density and number of mitochondria that we have, the sort of fitter and healthier the system is.”

Dr Antony Stadnyk from the University of Technology Sydney, going through Zone 2 testing.(Supplied)

So to summarise: As we train more in Zone 2, we produce more mitochondria, which means we have a greater ability to metabolise fats.

As we become more oxidatively powerful, our bodies can use fat for longer and put off using carbohydrates as a fuel source, saving those stores for when we really need it during high-intensity efforts.

So in theory, the lactate curve in the graph above should shift to the right as I become fitter, but that can only last so long once we start to increase the exercise intensity Dr Stadnyk explains:

“While fats are really energy dense, they can’t be oxidised at a rate that is fast enough to maintain that exercise,” he says.

“The top end of Zone 2 is what we call the first metabolic threshold — you might hear that referred to as lactate threshold one, or the ventilatory threshold one.

“And that represents the point where we start to have an increase in energy being provided by carbohydrates, which provide less energy [per unit], but can be oxidised at a faster rate.

“And so with that, we start to get an increased production of lactate.”

Zone 3 is what Dr Stadnyk calls a tempo zone – we’re starting to work a bit harder, and often you’ll find yourself drifting into this zone during bunch rides.

“And then above that, we go into our threshold zone – Zone 4 and that crosses the second metabolic threshold,” he says.

“And what that second metabolic threshold represents is where we are going predominantly into anaerobic metabolism, so we’re not supplying enough oxygen to continue to fuel exercise.”

You can see from my data that this happened to me at 200 watts where my lactate jumped from 2.4mM to 4mM.

Zone 4 is what’s sometimes called threshold – it’s hard work.

If you’ve ever tried to run a personal best at Parkrun, you would have been running at your threshold – although you would find yourself in the zones 5 and 6 as you pushed towards the end.

Zone 4 is when you’re on the red-line, staying just short of the level of exertion where you would burn out in just a few minutes if you upped the intensity.

How long can you stay at the threshold? Again, it depends on training – for me it might be 30 minutes, but an elite cyclist or runner could go for much longer.

Dr Antony Stadnyk from the University of Technology Sydney, going through Zone 2 testing with ABC journalist David Mark.(Supplied)

Above this we’re in the sprint zones, Dr Stadnyk says, where “ATP and phosphocreatine stores will exhaust in 10 to 30 seconds”.

Dr Stadnyk uses a six-zone model. Others might use seven, whereas your smart watch, for example, might have five.

OK, that’s the science behind Zone 2, now to put it into practice.

Dr Stadnyk hasn’t given me a training plan, rather he says my Zone 2 training should make up about 70 to 80 per cent of my total training time.

As for the remaining 20 to 30 per cent of my training time – he says I should do some work in the higher zones.

“A little bit in that Zone 3 and 4 area and then a smaller amount in that Zone 5 or 6 — if you want to put in a couple of extra sprint efforts that can be beneficial for the anaerobic power — you’re going to get all of your zones ticked off,” he says.

“A little bit of training variation is always useful, but also you’re going to be stressing your body a little bit different and getting that anaerobic stress as well.

“So, the ability to actually use glycogen, and carbohydrates well, can be affected by that.”

ABC National Sport Reporter David Mark riding in the Snow Challenege, climbing Beloka.(Supplied)

OK, that’s the plan – let’s say three sessions of riding per week at Zone 2 and one session at a higher intensity or maybe some intervals at Zone 4.

One thing to note about Zone 2: It’s easy, but it’s not just a gentle ride down to the shops.

When you’re in Zone 2 you are definitely working up a sweat and pushing yourself.

It’s often said that a good way to determine your Zone 2 is if you can have a conversation, but it’s kind of laboured. You might need to stop in the middle of a sentence to take a breath.

So, off I go: Riding, riding, riding.

And then somewhere along the way, the real world kicked in.

As much as I tried to do that volume of riding, I also wanted to maintain other forms of exercise, like social football once a week and a couple of trips to the gym.

Christmas might have got in the way as well.

Come February, I’ve been probably averaging about three sessions a week on the bike.

I try to make most of them Zone 2 sessions, but the reality is it’s very hard in the real world to maintain a steady heart rate.

When you go uphill your heart rate might go higher, downhill it goes slower, and when you stop at a traffic light, you have time to recover even more.

So my Zone 2 riding is really an average. I do my best to stay at a consistent heart rate, but there are necessarily natural variations.

I also do my one session a week at a higher level or do some intervals at the end of a Zone 2 ride.

Over the months I gradually increase my kilometres per week. I’ve joined a cycling group and go out with them once or twice a week and do a long ride each weekend and throw in some hill sessions in preparation for the Snowy Classic.

I feel I’m getting fitter, but exactly how much is hard to tell because it’s all based on feel and I’m not measuring myself against a given known – like how long it takes me to ride a 40km route.

I’m just going out and riding at a consistent heart rate.

That said, I find I’m able to ride for longer at my Zone 2 level and find it fairly comfortable.

As the Snowy Classic gets closer, I try to throw in more climbing training, so this is where I’m definitely jumping out of Zone 2 and getting into zones 4 and 5.

And I do a couple of 100km rides – just to know I can.

The Snowy Classic was tough. A 3km climb with gradients of up to 15 per cent at the 86km mark was a leg killer. A lot of people walked, but I managed to stay on the bike and hang on for the finish, in utter awe of the people who went on to ride the full 170km course, which included another 1,500 metres of climbing.

Since my first test about five months earlier, I’d done about 2,400 kilometres and spent about more than 100 hours in the saddle.

Despite the kilometres in my legs, I had some trepidation as I headed back to the UTS for my follow-up date with Dr Stadnyk and my second lot of testing.

It felt like a lot of riding but was it enough riding to see some improvement in my levels of fitness and my VO2 max?

The answer was not as clear-cut as I would have liked.

Disappointingly, and despite feeling strong on the day, the data showed my basic metabolic response hadn’t changed despite all the training.

There were differences however: my VO2 peak was higher – it went from 45.6 to 45.8 and my maximum heart rate increased from 169bpm to 170. At my age of 56, I’ll take any changes as a positive.

And there’s no question I felt much stronger in the second test. I was breathing through my nose throughout the test, which wasn’t the case back in October.

And unlike the first test when I didn’t even manage a three-minute effort because I went out too hard, this time I managed it perfectly and increased my power over the three minutes.

As Dr Stadnyk says afterwards: “We did see a change in how you completed the tests – you definitely looked a lot smoother … you looked more comfortable; your breathing was a lot more controlled.

“And what we saw from the VO2 data was that there was probably an increase in your efficiency on the bike. So you aren’t using as much energy in each pedal stroke or to produce each pedal stroke.

“One of the main changes at the higher end was that you weren’t producing lactate as much, or you were able to clear it more effectively and that’s obviously beneficial as well.”

So why didn’t we see the metabolic changes in my use of fat as an energy source?

One of the answers could be as simple as what I ate. In October I had some cereal three hours before the test, whereas in the second test I ate some muesli only 90 minutes before.

I also ate a lot of carbs the day before the second test.

So I might simply have had more carbohydrates floating around in my bloodstream.

This is borne out by the figures, which show my lactate levels were twice as high when I started my second test as they were in the first, and the amount of CO2 I was breathing out was also higher at the start of the test.

That might have reflected my diet or simply some natural variation.

But what we also saw was the lactate level was quite steady in my second test (despite the high levels at the beginning) until a big jump at 160 watts, which was 20 watts higher than in my first test.

In other words, it’s possible that there was a metabolic change, or maybe it has something to do with my physiology.

Perhaps what I’ve really identified is the problem of doing an experiment with a sample size of one, as opposed to a much larger number doing the same tests.

Clearly I should have been more careful about ensuring the conditions were the same for the two tests.

And the other possible variation was the intensity of my riding over the three months. Going on heart rate alone isn’t ideal, because it can vary according to heat, hydration and other factors, whereas power tends to be a more reliable measure.

We simply don’t have enough data to come to a definitive conclusion about the benefits of Zone 2, but what I have determined is the five months of Zone 2 riding have left me feeling a lot stronger and a lot fitter – even if that’s not obvious in the numbers.

As Dr Stadnyk says: “We know the benefits of aerobic endurance training, we have decades of evidence to show that it works.

“Get out and do exercise really, every little bit counts. It’s definitely worthwhile spending a large volume of time at the lower intensity.”

But he also says there’s a benefit to doing a bit of work in all your power zones so you get the adaptations at both ends.

And that’s what I’m going to do. I’ll continue to do most of my riding at Zone 2 but be sure to put in some harder efforts on at least one day a week.

And above all, I’m going to keep riding.

Sports content to make you think… or allow you not to. A newsletter delivered each Saturday.

Posted 12 hours agoSat 27 Apr 2024 at 7:10pm, updated 5 hours agoSun 28 Apr 2024 at 1:27am

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#Tour #France #champion #swears #Zone #training #making #work #Average #Joe #simple

How rest and preparation dictate AFL performance

Post By World abc sport, afl, aussie rules, breaks, draw, Sport, turnaround

Sometimes truths in the sporting world are whispered quietly, and sometimes they are said aloud.

This week Craig McRae didn’t mince his words when on FoxFooty’s AFL360.

“There’s no way that you could look at the draw and say it’s fair anywhere. Everyone understands it. It’s just ‘which bit is yours (your advantage)’. That’s reality, isn’t it?”

For much of football’s long and storied history, the time of football was largely constant — Saturday afternoon.

The first midweek matches for premiership points happened in the league’s first season in 1897 on the date of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Public holidays were the main reasons for the early weekday games in the early decades.

This regular schedule made it easy to follow your team every week, aside from knowing what ground a game was being played at.

This significantly helped players in the semi-professional era when they still had day jobs.

After experimentation with midweek, and night-time football, media executives and the VFL started to experiment more with the fixturing of proper league games.

In 1980 regular standalone Sunday afternoon games were introduced via games held at the SCG. Playing in Sydney provided the VFL a convenient end-run around the VFA’s government-backed grip on Sunday fixturing.

Friday night footy, pioneered in 1983 by the Swans is now perhaps the most commercially coveted fixture available.

Friday was the last weekday to feature a league game, but has since become a core part of the footy week. By the late 1980s all teams were regularly playing footy on Fridays.

Thanks to roaming public holidays and invented occasions like Anzac Day Eve, no day of the week is fully off-limits.

In the 2024 AFL season football will be played on at least six of the seven days of the week across 21 different start times.

The introduction of all these time slots has introduced new considerations for footy staffers — condensed and elongated preparations. This season sees more short breaks than ever before. These include five and six-day turnarounds — think Sunday to Friday being two games in six days. They also include multiple six-day turnarounds and batches of condensed games.

This is how teams prepare for the short week, and the impact it has on your team’s chances.

The footballing week

To work out how a short week can affect the preparation of a team going into a game, a better idea of a normal footballing week is required.

Richard Little, a former Essendon staffer and current data intelligence manager at the Victorian Institute of Sport, is across how clubs usually prepare for a week of football.

“Depending on the club, a seven-day break schedule would potentially look something like this:”

“Some clubs flip the sessions three days prior to the game with the ones two days out.”

Little stresses that this is dependent on the game and training loads before that week and the week’s scheduled ahead.

“Because the fixture is known for the first 15 rounds, these loads will have been planned well in advance,” Little adds.

“The skill acquisition aspect of training is generally planned loosely with specific drills dropped into a template as needed. So, it might be that a three or four week block is focused on defence but other areas would still be included. This is dependant on the coaching philosophy but it could be that there’s more work done on maintaining strengths or fixing weaknesses.”

Earlier this season Collingwood struggled with their performance coming off consecutive six-day breaks.

“Well we started the season with six days (break), six days (break), six days (break). We didn’t realise parts of our game were so far off,” McRae explained.

“So when you actually get a deeper breath you get to work on those things. You get to train some habits and change those focus areas.”

This ability to adjust on the fly is key to football clubs being able to right the ship midway through the season. It’s often why teams struggle to adjust the game plans on a wholesale basis until the bye rounds.

Shorter time frames between the games also mean the ideal schedule is adjusted.

“A compressed schedule is going to mean lighter training loads overall as the games themselves will provide the majority of the physical load,” Little articulates.

“On a six-day break, one of the post sessions will likely be merged with another and the main session will have reduced load. On a five-day break, individual craft or recovery skills are likely dropped and the main session is drastically reduced. Sometimes that’s only a couple of drills in those situations.”

Surprisingly, shorter breaks on their own don’t have a direct impact on game results. Emerging football analyst Emlyn Breese of CreditToDuBois.com has researched how these short breaks have affected results in recent years.

“It’s hard to identify the performance impacts of a short break in isolation. The typical things you’d look at as indicators of effort and energy like tackles and pressure acts — teams aren’t performing noticeably below their season average off a short break,” Breese told ABC Sport this week.

Breese has analysed outcomes against predicted performance based on how strong a team is expected to perform. He has used the predicted match results as calculated by James Day, creator of the blog Plus Six One and co-creator of the football statistics package FitzRoy as a baseline.

“When a side has two days less rest than their opponent they are likely to perform just under a goal worse than expectation when they are the home team, and about half that when they are the away team. They’re not big numbers on the surface, but when you’re looking at hundreds or thousands of results it suggests there’s something there.”

There’s also more extreme breaks — often caused by byes. Usually they have minimal impacts, with one exception.

“Teams coming off a bye playing away against a home side without a bye have performed, on average, a goal below expectation. Coaches talk all the time about just how hard it is to win a game of footy — I think it’s an example of the cumulative effect of just one more thing that takes the team out of their normal routine.”

It must be wearing off

It’s not only one match of short turnarounds that matters. Often teams have several shorter breaks compounding on each other – especially when compared to their opponents.

In high-performance terms, this is the difference between the acute and the chronic.

“The acute to chronic ratio has been a consideration for a while. The actual ratio isn’t necessarily that important but the idea is that having a high acute load compared to the chronic load exposes the athlete to an increased risk of injury,” Little adds.

“Generally the acute period is seven days, while chronic can be 21, 28 or even 35 days. Players can be managed individually as well, so might come out of specific drills or sessions or have extra sessions prescribed,” Little explains.

“Some can’t tolerate two sessions in two days so they need to be programmed differently as well.”

When looking at performance and changes over longer periods, Breese notes that some of the same factors are present.

“The benefit of getting a couple of extra days rest continues on past the first game — including into four and five game runs. Extra days to rest, plan and recover tend to make a difference in the medium term,” Breese states.

Breese has also looked at the number of changes a side makes in these short turnarounds compared to normal games.

“On average there’s around two and a half selection changes per team from one round to the next. When you get to the extreme ends of a schedule — your third game in 11 days, your fourth in 17, your fifth in 23 — that jumps up to around four changes. It tails off back to the average pretty quickly though.”

This year’s favourite teams

These impacts of long and short breaks are felt differently across the league this season.

It’s the two South Australian teams facing the most short breaks in total. Essendon sees the least short turnarounds this year — a boost to their potential finals hopes.

While Adelaide cop a lot of short breaks, they’re rarely at a rest day disadvantage against opponents. This year, the short break straw for head-to-head breaks has gone to Hawthorn. Sydney has the most regular recovery edge at the other end of the equation.

Given that the last third of the fixture has yet to be set, it remains to be seen if the AFL will look to even out this aspect of the fixture.

One thing is clear though — the amount of compressed scheduling will likely increase in coming years.

The new Collective Bargaining Agreement allows for three five-day breaks per club per season — which would be a significant increase across the board from this year.

Fans and players alike will have to get even more used to the short break, and any impacts from it.

Sports content to make you think… or allow you not to. A newsletter delivered each Saturday.

Posted 4 hours agoWed 24 Apr 2024 at 10:08pm, updated 2 hours agoWed 24 Apr 2024 at 11:40pm

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#rest #preparation #dictate #AFL #performance

‘Their voices are too high pitched’: The backlash Tracey Holmes faced as the first woman to host ABC Grandstand

Post By World abc sport, australian sports commission award, grandstand, Sport, sport and politics, stan grant, the voice, tracey holmes, women in sport

Tracey Holmes might have been the first woman to host the iconic ABC radio sports program Grandstand but don’t call her a trailblazer.

“I’ve never thought of myself as that,” she says.

“My mum and dad were both pro surfers at the beginning of pro surfing and were exactly the same and I’ve never, ever liked that kind of distinguishing between one or the other, when it’s actually got nothing to do with gender, it’s a job and anyone should be able to do that job. It’s about the best person for the job.

“People talk now about ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’, and I don’t actually subscribe to that because I think you’ve got to look for where you can see yourself, even if there’s no one like you doing it.”

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Starting at the ABC in 1989, Holmes says she just modelled herself on the best in the business and, at the time, they were overwhelmingly men.

“Before me there was only men, all the national sports programs in Australia had only ever had men, and they were really good men doing that job. I learned a lot from them,” she says.

“I used to listen to them, and I’d look to men who were doing programs internationally and thought I’m going to be like that, or I don’t like that. It really should not matter what you are, male or female — and it does get on my goat that it does matter in some people’s eyes — you’re a human being. If you’re being discriminated against, fight that. But the whole thing about you can’t be what you can’t see, I think just look harder.”

Over 34 years since she started at the ABC, Holmes has become one of Australia’s most respected sport broadcasters and journalists and was recently awarded the Australian Sports Commission Lifetime Achievement Award.

Currently host of ABC Sport’s The Ticket podcast, a weekly in-depth analysis of the major issues in sports business, politics and governance, she also reports for ABC News and appears on News Breakfast.

Holmes has previously hosted programs and sporting coverages on commercial TV in Australia and internationally and covered 14 Olympic Games over the course of her career.

While she recalls encountering sexism when she started hosting Grandstand, Tracey Holmes says there were plenty of men who championed her.

“There was a lot of trouble that a lot of the men I worked with had to go through to enable me to host Grandstand,” she says.

“There was pushback, of course, all those usual things. Even though my voice was a regular voice on Grandstand, I hadn’t hosted, and people were saying no one can listen to a woman for that many hours a day, all the women do is laugh, their voices are too high pitched. But the men I worked with advocated on my behalf.

“John Parker, who was head of Sport when I started, was very supportive. Alan Marks, legendary rugby league commentator who organised ABC Radio’s coverage of the Olympic Games was amazing. Peter Longman, executive producer who ran Grandstand and was head of Sport for a period, put up with a lot over the years and was good at managing me and managing the program.”

In 1989, Holmes launched a radio segment called Women In Sport and has been recognised for her work over the years championing women’s sports and women covering sport.(ABC Archives)

While bristling at descriptions of her as a broadcasting pioneer, Holmes is proud of how transformative Grandstand was in the coverage of sport.

“I think we changed how sport was viewed,” she says.

“My passion has always been about this intersection of what sport tells us about our culture, politics, countries, not so much what’s played, who’s been injured, what the score is, it’s always been about that bigger picture.

“We started doing a lot more in-depth interviews with superstars from around the world, not just about their sport but as much about life and their lessons from it and now that kind of coverage is everywhere, which is fabulous.”

Chasing waves and confronting racism

Tracey Holmes had a somewhat nomadic childhood, growing up on Sydney’s northern beaches, then South Africa and Hawaii.

While her parents entered her in surfing contests, Holmes says she was never competitive and more interested in the stories of her opponents than winning a heat.(ABC Archives)

Her parents, as professional surfers, chased the best waves. It instilled in Holmes a love of exploring different cultures and exposed her to the inequality in the world.

She remembers her mother organising a surfing competition in South Africa during apartheid and the discrimination Hawaiian surfers visiting the country experienced.

“They were Hawaiian, so they weren’t white but were given honorary white visas,” she recalls.

“The reality was they couldn’t go into any place that was deemed for whites only — hotels, restaurants, cafes, even some beaches and they weren’t comfortable in the black areas either, because they weren’t Zulu.

“They were kind of stuck between surfing their heats, going back to their room and nothing in between. My mum noticed this and said, ‘well, that’s terrible, just come and stay at our place for the duration of your trip’.

“That started a journey for me of understanding how these clashes in culture and politics can happen and how you can actually play a role in overcoming those sorts of things.

“That led to us living in Hawaii because when the surfers went home, their parents wanted to repay this wonderful experience given to their sons, so we ended up living with them for a while. I’m still lucky enough to travel to different places, meet different people, tell their stories and how we’re all on this one planet together, despite our differences.”

Early on, Tracey Holmes was drawn to sport’s ability to bridge those cultural differences.

“I think what sport shows us is that we can coexist — we are different but it’s up to each of us to find a way to work together,” she says.

“So, when people talk about boycotting the Olympics or banning athletes from this country or that country, that’s not why or how the Olympics was set up.

“The Olympics was set up because people became aware that the world was fraught, there was tension so they created a place where soldiers would come and lay down their arms, put their differences aside, and would all agree to compete in a specific event, with the same rules and may the best person win.

“I think we can learn a lot from that, by not politicising it, not manipulating it. I often think if we didn’t have events like the World Cup football and the Olympic Games would the world be a better place?

“As far as I’ve been able to tell after all these years, I think the answer is no because sport is the one place where people can and do come together and we witness the beauty of it, the complication and difficulty of it.”

Should sporting organisations take a stand on the Voice?

Despite those lofty ideals, sport, in reality, is full of politics — for better or worse — and that has been a focus of Holmes’s journalism.

“I always think it’s really funny when people say to me, ‘I don’t really follow sport, I’m much more interested in politics’,” she says.

“And I say, ‘well, you’re really missing out because there’s more politics in sport than anywhere and the politics of any country inevitably overlaps with sport. Sport has never only been about what happens on the field or the court or the running track. There’s all this stuff that happens behind the scenes, so many strings being pulled, and it tells us a lot about the world.

“At the moment we are seeing the rise of athletes using their own voice to try and make the world a better place. Look at what happened recently at the BBC with Gary Lineker [former England footballer and leading TV host] making a statement criticising the UK’s refugee policy and being taken off air.

“It became a furore that made headlines around the world but 20 or 30 years ago a story like that was few and far between, an athlete making an impact beyond their playing days rarely happened, but now you can probably find a story like that every week around the world and that’s the biggest change I’ve seen over my career — you can’t separate sport from the rest of society.”

While she understands why individual athletes might take a stand on particular issues that prick their conscience, Holmes believes sporting organisations should stay out of politics.

Tracey Holmes with husband Stan Grant.(ABC TV: Tracey Spring)

As Australians prepare to vote on a referendum to install an Indigenous Voice in the constitution, Holmes, who is married to proud Wiradjuri man and prominent ABC journalist and Q&A host Stan Grant, says sports should be careful about expressing a view for or against.

“Obviously, we talk about the Voice in our house a lot and when we walk down the street people are constantly stopping my husband to ask him if they’re thinking along the right track, they want to know what is best for Indigenous people,” she says.

“My husband never tells them one way or the other but says ‘here are the pros and cons and it’s up to each individual to come to their own decision in their own mind on what is best’.

“And this idea that sport needs to buy into these things, stand up and support the Voice — I think sports need to be very, very careful about that because in sport, we have everybody. We have people who will agree with it and people who won’t agree with it.

“We have Indigenous people who agree and don’t agree with it, white people who agree and don’t agree with it and to say as an umbrella organisation we’re taking ‘this view’, well, what does that say to all your members who don’t have that view for many reasons, many valid reasons.

“I think that’s the difficulty and where sports can show leadership is by saying we are a diverse family, people come to us with all sorts of history and experiences and what we hope we can give them is that moment of inclusion of all of these diverse aspects and the space to be able to decide for themselves. Otherwise, sport becomes divided and sport is not supposed to be that.”

How women’s sport and women covering sport has changed

Growing up, Tracey Holmes played a lot of different sports — basketball, volleyball, athletics, surfing — but found herself more interested in conversation than competition.

“I was always surrounded by sport because I was always at a contest at the beach with my mum and dad, but my interest was less about the sport than the people, I love people,” she says.

“I never saw myself as a competitor — my sister got all the competitive genes and became a pro-surfer — but I’d be in school surfing contests and instead of rapidly trying to catch waves and beat my opponents, I’d be sitting out the back talking to them about their life story and letting them catch the waves. I’d come in, finishing last because I hadn’t caught any waves, but I knew everything about the people I was competing against in that heat. I just love storytelling.”

Holmes covering the World Cup in Qatar in 2022 for ABC Sport.(Supplied: Tracey Holmes)

She loves any kind of sport and has no favourite.

“That’s like asking me if I have a favourite kid,” she laughs.

“I can watch anything. When I was living in Beijing, I was lucky enough to cover the Asian Beach Games, which Australia traditionally did not participate in. There were all these sports that are mostly played in the subcontinent and they’re fantastic. I love the psychology of sport, so it doesn’t matter what it is. In any game of sport, I look at the people.”

Tracey Holmes studied public relations and while working as a publicist for the 1988 Bicentennial sporting events she started providing reports for media organisations that couldn’t get to all the events.

She filed to radio stations around the country, including the ABC which invited her to then apply for a specialist broadcast cadetship and her career was off and running.

In 1989, she started a weekly segment on the ABC called ‘Women in Sport’ and her efforts over the years in reporting on women’s sport and mentoring women sports journalists has been recognised by the International Olympic Committee with the Women and Sports Awards for Oceania.

“We are so much further ahead than when I started 30 years ago, a lot has changed but then a lot just stays the same,” she says.

“We hear a lot more about women’s sport and there are a lot more women covering it, but when the big decisions are made, they’re still overwhelmingly made by men.

“The majority of boards are overwhelmingly men, editors — the people who decide what the sports story of the day is going to be — are still overwhelmingly men. To be fair, there are lot of men who are forward-thinking in that regard, like Peter Longman 30 years ago who I mentioned earlier.

“If the Matildas are playing a World Cup game, for example, it should rank far more highly than a round three NRL or AFL clash but we still see so often that that round three domestic football clash will take priority over an international tournament with one of this country’s most highly regarded teams, so there are those sort of things that haven’t properly found their level. Change is happening but it happens slowly.”

Tracey Holmes nominates covering Olympic Games as career highlights but as someone who is intrigued by the personal story interviewing tennis champion Arthur Ashe, the first African American man to win the US Open, Australian Open and Wimbledon, is an experience that had a profound impact on her.

“Arthur Ashe was a tennis legend and a black man who played in the era when it was really only white people playing and what he put up with and what he achieved was phenomenal,” she says.

“In later years he had to go to hospital for an operation, required a blood transfusion and the blood he was given was infected with [HIV, which led to him developing AIDS], so his life was cut short.

“I spoke to him not long before he died and asked him about his phenomenal career and if he was angry about getting infected blood and his life being cut short. He said to me, ‘well no, because, if it wasn’t me it was going to be someone else, so why shouldn’t it be me? It’s the randomness of life’.

“It was just so powerful. When someone like him who had such an extraordinary life, been so significant, and he could pull back from it and see he was just a small part of this world and to have such grace through everything he confronted — those are the stories that amaze me. They are the type of amazing things that happen in sport that I think other sectors of society can really learn from.”

When the Australian Sports Commission got in touch about her Lifetime Achievement Award, Holmes was humbled but then wondered with amusement whether that meant she was old and her career was over.

In fact, she’s still a long way from the finish line.

“I consider it my ‘halfway there’ Lifetime Achievement Award because I’ve still got the second half to go,” she says.

“To be able to tell other people’s stories and for them to trust me enough to tell them and that people do listen to these stories, I hope that by the work I do, I can drive positive change and that gives me a lot of gratitude.”

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Tag: abc sport