Round and round in circles?

Olivia Podmore’s family want to know how Cycling NZ – already under scrutiny for its culture – appears to have got it so wrong with her. reports.

livia Podmore’s family know they may never get all the answers they need.

They accept it’s unlikely they will ever truly come to understand the complex set of circumstances that led to the Rio Olympian’s suspected suicide last month – a tragedy her mother Nienke Podmore says she never saw coming.

For Podmore’s mother and her partner Chris Middleton, the questions will forever linger.

But they hope that, in multiple inquiries launched in the six weeks since Podmore’s death, sports leaders can at least find answers to the searching questions the tragic event has posed of the country’s high-performance sport system.

The big question currently being asked is ‘‘How did we end up back here?’’

The release of QC Mike Heron’s 2018 review into Cycling NZ was supposed to mark a line in the sand for the sport. Heron’s investigation into allegations of bullying, intimidation, a drinking culture and an inappropriate coach-athlete relationship culminated in an 83-page report full of deeply troubling insights into the sport’s elite programme.

Heron, a former solicitorgeneral, also identified several areas in which the sport’s government funder, High Performance Sport NZ, failed to provide appropriate oversight. He recommended an overhaul to its risk escalation systems and processes.

In the wake of the findings, sports leaders promised action.

‘‘There was a hell of a lot of noise around the 2018 Cycling NZ report, they said all these great things that they were doing, how they would all learn from this. Well, clearly they didn’t, otherwise we wouldn’t be back here,’’ says Middleton.

On Tuesday, grim-faced officials from Cycling NZ and Sport NZ fronted media to announce the details of a fresh inquiry into the beleaguered sport.

The latest review, which will once again be led by Heron, alongside co-chair professor Sarah Leberman, will examine the adequacy of steps taken after the 2018 investigation.

The inquiry will address areas of welfare for those involved with the programme; support offered to athletes with an emphasis on career progression including induction, selection criteria and exit from the programme; the impact of High Performance Sport NZ funding in cycling; and whether having a centralised training hub in Cambridge is beneficial.

It is understood High Performance Sport NZ will also conduct a separate, internal investigation into its medical support for athletes.

Nienke Podmore says it is her hope that greater accountability will flow from the latest inquiries.

She says it is ‘‘disgusting’’ that former Cycling NZ chief executive Andrew Matheson, who was found to have demonstrated ‘‘sub-optimal leadership’’ and failed to recognise and protect Podmore from the ongoing risk of bullying identified in Heron’s initial investigation, has since been appointed to High Performance Sport NZ’s senior leadership team, after resigning from his earlier post in late 2018.

Matheson was appointed as acting general manager of strategy implementation at High Performance Sport NZ in July this year after being employed as a contractor for several months before. He worked out of the same Cambridge building where Podmore trained every day.

‘‘These environments need real accountability, not just for the athletes,’’ says Middleton. ‘‘All the people in the programme need to be accountable.

‘‘I know medals are the obvious measure, but there are a lot of other measures of an effective coach or an effective programme. There are an awful lot of kids who have pulled out of the programme totally broken. So that alone should suggest to the managers, to the board, that it is not a healthy environment.

‘‘The power imbalances need to be a lot more carefully managed, and people need to be employed a lot more carefully. When you are managing young people, you need a lot more credentials than having won a few medals in your own event 20 years ago. Are we really employing the right people for these roles?’’

The day after Podmore’s death last month, Sport NZ chief executive Raelene Castle defended the appointment of Matheson, who she says works in a strategy role with no direct oversight of athletes.

‘‘Andrew will hold his hand up and say there were some things he could have done better. He is now working in an implementation role around strategy,’’ Castle said. ‘‘He has very good project management

skills and that is the focus he is bringing to his role.’’

ienke Podmore says her pleas for greater accountability should not be interpreted as a ‘‘revenge mission’’. ‘‘We can’t bring Livi back, but we need to make it better for everyone else.

‘‘Our every thought guiding this is ‘What would Livi want?’ And she would want to make sure no-one goes through what she went through.’’

In the weeks since Podmore’s

death, several troubling details of her time in Cycling NZ’s elite squad have emerged, including revelations – confirmed by her mother – that the 24-year-old’s treatment in the programme was a key focus of Heron’s 2018 investigation.

Heron found Podmore was pressured ‘‘to give a false account’’ in 2016 to protect a coach alleged to have been intimately involved with another teammate.

Podmore was also caught up in a selection controversy for the Tokyo Olympics. The youngster, who

competed at Rio de Janeiro in 2016, was devastated by her omission from the team for the Tokyo Games, which she believed was a political, rather than a performance, decision.

Podmore, a powerful sprinter, had considered contesting her nonselection, her mother says, but she believed it would only hinder her future opportunities in the sport.

‘‘Livi did not want to risk her job. There’s no other employer for her if you want to represent New Zealand, and she more than anything wanted to succeed. So

every time she got smacked around, she arrived back at ‘it’s not worth making waves’ basically, or risking her future selection.

‘‘Unfortunately she is a lot like me, she will just box on, and we keep telling ourselves that you will get through, there’s always something better around the corner.

‘‘That is how I rolled as a person and that is what I instilled into her. And now, looking back, you wonder if that is actually a downfall.’’

Nienke Podmore says that,

before her daughter’s death, she had seemed positive about her future. She had made headway with Cycling NZ officials, who had allowed her to have her former junior coach, Hamish Ferguson, manage her programme.

Acknowledging the tragic backdrop which led to the latest inquiry, Cycling NZ chairman Phil Holden promised on Tuesday to ‘‘leave no stone unturned’’.

‘‘As a board and organisation, we are 100 per cent committed to following through this inquiry and whatever comes out of it. Integrity is one of our values and I think that you should take comfort from that,’’ he said.

To many athletes, this one already feels different. The level of engagement from Sport NZ with the athletes and staff at Cycling NZ in designing the terms of reference has led to a sense of hope that this time they will be heard.

Castle said her organisation had learned from previous reviews that athletes needed to be given the opportunity to engage in various ways, and be assured they can ‘‘step in and up into a process in a safe way’’.

But other athletes have questioned whether returning to Heron was the right move. There was some disappointment from the cyclists that his 2018 investigation did not find a widespread culture of bullying within Cycling NZ’s elite programmes.

For those who took part in the original review, the investigation appeared primarily focused on establishing whether the allegations that appeared in the media were accurate. Two cyclists have told Stuff that they raised further complaints during the investigation, but these did not appear to have been dealt with in Heron’s report.

It is also believed that Cycling NZ was in mediation with another athlete in 2018 at the time of Heron’s investigation. Emails seen by Stuff indicate the board and senior executives of High Performance Sport NZ were also told of allegations about the athlete’s treatment.

The treatment of women athletes in the programme is also a key concern expressed by several cyclists and staff interviewed, and some feel these issues were not given enough weight in Heron’s final report.

However, not all of Heron’s findings were made public. Under the section ‘‘referrals which may give rise to further action’’, he wrote that there were some issues raised during the investigation that he would deal with separately and confidentially.

Both Castle and Holden have backed the appointment of Heron, who would bring ‘‘huge gravitas’’ to the role.

‘‘I think having Michael back in the mix absolutely ensures that we’re capturing what has happened in the past, and applying it as we need to in this inquiry, supported by some fairly strong and skilled people around him,’’ said Holden, referring to the panel of Leberman, former Silver Ferns skipper Dr Lesley Nicol, and former elite rower Genevieve Macky.

There is another tragic, but salient, point left unspoken: Heron is the only investigator to have interviewed Olivia Podmore.

In reality, Cycling NZ’s troubled history goes back a lot further than the period from mid-2016 that Heron was tasked with examining.

The current investigation will be the third into the sport in the space of eight years, after a 2013 review led by Nick Hill of management consultancy MartinJenkins, and the first Heron review.

Over that same time period, Cycling NZ has reaped $39.3 million in government funding for its highperformance programmes. It has received millions more from Sport NZ to assist with governance and operational support. But the sport has remained trapped in a seemingly endless spin cycle of crisis, review, reset, repeat.

It is for this reason that sport leaders believe the latest inquiry must put the focus just as squarely on High Performance Sport NZ’s engagement with Cycling NZ, as it does the sport’s own leadership.

The MartinJenkins review focused on the governance and organisational structure of Cycling NZ (then Bike NZ) after the sport teetered on the ‘‘brink of insolvency’’.

Conducted in an era before ‘‘athlete wellbeing’’ had entered the high-performance sporting lexicon, the review noted the board and executive’s poor oversight of the high-performance programme.

‘‘Sport NZ is the most significant funder of Bike NZ and faces a number of exposures. This leads to a range of relationships, interactions and interventions that in practice blur accountabilities and responsibilities between organisations,’’ the report said.

The report recommended Sport NZ ‘‘clarify its prime role with Bike NZ as funder’’ and consider a more ‘‘effective monitoring regime’’.

‘‘Ultimately,’’ says Middleton, ‘‘the gatekeeper of all of this is High Performance Sport NZ, but who is holding the gatekeepers to account?

‘‘This is not just about Livi. It’s about the next lot of kids that come through that programme, it’s the friends of Livi’s who have been churned and burned by the system. We’ve seen now where that can lead, and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’’