Jana Pittman does everything straight ahead. It was true for her hurdling and running career – she was twice world champion in the 400-metre hurdles – true for her new career as a bobsledder, and certainly true in the way she speaks. You are not left wondering what is in her mind, a trait that has often got her into trouble.
After all the negative press – more on that later – I ask Pittman whether there was a moment when she decided she didn’t care any more about what people thought. “I don’t think I’d say I never care, I’m too sensitive for that,” she says.
“A lot of public people get backlash and don’t care, but I wouldn’t want to change the way I am because I like my sensitivity. I’m going into medicine and that will be a good thing to show empathy.”
Empathy is something Pittman, 30, clearly has a lot of. Just an hour with her and you’re pretty confident she’ll be a great doctor. A career in athletics, where you’re meant to think only of yourself, is giving way to a career where it’s all about everyone else. That’s exactly how Pittman wants it.
We’re talking at the New South Wales Institute of Sport in Sydney, where Pittman is training every day for bobsledding at the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, in February. In an interesting U-turn, she’s switched from athletics to snow sports and will compete in the bobsledding with Astrid Radjenovic.
She chose bobsled after first considering boxing and rowing. “Mainly because it still has a running component,” she says. “I love to run. I wouldn’t have done it for 20 years if I didn’t like it.”
For bobsledding, Pittman needed to bulk up. “In track and field the goal is to be your minimum body weight, very low skin folds, quite unhealthy really, if I’m being honest. In bobsled you’re encouraged to be as lean but as big as you can be – it’s all about muscle mass.
“That’s hard to do clean, as a girl. Boys put on weight really quickly. Us females take a little longer to do it.”
The major change in swapping sports was, she says, psychological. “I’ve always been No. 1 in the world. I’ve always been the best at what I do. And transferring to a sport where you’re rubbish, it was a real challenge to not be so hard on yourself and realise you’ve been doing the sport a small amount of time. The realistic chance of Australia winning a gold medal in the Olympics in bobsled is very, very low, whereas every time I stepped on the track in athletics I was there to win.
“We don’t expect to win gold. A few sleds would have to crash. You never write it off. I think Astrid and I are very good athletes, but the German girl has been sliding for over 20 years. In Europe you get thrown in a sled when you’re 15, 16 years old. Both Astrid and I are 30. We don’t have the experience. If we come top five we will have done very well.”
Pittman met Radjenovic 18 years ago when they were both hurdlers. Radjenovic swapped to bobsled when she was 18, while Pittman stayed in track and field. “She hounded me a few times last year saying, ‘Would you swap over?’,” Pittman says. “I said, ‘Absolutely no chance’. But as soon as I had a go the bug bit, it felt amazing. It’s a brilliant sport.”
Pittman is a different person from the days when she was an Australian household name and in the headlines, as much for her off-track controversies as her athletic victories. Being a single mother to six-year-old Cornelis has changed her immeasurably. “For me, he’s very grounding,” she says. “I had a very turbulent career as a young person. I was world champion in athletics when I was 19, so was thrust into the spotlight, no idea how to handle it, spoke too often at times, then didn’t know what was important in life. Then you get a little boy who changes that whole thing for you.”
In 2012 she did an entry exam to study medicine. “I remember the day I got the exam results, I can honestly say I was happier than when I won the world champs.”
But things haven’t always been so happy. In 2004 she tore artilage in her right knee and underwent surgery in London a week before the Athens Olympics. She ran fifth in the 400-metre hurdles, but her teammate Tamsyn Lewis later said Pittman “loved all the drama”. Pittman responded that Lewis, who had posed for Ralph magazine, was more focused on being a “bikini babe” than running. The rivalry flared again the next year when Pittman accused Lewis of creating a “very evil atmosphere” before the 2006 Commonwealth Games.
Pittman says she always hated her drama-queen public image. “I was very young and I don’t think I had a filter, so if someone asked me an honest question I gave them an honest answer. I’m still like that and I wouldn’t change that about me. It still hurts. All I’ve ever wanted to do was represent my country and be a proud Australian. My whole goal is to help other people, which is why I’ve gone into medicine. I’ve always wanted to be a positive role model for people and it’s difficult to do that if you have somewhat negative things written.”
The alleged “catfight” with Lewis saddened Pittman. “It was a very sad story. The only things that ever came out about Tamsyn and I were that we were having some kind of bicker, but the things that don’t come out was that Tamsyn was the very first friend I had in athletics. The first time I ever ran a 400 metres, I was vomiting on the start line and she carried my spikes and drink bottles to the start line, so she cared more about me than anything else and helped me get through the race.
“When I did my knee in Athens, she was the one who came all the way to England with me and sat by my side while I had the operation and looked after me post-operatively. But nothing like that ever got said. I was told to say nothing, to shut up, not to comment in the media … and I think if I had my time over I would have said, ‘Look, she was one of my best friends’. We almost lost our friendship over it. We’re lucky we’re friends again now. What she said as a joke was played out to almost ruin a friendship.
“It was something to do with who was going to beat who, said as a jesty joke and it should never have been anything more than that. Both of us got painted in a negative light and none of the beautiful side of Tamsyn came out.”
A 2006 cover line in Ralph magazine said: “It’s alright Tam, we don’t like Jana Pittman either.’’ Soon after, Pittman was booed off the stage at a nightclub: “That was hurtful.”
Is she misread? “I think I’ve allowed it to happen … I was the one who answered the questions when I was asked. I was just a little young to understand the repercussions of it.”
Pittman is studying first-year medicine at the University of Western Sydney, juggling full-time studies with Olympic training. She hopes to be an obstetrician. “My whole passion in medicine is in obstetrics and babies and delivery.” She started out in midwifery and transferred to medicine. “I’ve always had a real love for children and maternal health, which automatically meant when I had my own son he became very special.”
Pittman, divorced from British athlete Chris Rawlinson, talks about her “turbulent” life. “On track it was brilliant. I won five world titles and was undefeated for many years. Among it all I still managed to come out and win worlds in Osaka in ’07, seven months after having a baby. I look at a lot of people who are quite good at what they do, they can often be a little bit quirky. I am definitely not normal. I’ve got some very quirky sides to me. I’m very spontaneous, I’m very very, very passionate. I can be very single-sighted on things, so if I have a goal in mind I’m very headstrong and driven towards that. My greatest love in life is to help other people, so I will often put my foot in things when I’m trying to help someone else.”
She says she doesn’t know why she attracts negative publicity. “I’ve always wanted to know. If I could know I could change it and not have it happen again. Or I could teach my son not to do it … I would love to know what I did wrong so I could help somebody else not to do it.”
When injury forced her out of the London Olympics, she became fed up with all the ups and downs of athletics. “It’s a horrible roller-coaster, sport. After Athens I wanted to retire, ‘I’m done, I can’t do this any more. It’s such a roller-coaster – I’ll go and be a doctor’. And then you love it and you go back to it. You stop, you start. With anything worth doing, it’s hard but with sport it’s particularly hard because the Olympics are on every four years. That’s one of the reasons I went to bobsled, because Rio was so long away. When London was over I thought, ‘Wow, I’m not waiting four years, I’ll try to find something in the interim’.”
Pittman is the “brakeman” on the team, Radjenovic the pilot. “She’s the real gun on the team,” says Pittman. “I’m very substitutable, she’s not. She has to drive it. She’s the skill, I’m just the big muscle at the back.”
Last year Pittman coached athletics at Haileybury College in Keysborough. “It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done. It was another reason I wanted to go into medicine – you can lose yourself in an environment where it’s not about you at all, it’s about someone else. And they didn’t know who you were.’’
She is deeply indebted to her parents, who live close to her in Sydney. “I became an athlete because I was obsessed with my dad,” she says. “He’s like me, he’s a workaholic, very little time for anything but work and his kids, and he would always take a day off work to come to carnivals with me. I saw that as way of getting into my dad’s heart so I trained to impress him and then my body was the right shape.
“Sometimes I leave at 5am and they get my little man up and give him breakfast, which allows me the time to pick him up from school. When he goes to bed, I go to physio. I couldn’t do it without them.”
She’s been reflective and characteristically candid.
“I did a lot of media, didn’t have a lot of support in terms of what to not do and say. I think I got caught up in the whole, ‘People don’t like you or people do like you’. I found it really hard to deal with. Then Cornelis comes along and he doesn’t care who you are. He’s far more proud that mummy’s going to be a doctor.
“The other day he was asked ‘What does mummy do?’ and you’d think kids who have an Olympian mum would say, ‘Mum’s an Olympian’. He said, ‘My mummy works in a hospital’.”
Jana Pittman will compete in the bobsled team at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, February 7-23.
