In death, Olivia Podmore is finally seen by a system that failed her

Just hours after the 2021 Tokyo Olympics ended, elite Kiwi cyclist Olivia Podmore was found dead in a suspected suicide at her Cambridge home. Six months of harrowing coronial hearings have revealed the disturbing truth about her treatment within New Zealand's national cycling organisation. Sports correspondent Dana Johannsen followed every day of the inquest.

As she wheeled her way out of the pits of Rio's Barra Velodrome moments before her Olympic debut, Olivia Podmore's coach leaned in and delivered one last unsettling barb: "Don't crash, don't f***ing crash."

The coach had refused to roll the young sprint cyclist up to the startline for her opening race at the 2016 Olympic Games, instead offloading the responsibility to an assistant.

Earlier the coach had told the teenager she was "useless" and repeatedly declared that she didn't deserve to be there. It would be embarrassing for him to stand by her side on the startline, he said.

Inside the velodrome that day in August 2016 were hundreds of fellow elite track cyclists, coaches, mechanics, support staff and cycling officials bustling around in the pit. Thousands more spectators were packed into the stands.

But there on the startline ahead of her first appearance on sport's grandest stage, Podmore must have felt the loneliest person in the world.

Only a few weeks earlier, the 19-year-old had triggered a trip wire which set off a chain of events that would soon overwhelm her.

At a pre-Olympic training camp in Bordeaux, Podmore unwittingly exposed an affair between a coach and another athlete in the programme.

With the opening ceremony of the Olympics just two and a half weeks away, Podmore found herself caught up in complex power games, as she was blamed for the disruption in the camp and pressured to lie to protect the coach and athlete.

Much of the broad strokes details of the turbulent period and subsequent fallout were outlined in a 2018 investigation into Cycling New Zealand carried out by former solicitor general Mike Heron KC.

The inquiry revealed "sinister and distressing examples of bullying", poor leadership, a lack of accountability and a culture where poor behaviour was accepted by those deemed critical to the success of the programme.

But the report, as explosive as it was at the time, was written in the very particular language of a lawyer - stripped of emotion and identifying details.

Over the past six months in a protracted coronial inquest that has spanned two courtrooms, two islands, and the ringing in of a new year, the human experiences behind that report have been drawn out and raked over in harrowing detail.

The revelation that Podmore's coach taunted her moments before her Olympic debut was just one of many jarring pieces of evidence to garner an emotional response from the public gallery.

The disclosure came during an extraordinary morning of testimony from Nicholle Bailey, the ex-wife of the coach.

It stopped Chris Middleton, Podmore's stepfather, in his tracks. Leading the questioning on behalf of his wife and Podmore's mother Nienke, Middleton was rendered momentarily speechless.

"Wow, we didn't know that," he said eventually.

'A significant breach in safeguarding'

For three weeks at the end of 2024, courtroom seven of the Hamilton District Court was transported trackside at elite cycling events around the globe. The inquest revealed behind-the-scenes details of meets in Glasgow, Rio, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and even Kazakhstan, offering a rare unfiltered glimpse at the realities of high-performance sport.

But ultimately, all roads led back to Bordeaux.

Several witnesses at the inquest into Podmore's death in August 2021 testified the incident at a pre-Olympic training camp was the defining moment of the young athlete's time in Cycling New Zealand's national programme. It was, as forensic psychiatrist Dr Erik Monasterio described, the event that set off "an avalanche".

But the court heard sport's high performance programme was in disarray well before Podmore was recruited to join the elite sprint team in Cambridge at just 17.

For much of the previous two years, Cycling New Zealand's former campaign manager Jess Massey, had been trying to escalate concerns about cultural issues in the squad, and the "diabolical" conduct of one of the coaches in particular.

The coach, who cannot be identified due to suppression orders, routinely breached the organisation's alcohol policy and demonstrated "unethical" behaviour, Massey said.

She cited one example when Cycling New Zealand narrowly avoided an embarrassing diplomatic incident at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, after the coach stole a gold plated bell estimated to be worth thousands of pounds following the final event.

After the Glasgow "debacle", Massey said she began to formally document incidents of concern and escalating matters to the higher-ups at Cycling New Zealand. But she said her concerns about an inappropriate relationship between the coach and an athlete did not "fully crystalise" until a World Cup event in LA the following year.

Podmore did not know any of this background when, late one night in Bordeaux, she sent a text message that would inadvertently reveal a secret. Her teammate was missing, she messaged Massey. The athlete had not been heard from since going for a ride into town that afternoon, and Podmore was worried about her.

After failed attempts to locate the rider, Massey said she and another team official met in the lobby and were about to go looking for the athlete when she arrived back in a taxi with the coach. The "highly inebriated" pair were seen kissing, Massey said.

There in the lobby, Massey and the team official came up with an action plan, which involved notifying Cycling New Zealand management of the incident and writing a full report. But by the next day Massey said her colleague's resolve had weakened.

"The following day, [the team official] tried to convince me that we hadn't seen them kiss. It was one big cover-up."

Massey said she was cut out of any official debriefs of the incident, as the coaching and high performance staff closed ranks. Soon, she was cut from the travelling staff altogether and informed she would not be going onwards to the Rio Games.

Massey's omission did little to quell the disquiet on the ground.

A health practitioner who supported the Cycling New Zealand team at the 2016 Games, said stress levels among the team were extraordinarily high throughout the campaign.

She was particularly concerned about the ongoing impact on Podmore.

The health service provider, who has interim name suppression, told the court she felt a lot of the "panic and emotion" demonstrated by Podmore at the Games was a result of what the young athlete experienced in the build-up.

"It felt incredibly significant that she was made to feel quite unsafe by what happened and I was really concerned that for someone so young to be ... thrown into the middle of something that she genuinely had no idea of, right before her first Olympic Games.

"To me, the flow-on effect [in Rio], so much of it could be attributed to how confusing and how traumatising [the build-up was]."

But, the practitioner reasoned, Rio would surely be the end of it.

She told the court she believed the misconduct from the coach and wider cultural issues in the team were so serious that Cycling New Zealand would be compelled to act when the team returned from the Games.

"I admit I reassured Olivia things would be different post-Rio, because I felt this was a significant breach in terms of safeguarding," the practitioner said

The court heard evidence Cycling New Zealand and High Performance Sport NZ (HPSNZ) officials carried out a review after Rio, but the process was bungled from the start. Key staff, including Massey, were sidelined as the debrief was restricted to high performance staff only.

Most chillingly, confidential athlete feedback forms were shared with the coach, leading to further targeted bullying of those who had raised concerns about his behaviour.

With the review process failing to lead to any meaningful action from Cycling New Zealand, the practitioner told the court the environment continued to deteriorate through 2017, prompting her to resign.

"It was not sustainable. It was a feeling of 'I don't think I can be effective here, I don't feel safe'," she said.

The court heard Podmore's safety was also compromised at this time.

Bailey, the former wife of the coach, said the young athlete endured "relentless bullying" from the coach and her teammates over this time, as the athletes, who felt their own cycling ambitions rested on the status quo being maintained, reinforced the "hierarchy" set by the coach.

"He would berate Olivia on all aspects of her personal life. Who she was seeing and when, what she ate, the size of her bottom, her haircut, how many boys she slept with and more. It was relentless," she said.

Asked how the young athlete felt about the comments, Bailey responded: "She felt awful … it would be the same as if I was in the workplace and my boss was dredging up my personal life and using it against me every day. It's not okay."

The inquest heard evidence that several people tried to raise the alarm about the coach's behaviour, and in particular his inappropriate relationship with the athlete.

However, former Cycling New Zealand chief executive Andrew Matheson told the court he did not have any solid evidence on which he could act until Podmore met with him at his house in May 2018 and told him about the toll the previous two years had taken on her.

Off the back of that meeting Podmore submitted a formal complaint, which eventually led to the coach's resignation. The terms of the coach's departure from Cycling New Zealand, which included a significant financial payout, were not disclosed during the inquest.

As media began reporting about the sudden departure of the coach and wider issues within the Cycling New Zealand environment, the health practitioner saw her opportunity to finally be heard.

She told the court she flew to Auckland in mid-2018 at her own expense to meet with Michael Scott, the then-chief executive of HPSNZ, and delivered a stark message: "I told [Scott] we would have an athlete kill themselves", if urgent action was not taken.

Asked how many athletes she considered to be at risk, the practitioner responded:

"I would have said more than half would have been experiencing psychological distress, in terms of risk, I recall in my brain, again I didn't share names, but three specific athletes I was concerned about."

At that point, HPSNZ were in the process of commissioning Heron to lead an independent review of the Cycling New Zealand programme. Scott promised to put the practitioner in touch with the reviewer.

The health practitioner said she spoke to Heron twice for the 2018 review, and also fed into the 2021 inquiry prompted by Podmore's death.

"I've now met with Michael Heron three times," she said.

"When I met with him in 2021, he noted, 'You raised quite a few of these concerns in our first interview.'"

Biting the hand that feeds you

The 2018 inquiry into Cycling New Zealand and HPSNZ was supposed to be a "line in the sand moment" for New Zealand's elite sports environments.

The review revealed a litany of failings - not just among Cycling New Zealand's leadership, but deep systemic issues in the wider high performance system.

In addition to his public findings, Heron wrote a confidential letter to Matheson outlining additional issues uncovered in his investigation "that may give rise to further action". Among Heron's concerns were allegations Podmore was bullied by two of her team-mates.

A letter, uncovered only weeks before the inquest was due to get underway, revealed what happened next.

Matheson wrote to Podmore in December 2018 - three months after the release of the review - to inform her that he saw "no tangible value" in taking disciplinary action against those alleged to have harmed her.

"On behalf of Cycling New Zealand, I am declaring this matter formally closed," the letter concluded.

Podmore sent a copy of the letter to Massey over Facebook messenger : "FFS, same shit, different day," she wrote.

There was no line in the sand for Podmore.

Sending the letter was one of Matheson's last acts in his role as chief executive of Cycling New Zealand. He resigned at the end of 2018 and Jacques Landry, who represented Canada at two Olympic Games, took over as chief executive in the new year.

Landry was part of a new broom at the national sports body that included high performance director Martin Barras, and sprint coach Rene Wolff.

The trio all testified at the hearing that they had limited knowledge of what had occurred prior to their arrival at Cycling New Zealand, and their approach was to start with a clean slate.

But in everyone's haste to move on, it appears the trauma at the heart of Podmore's experience was never addressed.

Taking the stand this week for the second time in the inquest, expert witness Dr Erik Monasterio said "you don't have to be a forensic psychiatrist" to understand the impact the letter would have had on the cyclist.

"Psychologically, if you've been traumatised by a situation that's been accepted to be unfair, some sort of redress and balance needs to occur, otherwise you feel doubly disempowered," he said.

"What does that do for your sense of coherence and understanding of fairness and reasonableness around you? It would not have comforted her that she was working in a safe environment given her experience."

Monasterio, an independent expert witness assisting coroner Louella Dunn, said there appeared to be a widespread lack of recognition among Cycling New Zealand officials and medical staff about the impact the previous two years had on the young athlete.

"It's interesting that … this concept of her being a whistleblower isn't identified as a key issue, and the reason I say that is that the impact of whistleblowing is relatively well understood in science and in clinical practice, and it's very sad to say, that people who whistle blow don't do well.

"This remained a substantial issue because to complain against an agency upon which your destiny resides is very compromising for a high performing sportsperson wanting to get to the Olympics. It's very difficult, it's a bit like biting the hand that feeds you.

"So that put her in a compromised position and her view thereafter is that that impacted her trajectory and led her to believe that she was excluded from the Tokyo Olympics on that basis."

'She was crushed'

With her first Olympics a write-off, Podmore desperately wanted to be back there on the startline again. To get her Rio re-do.

Those hopes were extinguished when in mid-2020, Podmore was informed by coach Rene Wolff that he would not be recommending her for selection. Instead, Cycling New Zealand elected to give one of the two sprint spots that Podmore helped it secure for the Olympics to an endurance rider.

The Covid-delayed Tokyo Games were still more than a year away, but the door had been firmly slammed shut on Podmore.

She elected to appeal the decision, placing Cycling New Zealand's contentious handling of the selection also under the spotlight at the inquest.

Appearing in the coroner's court last year via audio visual link, both Wolff and former high performance director Martin Barras, who have each gone on to roles with other international teams, clearly laid out the process for the selection.

The pair said Podmore had not met the performance criteria to be selected for Tokyo, pointing to the young rider's inconsistent results during the selection window.

But the minutiae of the complex qualifying system was, in the end, a side issue for the inquest. The more relevant factor in understanding why Podmore's mental health declined rapidly over this time, was her perception of why she had been excluded.

Andrew McLean, a close friend and flatmate of Podmore, said "whether rightly or wrongly" the cyclist strongly believed she had been omitted for political, rather than performance reasons, and that her fate was tied to another athlete who had also appealed their non-selection.

McLean sat in as Podmore's support person at a meeting with Cycling New Zealand high performance staff to discuss the selection decision and said he witnessed first hand why the young rider had come to believe her national body were not interested in her development.

He told the court Cycling New Zealand officials acted in an "arrogant, mean and defensive" manner towards Podmore in the August 2020 meeting.

"No one there seemed at all concerned about the athlete's welfare and how she was leaving the meeting," McLean said.

"There was no 'we think you're fast, but you're not quite there' … there's ways you could couch it to make someone leave that meeting feeling like they were a valued part. But she did not leave the meeting feeling like that. She left that meeting feeling like that was it. [She was] crushed."

Under cross examination this week, Monasterio said he believed the "significant trauma" and disempowerment Podmore experienced over the 2016-2018 period, resurfaced for her following her non-selection for Tokyo.

"What happened in 2016 through to 2018 was there was a lot of distress, which reached a threshold of being psychologically traumatic for a young person," Monasterio said.

"Then there is this reappearance of significant anxiety and distress in 2021, which is when we have this first manifestation of suicidal thoughts. In my view there is a connection between those two events."

Blind Spots

Even before the crushing disappointment of missing out on the Tokyo Olympic Games, Podmore was beginning to show clear signs of distress.

A mood test carried out in February 2020 indicated severe to very severe depression, anxiety and stress levels in Podmore. Her score on the structured psychological screening tool, known as the DASS-21, was described by a health practitioner treating Podmore as "the worst I've seen".

The health professional, who RNZ will refer to as practitioner A due to suppression orders, said he was "very concerned" by what the test indicated, and discussed it with a colleague. Practitioner A told the court he relied on his colleague, practitioner B, with his particular skillset, to provide the correct treatment or referral.

But the court heard Podmore was never referred for a detailed psychological assessment on the back of the test, which Monasterio identified as a time when "more assertive steps needed to be taken".

By early 2021, Podmore's level of psychological distress had escalated to having thoughts of taking her own life. In January she disclosed to practitioner A, who carried out the DASS-21 test the year prior, that she was experiencing suicidal ideation.

The practitioner again said he relied heavily on the guidance of practitioner B in determining the correct course of action.

Practitioner A left his role the following month, kicking off a merry-go-round of public and private health providers, as Podmore bounced between six different health practitioners in the seven month period leading up to her death.

The inquest heard her coach, Rene Wolff, seemed to take a pejorative view of this, noting in an email to one practitioner that Podmore tended to "jump between providers" - ignoring the fact that Cycling New Zealand had three team doctors in the first half of 2021, each one of those proposed a different course of action to address Podmore's deteriorating mental health.

Collectively, those responsible for Podmore's care recognised that the upcoming Olympics would be a challenging time for the 24 year-old, and a plan was developed to ensure she received support during this period.

The plan, according to practitioner B, was to check on Podmore weekly. However, the first check-in was not scheduled until August 6 - just two days before the closing ceremony.

Podmore later texted the practitioner that day to cancel the appointment, telling him she was down in Queenstown having an "epic" time snowboarding with her friends.

"I thought it was a young lady having the time of her life," the practitioner told the court.

Three days later he would receive the tragic news the young athlete had died at home in Cambridge, in a suspected suicide.

9 August, 2021

From the outside, it seemed to everyone that Podmore had made a determined effort to push the despair of missing the Olympics to one side, and was living her best life in Queenstown with friends Andrew McLean, champion rower Eric Murray and his partner Thea Lyle.

It was only with hindsight that Lyle pieced together the subtle signs of Podmore's inner turmoil.

It was there in the way she seemed to withdraw from the group at times during the trip, having quiet moments of contemplation.

It was there in the way Podmore seemed "obsessed" with the idea of seeing her mother at the airport during a stopover in Christchurch on the way back up north.

And it was there in the way she lingered at Murray and Lyle's house upon their return to Cambridge, seemingly reluctant to go back to her own flat.

Podmore and Lyle discussed an upcoming quiz night, and the athlete's plans to go to the gym the next day. Then they said their goodbyes.

An hour later, the Instagram post appeared.

"Peace out," it began.

The lengthy post went on to describe Podmore's challenges in New Zealand's high performance system, accusing Cycling New Zealand and HPSNZ of "blackmail" and a "cover up". Podmore also outlined some of her personal struggles, including her decision to have an abortion aged 16 and feelings of inadequacy that her sole focus on sport meant she did not meet society's expectations such as owning a house, marriage or having kids.

The police report indicates less than 10 minutes elapsed before some of Podmore's New Zealand-based teammates who were out on a training ride got news of the post and raced to her house.

Emergency staff arrived soon after, but they were unable to revive the 24 year-old.

Back in Christchurch, Podmore's mother Nienke Middleton, who had seen her daughter only hours earlier, could not fathom the news she was now hearing.

Meanwhile, Podmore's brother Mitchell, who had been frantically calling everyone he knew in Cambridge as soon as he saw the post, was also receiving the devastating confirmation. Mitchell then had to make the heart-wrenching call to his father Phil to let him know "Olivia is gone".

Grief and anger followed. But there was also confusion.

While a lot of Podmore's close friends and family had been aware of her struggles with her mental health, the evidence presented at the inquest was that at no point had the young athlete been considered at high risk of suicide.

Few saw the true depth of her pain.

Nearly four years on, as piece by piece of her experiences, her disappointments, her trauma, her hopes and her dreams were revealed through the inquest, Olivia Podmore was finally seen.

Where to get help:

• Need to Talk? Free call or text 1737 any time to speak to a trained counsellor, for any reason
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 or text HELP to 4357
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 / 0508 TAUTOKO. This is a service for people who may be thinking about suicide, or those who are concerned about family or friends
• Depression Helpline: 0800 111 757 or text 4202
• Samaritans: 0800 726 666
• Youthline: 0800 376 633 or text 234 or email talk@youthline.co.nz
• What's Up: 0800 WHATSUP / 0800 9428 787. This is free counselling for 5 to 19-year-olds
• Asian Family Services: 0800 862 342 or text 832. Languages spoken: Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, and English.
• Rural Support Trust Helpline: 0800 787 254
• Healthline: 0800 611 116
• Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155
• OUTLine: 0800 688 5463
• Aoake te Rā bereaved by suicide service: or call 0800 000 053

If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.

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