Stephanie has point to prove

Press, 31 July 1984, Page 25

Stephanie has point to prove

NZPA Lake Casitas Stephanie Foster, New Zealand’s first woman Olympic rower, has an iron determination to prove she has what it takes to win an Olympic medal. “I’ve got a lot of things to show a few people when I get my medal. I’ve got a ton more guts than a lot of those hulking big girls. “They all used to think I was such a little girl . . .

frail. . . some of them still talk of me like that,” she says of unnamed rowing people in New. Zealand. “Just because I’m not a bloody great hulk. "I feel so mentally prepared and good. I know damn well that if I get beaten I will have raced the hardest I have ever done. “If I’m beaten I would just come off and say that girl was better. But it’s not going to happen like that. “I have age on my side, experience on my side, the best coach and strength.

“If I win it will be for all the people who believe in me, not that there are a lot of them, but it’s the ones that count that matter, “ said Foster on the eve of her first Olympic heat. The sculler, described as a “sports person (unemployed)” • in her rowing

biography notes, will be 26 in September, and feels that she is now at her prime.

She stresses again and again her feeling of maturity, of mental relaxation as she prepares for the high point of a lonely sculling career that began when she was a schoolgirl in Auckland. Foster has sorted out earlier mental pressures, worries that she was letting other people down who had helped her along with her career, both financially and otherwise, if she failed.

Now she knows that she first and foremost has to consider “No 1”. She has in perspective what she owes to others and knows that she can best repay them by doing her best.

Tha ; does not mean that Foster, the winner of 18 national rowing titles and a bronze medal from the world rowing championships at Lucerne in 1982, has forgotten the people of Cambridge and elsewhere who have helped her along - far from it.

“People in New Zealand have given me so much help — people in Cambridge have been absolutely magnificent — it really gives you a good high. “But you have to do it for

yourself — you have to, and then you go and do it for the others.

“To see other people get pleasure out of something you do gives you pleasure. It all counts when you get on the water.”

Foster speaks with a touch of bitterness about the way she has had to fight for recognition and of the failure of the Olympic selectors in 1980 to name her as part of a New Zealand team, even if they knew it would not be competing.

Did that hurt? “It sure did!” came the vehement reply. “But you can’t hold things like that against people, a bitterness like that can be detrimental.”

Being the only woman and a sculler in the New Zealand Olympic rowing team she admits brings its difficulties.

Occasionally she says she has to let out the built up feeling and at times anger. “You can’t bottle it up inside you, Ray (Reid, her coach) knows that”

From how she speaks, its obvious Foster has a tremendous personal and professional regard for Reid, her coach of the past four years and who has helped her to where she has reached in her career.