Olympic chef de mission Anna Meares: ‘I’m getting the same almost physical response as when I was an athlete’ | Mike Hytner

Anna Meares, Australia’s chef de mission for the Paris Olympics, is not sleeping well. With just a week to go before the Games officially begin, the former track cyclist’s mind is whirring as fast as the pedals of her bike once did. Nearly 1,000 people are under her management, and the former world champion is bearing a heavy weight of responsibility.

“I feel like I’m getting the same almost physical response as when I was an athlete when I got this close,” says Meares, whose glittering cycling career ended in 2016. “I still get sweaty palms a bit when I realise how close it is, a little bit panicked.

“There are very different stress levels to when I was an athlete. I think that I’ve learned a lot of psychological skills as an athlete that have put me in really good stead. But there is an element to this job that I don’t know yet. And that’s coming at Games time.”

Australia confirmed a 460-strong athlete delegation earlier this month and with support staff, coaches, psychologists and AOC staff, that number more than doubles. Meares, a four-time world champion and Commonwealth and Olympic gold medallist herself, is effectively responsible for the entire cohort.

Since retiring from the track eight years ago – with her body breaking down and crying out for some respite – her journey to becoming the public face of Australia’s 2024 Olympic team has not been straightforward. The transition away from an elite high-performing athlete has not come easily for Meares, who has had to deal with serious mental challenges along the way.

“I was ready to retire and I knew it,” she says. “In a lot of ways I was crawling to the finish line in Rio. I was mentally, emotionally and physically spent. I was going through a lot personally. And it’s difficult to find focus when one part of your life feels like it’s falling apart and another part of your life is going well.”

Meares initially loved retirement. She could eat and drink what she wanted, sleep when she wanted, stay out and go wherever she wanted, whenever she wanted. The freedom she had been afforded was fresh and exhilarating. But it didn’t last long. Soon it became overwhelming. When the team got back together to plan for the next Olympics cycle, a realisation hit hard: she was no longer part of those discussions.

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Cast onto the outer, Meares started to miss the structure and routine of her former life, and not having a place to be each day made her question her decision to end her career. At the same time, she was having to overcome anxiety, grief and loss, which compounded matters as she processed a divorce and the declining health and eventual death of the man who coached her to Olympic glory, Gary West.

It was the perfect storm, and one that was initially difficult to navigate out of.

“I realised that sport, when you’re in it, is a really big world that runs like clockwork,” Meares says. “There’s a lot of attention and adulation, and the highs are incredibly high. I experienced the highest of highs and then I realised that life, when you step out of sport, is far bigger with far fewer people. The recalibration of what normal was for me – from a high performance sport life which I’d lived for 22 years – to life without it took quite a bit of time and quite a bit of effort to process and work through.”

Meares turned elsewhere – to things that she loved as a child. Art was important to her when she was young, so she got back into painting, started taking pottery classes. “I just started to learn how to be creative without judgment again, which as a high performance athlete is a hard thing to do.” Becoming a foster parent offered some perspective. She began to work with at-risk youth between the ages of four and eight, bringing them into her home and helping set up the next stage of carers.

“There were some real perspective moments that occurred where, as I struggled to let go of sport, I realised through these interactions that my own insecurities and vulnerabilities were actually a strength,” she says. “And if I could find the confidence to step back into that sporting world again, I could feel like I could do something really positive.”

Eventually, her second husband, the former national sprint cycling coach Nick Flyger, provided the spark Meares needed to light the touchpaper on the journey that would eventually lead to Paris.

“He said to me, ‘take the pressure, expectation and people off the table, if you were here, and no one could judge you and you could do anything, what would you do?’ Straightaway I said ‘I’d be chef de mission for Australia’. He’s, like, ‘why?’. I said ‘because you lead the most motivated, driven group of people that you’ve ever come across in your life. I just think that would be the best role that I can possibly aim for.’”

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Flyger urged Meares to take the bull by the horns, to go and talk to people, find some mentors and learn how to upskill herself. It was around this time that Meares was asked to be a general manager for the Australian team at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, an opportunity she jumped at, not only to confirm this was the direction she wanted to be moving in, but also to put herself in a position to meet the right people and ask questions.

So, when she found herself at a dinner at the UCI Road World Championships in Wollongong in 2022 and was asked what her future held, Flyger’s words reverberated in her head. “Tell them, say it. They won’t know unless you tell them.” Meares took a leap of faith and put herself out there, saying publicly that she would be delighted if the opportunity to become chef de mission presented itself.

It turned out she wasn’t the only one in the room already thinking along those lines. She got a call the next day and was offered a chance to throw herself back into the embrace of sport with her dream post-cycling job. She will now oversee Australia’s third largest team to compete at a Games held overseas when Paris 2024 officially gets under way next week.

“I really feel like I’ve hit the jackpot in terms of the opportunity to have the job of a lifetime. I love working in this space. I’ve got great people to work with. And now I can do something positive. If that’s a positive impact behind the scenes for someone else, that’s my gold medal. That’s how I’m measuring my gold medal.”

Having been used to competing during a highly decorated career, the shoe is now firmly on the other foot for Meares. But her mindset heading into the Games, she says, is “exactly the same” as it was for all those years as an athlete.

“But the stresses are different,” she adds. “As an athlete, it was all about myself. And now in this role, it’s all about the athletes and how we can help them and best support them. So there are many sleepless nights at the minute because my head just ticks. I have no physical exhaustion at the moment. My fatigue is the constant ticking of the mind. I really enjoy that. I find it engaging, I find it challenging.”