Doyle realized dream with Olympic bronze in 1992

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This article was published 06/08/2016 (3528 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Angela Doyle (nee Chalmers) believes life is full of finite chapters.

Her current chapter — halfway around the world on a sugarcane farm near the Australian city of Bundaberg, Queensland — involves juggling the parental responsibilities of associated with raising two teenagers with her husband and carrying on her professional livelihood as a biomedical scientist at a pathology laboratory.

Twenty-four years ago, however, in the northeast Spanish city of Barcelona, Doyle penned her own page of greatness.

For 2,400 metres she bided her time. It was at that point the women’s 3,000m final began.

Competing in her second Olympic Games, Doyle, then 28, said the pace was “slow” and “nerve-racking” for the first four-fifths of the race. It was also “very physical, very tactical,” the now 52-year-old recalled during a phone interview from her home in Australia on Friday.

She qualified for the 12-woman race with a time of eight minutes 42.85 seconds — third-fastest of the 33 middle-distance runners who registered times — but none of the competitors came close to that in the final.

As the final intensified, Doyle fell behind back in the pack and got boxed in but didn’t panic. Then she saw her opportunity.

“There was about 150 metres to go and I just started going for it,” Doyle said. “At one point I thought I’m going to get this race, and with probably 100 metres left I could see everybody still.”

Coming around the final turn, the Brandon product was in fourth position, but passed Ireland’s Sonia O’Sullivan down the stretch to finish with a time of 8:47.22. More importantly, Doyle finished third and claimed a bronze medal.

A pair of runners competing under the Olympic banner — Yelena Romanova and Tetyana Dorovskikh — claimed gold and silver, respectively, but Doyle finally had her Olympic moment.

She only wished her dad — her biggest supporter — had been there to celebrate her achievement with her.

“For me it was a goal that I set for myself somewhere between the ages of nine and 12,” Doyle said. “I had this huge desire to go to the Olympics and I suppose when I lost my dad in 1984 I made this promise in my head that I’ve got to try and win a medal. I’ve got to try and pretend I was as good as he thought I was because he really believed in me.”

In addition to her bronze in the 3,000m, Doyle finished 13th in the 1,500m at the Barcelona Games, bettering her 17th-place finish in the same event at the 1988 Seoul Games. She was also 14th in the 3,000m in South Korea.

Despite a silver-medal performance in the 3,000m at the 1987 Pan American Games in Indianapolis and capturing gold in both the 1,500m and 3,000m at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, New Zealand, an Olympic medal was still missing from her resumé.

And yes, Doyle put pressure on herself ahead of the 1992 Games.

“Unfortunately I hadn’t competed at the world championships with an injury in 1991 but I felt like I could be in contention,” she said of the Barcelona Olympics. “I felt like I could have an opportunity to win a medal. So once you have that knowledge and realize that, you do expect something of yourself, whereas in ’88 I didn’t have that expectation or know what to expect.

“Walking into the village in ’92 I could clearly remember this enormous adrenalin rush that was part excitement, part anxiety, and it was daunting.”

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing for Doyle ahead of her second Olympics. On New Year’s Eve 1991, she had her “major freak-out” when the pressure of something she so desperately wanted finally hit her.

“‘Am I ready for this? Can I do this? How am I going to do this?’” she remembers asking herself that night. “I just really wanted it at that point but by the time I got to Barcelona I felt ready and confident.”

A woman of Dakota First Nation ancestry, Doyle said that while in Barcelona thoughts of her grandmother were a source of calm and peacefulness when she tried falling asleep on many hot and humid nights in her three-person room.

“You’ve got this pressure to perform and I was trying to relax and I used to just lie there and remember my grandmother … and I could remember just the smells,” Doyle recalled. “She used to braid our hair and put leather bands in the bottom of mine and my sister’s hair, like tie leather on and I could smell the leather, and burnt sweetgrass.

“I can remember just being in her little house, going to powwows with her and I’d lie there and sit so happy and I went to that place in my head to find relaxation.”

The bronze medal Doyle won in Spain marked the last time a Brandonite stepped on the podium at an Olympic Games. In fact, she was the last Wheat City product to earn a berth at any Olympics until 18-year-old Isablea Onyshko qualified for the Canadian women’s artistic gymnastics team.

Brandon-born rower Dave Calder, who grew up in Victoria, did, however, make four consecutive Summer Games appearances from 2000 to 2012.

Although they starred in different sports, Doyle has an idea of what Onyshko is feeling as the Brandon Eagles gymnast prepares to make her Olympic debut Sunday during qualifying.

Doyle always knew there would be another Brandon athlete to follow in her footsteps, but admitted she didn’t think it would take 24 years for the next one. Still, she offered some advice to Onyshko.

“Once you’re there it’s all about having faith in what you’ve done, having faith in your ability and just finding those key words in your head that allow you to perform the way you always perform and pretending that you’re just back in Brandon doing what you always do,” Doyle said. “You really do have to get to that place in your head no matter how you do it.

“Have faith that you belong there is what I would tell her.”

Doyle had that inner belief and it began to form in her childhood.

From the time she first started running as a nine-year-old while living in Nanaimo, B.C., to her days running around the Keystone Centre amid the smell of dry dust, the sound of popcorn popping and the sight of hockey practice, Doyle had achieved her dream.

When she thinks of home, the Keystone Centre immediately pops into her head

“I spent many winter days there running up on that concourse and running up and down those stairs as a teenager,” Doyle said. “One of the workouts we had was one hour of going up and down the stairs … sometimes we did 600-metre and 400-metre runs with hairpin turns around the garbage cans.”

She has lived in Australia since 2000 and hasn’t been back to Brandon since attending her mother’s funeral in 2011, but thinks of home quite often.

“I have to be really careful with that because it’s a big thing to move to another country and most of the time I’m too tired and too busy to really stop and think about it,” Doyle said. “But when I do, or I call somebody at home, I feel quite nostalgic and part sad. I do miss it.”

But she doesn’t miss running. Walking is more her style now, as is using her intellectual abilities instead of her physical gifts.

“I laugh sometimes because I feel like from the neck down I exploited the resources that I was given,” Doyle said laughing. “Now I’m trying to see what’s from the neck up.”

Yet by her own admission being a mother to daughter Emily, 15, and son Michael, 13, is the most fulfilling thing she’s done.

“You really know who you are when you become a parent. That’s an immense joy and challenge consuming all aspects of my life and you feel great. I have that chapter of my life,” Doyle said. “My husband and I are in such a wonderful phase of life where we are so busy we don’t know ourselves. I guess that’s the one thing about being a former athlete is you know how finite things are.”

Despite her athletic accolades, Doyle’s husband Simon, a middle-distance runner who finished fourth in the men’s 1500m at the 1990 Commonwealth Games, receives most of the praise in his native Australia.

But Emily knows the truth.

“My daughter was telling me the other day, ‘everyone knows that dad was a good runner but no one knows that you were,’” Doyle said.

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