Jana Drama 4: Quitting Oz

Jana drama a solo show

March 13, 2006

AUSTRALIA has had hundreds of athletes who could handle the sort of pressure that was forcing Jana Pittman to flee to England, according to Olympic boss John Coates.

He also said Pittman’s situation would not push the AOC to consider changing the way it advises athletes on dealing with public scrutiny for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Pittman said she will move to England with her English fiance Chris Rawlinson after the Commonwealth Games, blaming Australian media for depicting her as a “villain”.

Her trials since the 2004 Olympics have been a constant source of public interest – as have those of rower Sally Robbins who stopped in the eights final at Athens Games.

But Coates, the Australian Olympic Committee president, said their respective situations did not signal a need for change in how the AOC helps athletes handle media attention.

“We aren’t planning any changes to our guidelines on how you interact with the media or anything like that,” said Coates.

“I don’t see that – and you’ve given a couple of examples – but there were 482 people [on Australia’s Athens Olympic team] who seemed to have handled the last experience very well.”

Coates said he “can empathise” with Pittman, but added that such high-profile athletes in a sport where money was earned and publicity important had to learn to deal with it.

“I am not sure it is any worse than it has been,” said Coates, when asked if the pressure on sports stars was increasing.

“Surely, in the Olympic sports, the most scrutiny must have been leading into the Sydney Olympic Games. We seemed to have coped with that.”

As for Pittman’s decision to move to England after marrying Rawlinson, Coates said if she does follow through with it she will have no option but to still run for Australia.

Pittman has not indicated whether she intends to switch nationalities after the move with her English fiance.

But Coates warned against it. “She is probably running out of time. You need three years to do that and you need to step outside competition,” he said. “So I can’t imagine that is the case. I would assume that she is still [planning on] competing for Australia.”

He also said that until – and if – Pittman is selected for the Australian Olympic team for the Beijing games, the issue is not one for the AOC to deal with, but Athletics Australia.

:stuck_out_tongue: THIS IS A CLASSIC
Pittman to quit Australia after one too many Jana drama ding-dongs
Email Print Normal font Large font By Jessica Halloran
March 11, 2006
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JANA Pittman revealed yesterday she would leave Australia after the Commonwealth Games and no longer had the passion she once did to run for her country.

A teary-eyed Pittman told how she felt she was being driven out of Australia and planned to move to England, blaming the negative publicity she received after 400 metre runner Tamsyn Lewis called her a “bitch” and also bad press since the 2004 Olympics.

“Since Athens, my image is all about drama and I hate it,” Pittman said yesterday. "It’s not me. I don’t like it. I don’t want to be in the media anymore. I used to want to be a journalist. I used to want to be on TV. I just want to move out of Australia. I just don’t want to be around it anymore.

"It’s changed my perspective. I am now just running for me. I used to be really patriotic and really want to wear the green and gold all the time and not run for myself. I felt I was carrying the weight of my country.

“But I don’t run for anyone but us [Chris Rawlinson, Pittman’s fiance and coach] now because I don’t have the support I used to have from Australia. I now run for the feeling of my spikes and I love getting on the blocks. That’s what will keep me in the sport a bit longer.”

Pittman said there had been a “mixed” response from the Australian public since Lewis dubbed their rivalry a “catfight” and a “bitchfight”. She said she had been walking down the street last week when a bunch of men in a car yelled out, “We love you, Tamsyn, we hate you, Pitts”.

“I didn’t create that,” the 400m hurdler added. “I didn’t want that.”

She also points to the latest edition of Ralph magazine, in which Lewis poses in a bikini and which carries the tag line on the cover, “It’s alright [sic] Tam, we don’t like Jana Pittman either”.

Pittman said she did get a lot of positive support but the criticism and barbs have clearly hurt the 23-year-old.

“Someone recently ran a headline that ‘Lleyton Hewitt, Jana Pittman and Shane Warne are terrible role models for Australia’,” she said. “That was so awful. We are not going to stay in Australia. It’s Australia. Lleyton Hewitt left. Cathy [Freeman] left. Every one of our big stars left because we hate people who achieve things.”

Pittman described the Athens Olympics as the lowest point of her career and also the event that led to a shift in the public’s opinion of her, with the intense media attention as she battled back from knee injury in the build-up.

“It’s one of the worst experiences of my life,” she said. “But it’s kept me in the sport, I wanted to retire after Athens. I went from being something in Australia, after the world champs where I won the 400m hurdles, people love you want to talk to you, [to this].”

Rawlinson has recently ensured Pittman has as few media commitments as possible and said England would provide a quiet and solid base for his future wife.

“The Athens thing with the media was wrong and it gave her the wrong image,” Rawlinson said. "So last year she stayed out of the country for a long time. She tried to scale down the commitments.

“But this year she spent the summer here, and it’s happened again. I can understand why Jana would want to go back to Europe. You want to feel welcome and that doesn’t make you feel welcome. If you move to Britain, even if you do something special, athletics is so small.”

Despite Pittman’s reluctance to talk to the media, Rawlinson said the attention was relentless, pointing to the scrutiny she received after withdrawing from Thursday night’s grand prix meeting with a minor hamstring problem.

“She shuns the media as much as she can,” Rawlinson said. “But even the other night with her hamstring, the press asked if it was going to be another ‘Jana drama’.”

Pittman is keen to return to England, Rawlinson’s home country, to start her preparation for the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

“I love England,” she said. “To win Beijing, I have to be somewhere permanent without the moving around. Without the drama. Somewhere that’s very quiet and somewhere that’s forever. I just want to be somewhere I am grounded.”

[ :eek: THIS IS THE WOMAN WHO THREATENED TO QUIT THE AUSTRALIAN TEAM ACCOMMODATION QUARTERS IN THE OLYMPIC VILLAGE IN ATHENS BECAUSE TEAM MANAGEMENT CORRECTLY WOULDN’T ALLOW A NON-RIGHTS-HOLDING AUSSIE TELEVISION NETWORK INTO THE VILLAGE WITH HER. SHE’S GOT TO TAKE A LONG, HARD LOOK INTO THE MIRROR AND TAKE A SERIOUS REALITY CHECK. :frowning: kk]