RUNNING FOR HER LIFE
FROM OLYMPICS-OBSESSED KID TO TOUGH PROFESSIONAL AND MENTOR, JILL BOLTZ IS HAPPY TO BE IN CAIRNS, WRITES ARUN SINGH MANN
LIVING among the easygoing characters of the Far North is a British athlete whose journey from dual Olympian to life in Cairns has taken a meandering course.
Former Great Britain Olympic long distance runner Jill Boltz’s career took her around the world, but to end up in Cairns is a path she would once have equated to a move to another planet.
“That’s what running does for you, it gets you places you never would expect,” Boltz said.
“It’s funny ending up here, because as a youngster, I remember watching Skippy on TV. It was the bush kangaroo and Australia for us may as well have been somewhere like Mars — somewhere you’d never ever go.
“Now here I am and you have the kangaroos running up the streets. Things happen and I’m very happy to be in Cairns.”
Since 2005, the Far North’s next generation of runners has been happy to have the 1990 Commonwealth Games silver medallist as their mentor.
Boltz operates running programs in Cairns schools, as well as her own running club – PaceProject — and she has heard some familiar refrains when it comes to training athletes in the Far North.
“You hear, ‘you’re never going to make it from Cairns’, or ‘why do you bother’, a lot up here,” Boltz said. “If you’ve got the right team around you and the support, you can do it.”
She makes that observation from experience, as she credits her self-belief and support network as the drivers of her journey from growing up in northern England to representing her country.
“It was one Olympics in the ’70s, I was with my aunty cutting out all the clippings out of a newspaper and putting them in scrapbook. She would say ‘what are you doing?’
“I said ‘I’m going to the Olympics one day’. I just really thought I would do it.
“Growing up in Newcastle (northern England), it was the same for us as for kids here. We were far from everything, but the mentality was ‘we’re hard as nails’ — and running there was a lot more popular than it is here, everybody just did it.”
So without another career in mind, Boltz just kept running towards that goal she’d set herself as a child.
“Back then I just wanted to go to the Olympics. I didn’t realise you could make money out of it. I just wanted that (Great Britain team) kit.
“As a teenager I was all right, but I wasn’t anything special. I never got onto the English team as a junior or anything.
“My first English team I would’ve been 20 and I made the (1988 Seoul) Olympics as a 21-year-old. But I always believed and I was getting better every year and saw the numbers dropping down.”
She quickly learned, however, that making an Olympic team was the easy bit, as she was eliminated in the first heat of her first event in the Seoul 3000m.
“I felt a bit embarrassed at first, like I shouldn’t have been there,” she said. “I earned my spot to be there but mentally I wasn’t ready.”
With her hard-as-nails northern England attitude, Boltz bounced back to take silver in the 10,000m at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland.
She spent the next few years after that earning a living on the American road running circuit.
Although she represented her country again at Barcelona in 1992, the most memorable event outside any of the Olympics was the athletics world championships in Tokyo in 1991 where she met her future husband, Daniel Boltz, a Swiss long-distance runner. They were married in 1997.
The couple lived in Miami until Jill finished her professional career in 2000 after winning a local New Year’s Day event. “About a week later I found out I was pregnant.”
She said the plan had been always to move to Australia by heading to Cairns first and, eventually, Canberra.
“Daniel had come to Cairns when the airport opened in the '80s and they had a 10km race to celebrate. So he’d always wanted to come back,” Boltz said.
“He told me Cairns was like Miami, and when we drove through Cairns he went, ‘there you go’.
“After that initial drive through Cairns I thought, ‘yeah we’re going to Canberra’. I said ‘this is not like Miami, let’s go to Canberra’, but he told me to give it a while. So we gave it a year, and then never left.”
Now a northern beaches resident, Jill is getting her fix of athletics with her school initiatives and her running group.
“I don’t know if it’s more nerve-racking. We were just down in Brisbane for state (trials) and you just want to be there for the kids, you know what they’re going through.
“Most of them run well but the odd one that didn’t — they put all that work in and you know it’s very up and down. It’s no reflection on how you’re training or who you are as a person. You’re friends are still going to love whether you come first or last.”