The path to Paris
Camille French had just two chances to convince selectors of her Olympic marathon credentials, writes Richard Walker. Could she stake a claim?
On a hot February afternoon at Hamilton’s Porritt Stadium, few are out in the middle. An older chap is resting under the shade of a tree on the bank, and a man with a shotputter’s huge girth is going through his paces in the distance with, presumably, his coach.
Closer up, a young guy with his cap on backwards is pounding the 100m. He’s not built like a sprinter, and pulls up heaving at the end of each run.
Then there is Camille French, stepping it out in lane three, blonde mane bouncing behind her as her long stride carries her repeatedly around the track.
A group of schoolgirls who have turned up for a training session give her a respectful distance, keeping half an eye on her as she scoots past them. Do they know what they are looking at?
It’s not effortless, she’s breathing ever louder as she comes up the home straight. But she’s not slowing, either, and the pace is quick, about a 76, 77second pace per lap, with some faster ones thrown in. Extrapolate that, and you’re chewing up 5km in under 16 minutes.
Four 1200-metre repetitions, jogging a lap between each one, followed by eight 400m laps alternating between 72s and 75s pace.
Those are the times you need when you have the Olympic marathon in your sights. And French, 33, has the Paris Olympics in her sights.
She ran her first marathon last December, clocking 2h 26m 08s at Valencia in Spain. That bettered the Olympic qualifying standard by 42 seconds. It is the second fastest ever by a New Zealand woman.
Today’s training session in the blazing sunshine is part of her buildup to her second marathon, in Japan. That is her one remaining chance to convince the selectors to send her to Paris at the end of July. Beating the qualifying time is not enough in New Zealand; the guidelines say you have to be capable of finishing in the top 16, with top-eight potential. At Valencia, French finished 31st.
Two races, that’s it.
French was born for this, born to run. Instinctively competitive, she’s had a coach since the age of 8 after her talent was spotted young in Cambridge.
You can glimpse it in miniature, on a cloudy February morning outside her 1920s bungalow home, in the form of her daughter Sienna.
The 20-month-old is a study in perpetual motion, roaming around the Hamilton property. Scrapes on her legs testify to her adventurousness, and she is triumphant when, in the arms of her mother, she unlocks the front door with a key.
Sienna is a chip off the old block, right down to her tiny New Balance shoes, courtesy of French’s long-term sponsor. She stubbornly thinks she can do everything, French says.
Camille’s own mother, Cheryl Buscomb, helping out with some child-minding as she does twice weekly, contemplates the similarity. “Camille was the same, weren’t you? So determined.”
Camille’s sister Tessa is more chill, but perhaps Cheryl has her own share of stubbornness. She did the Rotorua marathon a few years ago. She came down with an illness three days beforehand but completed the race, despite having to walk the last 10km.
It’s one thing to be competitive and active by nature, it’s another to be the second-fastest New Zealand woman ever over the 5000m, 10,000m and marathon.
That takes a lifetime of preparation. Things like no TV in the house for 14 formative years. Like being on a healthy diet from a young age. Like a chiropractor father who used his skills to help keep her injury-free. Like going on to join a top Australian training squad, the Melbourne Track Club.
But despite all that drive, talent and support, despite how gilded her life may seem, there have been setbacks at the highest level. When Camille was 18, on a running scholarship in America, she got “confident” tattooed on one wrist and “flowing in control” on the other.
Not everything can be controlled, though. Camille Buscomb, as she was then known, missed selection for the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games.
Two years later, when she missed the cut for the Rio Olympics, she took six weeks off running before contacting a coach in Australia to say she would do whatever it took to be at the next Olympics. Training camps in Australia became a regular fixture and she flew everywhere to race.
At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Camille was New Zealand’s only woman runner. She finished 19th in the 10,000m, recording a season’s best 32:10.49, and 14th in her 5000m heat with a time of 15:24.39 – well outside her personal best of 14:58.59.
What most didn’t know was that she spent the two weeks in isolation, deemed a close contact with someone on the plane who had Covid.
There was frustration, too, at a perceived lack of support after she became pregnant. The High Performance Sport NZ $30,000 grant she anticipated did not materialise, replaced by one of $10,000.
Regardless, here she is, bidding for Paris. Mental toughness as much as talent separates the elite, and French has it in abundance.
After Tokyo, Camille and her partner, now husband, Cameron French, talked about having children.
They didn’t want to wait too long because they’d heard exercising at her level can mean conceiving takes longer. They decided the time was right, and Sienna was born in June 2022. These days, Cameron, New Zealand’s fastest-ever 400m hurdler, is a construction project manager clocking up long hours commuting to Auckland.
But nothing extinguished Camille’s drive. Within a couple of months of giving birth, she was back training, this time for the marathon. She could fit the longer distance into family life more easily, given she would be running just a couple of marathons a year.
Those were uncertain times, though. “I always wanted to try and make Paris. But I didn’t know if I could.”
French scrolls through her electronic diary to work out when training restarted. “Here we go,” she says. “Here’s a return to training with my goal ‘Paris 24. Week one, August 15, 2022’.”
It started with a 3km walk-jog, which she recorded as fairly slow but the fastest she had run in a long time. That was followed by a 4km jog, a rest day, a 5km jog on the Thursday, another 5km jog, then 10km on the Saturday followed by a walk on the Sunday.
She did 28km that week, she says, as she continues to flick through what she wrote at the time.
“The buildup begins,” she reads, and laughs at the words. “Oh god!” she exclaims and then resumes reading. “I still feel really excited about running and the prospect about moving up to the marathon really is something I’m keen on. I also think it is more realistic to achieve.
“It’s been about five months since I’ve run. So building back will be a fairly slow process, I would think, but we’ll see. So far my body has healed really well. And I feel good moving again. Really happy with week one.”
She was breastfeeding and still losing weight, but just 10 weeks after she started training, she ran the Auckland half marathon in teeming rain, finishing fourth in 1h 22m.
In January last year, she and Cameron married, and around the same time Sienna weaned herself. It was time to get serious.
It took a while, however, to get up to the training regime of 150-160 kilometres weekly that carried her to the Nagoya marathon in Japan.
That’s a lot of time pounding the pavement and it’s difficult to find running companions with a schedule that fits. Sometimes she does loops of Huntington with support from a friend who cycles alongside her.
Her longest training run before Nagoya was 37k around Hamilton’s northern suburbs, all part of a meticulous schedule worked out with her Australian-based coach, Nic Bideau.
Acouple of weeks after that marathon, French is getting dinner under way at midday. Onions are going in the pot for a slow-cooked meat dish. Today it’s corned beef, which she is slightly embarrassed about – normally it would be the likes of pulled meats or lamb shanks, along with oven-cooked vegetables.
Tabby Shiva, looking remarkably sleek and healthy for a 12-year-old cat, is enjoying the sunshine on a couch in the living room. Sienna is at the park with Cheryl. It’s a scene of ordinariness at odds with French’s far from ordinary life.
The fact it is noon, however, is a minor pointer. Midday meal prepping is the norm. She trains twice daily and doesn’t like getting back from the afternoon session still having to prepare dinner.
Hers is a life full of engagements, but she is generous with her time. In conversation, French is rapidfire, a bundle of diffuse energy as she recalls her second marathon.
The morning of Sunday, March 10, was windy in Nagoya. French went into the women’s marathon in great shape. Everything is set fair for the elite. Flights, hotel, food, transport, it’s all laid on.
She was driven to the course, where she had a changing room with her number on it. Behind her at the start line were the masses, 20,000 women who made their own way there and were doomed to drift further and further behind the top athletes. At 9.10, the race started. The finish line was 42 kilometres and 195m ahead.
Elite marathon runners set out in groups, based on target times. At Nagoya, the front group was aiming for a superquick 2:18 or 2:19. French plumped for the second group of about a dozen, which was aiming for 2:23, 2:24, a good progression from her Valencia time.
But things didn’t go to plan as pacemakers pulled out early. It left her group running on their own, battling the wind. But she felt good. Halfway felt easy.
And then the pace slowed. Runners around her were dropping like flies. That left French with a dilemma. Should she strike out on her own, at the risk of blowing out? Or stay with the everdiminishing group, with the benefit of some protection from the wind?
She stayed.
She is still weighing up whether she could have run the race differently.
“I don’t know whether I should have just tried to go harder and run on my own. I don’t know the answer.”
French ran the last 10km with Italian runner Giovanna Epis. She finished in 2:28:23, a second ahead of Epis, who last year ran 2:23. Frustratingly, she felt fine. It had been too easy, too manageable, and she paid the price of a slow race.
Her time was well down on Valencia, but she finished ninth, in a race that had been disastrous for some and in which the winner ran three minutes slower than her goal. Bideau, who was there at the finish line, told her she’d done well. Valencia had been no fluke. But would Athletics NZ recognise what a strong performance it had been?
She made her case via email, supported by Bideau, and also met with Athletics NZ before the announcement of the Olympic team on April 19. That meeting, on April 5, went well.
French is, in effect, a once-in-adecade talent. The only New Zealand woman faster than her over her three chosen distances is Kim Smith, who was Us-based when she was setting her records about 10 years earlier.
A decade before Smith, Nyla Carroll was setting records for the 5km and 10km, as Anne Audain had done a decade earlier. For the marathon, you have to jump back to the 1980s to find two women setting times faster than Smith, first Mary O’connor, then Lorraine Moller.
Audain, Moller and O’connor were among a golden age of women distance runners in the 80s whose ranks also included Allison Roe and Hamilton-based Dianne Rodger.
They were household names making their mark on the world stage at a time when New Zealand coaching great Arthur Lydiard’s training approach was allpervasive among both women and men.
When Audain, Roe and Moller decided to compete for money at the Cascade Run Off in the US in 1981, a famous act of rebellion, they also helped usher in an era of professionalism. That bedrock is long gone. By the time the young Camille was growing up, her role models were the likes of rowers Rob and Sonia Waddell and cyclist Sarah Ulmer.
Today, French says, there is a lack of distance coaches in New Zealand. Steve Willis, who was employed by Athletics NZ, was not replaced when he left, she says.
Should any of that group of schoolgirls who were at Porritt in February when French was doing laps turn out to be hungry and talented, and ask her how to get to the Olympics, she would probably say, go to another country.
There’s no setup here, she might say. “There’s no-one to coach, there’s no-one to help, there’s no-one to time, there’s no-one to pace.” It’s completely solo.
That begs the question, why is she here?
“Why do I do it?” she says. “I’m in too deep.” She laughs.
Is that her simple answer, she’s in too deep to stop?
“No, I think I felt that before, but now I do it because I want to. I do it because
I enjoy it.” But the question was really about, why here in Hamilton? That’s because of family. “When we decided to have a family. I was like, ‘what is best for us?’ I had to be prepared to not run again, because I didn’t know how I was going to go,” she says.
“I always felt that a family was more important than athletics.”
And it works. There’s the fact it’s largely a home-based career, including online coaching, so she can be around a lot more than if she had an office job.
Helping make it possible are not only her mum, but also Cameron’s family who look after Sienna one day a week, a babysitter she has for two mornings and friends she can call on.
“Maybe when she [Sienna] is older, I could do more of a standard career. But I think at the moment, I’m feeling really fulfilled. I’m still able to be a mum, and then still able to achieve stuff, which is cool. I enjoy that because I don’t feel like I’m being selfish.”
And if you have French’s experience and drive, you don’t need the perfect setup. But she won’t be pushing Sienna to follow in her footsteps. “I don’t want to say she can’t do it. But I think there is a very limited support network for it. And I think maybe I’ll try and encourage something with a bit more of a setup.”
On Tuesday morning this week, Dianne Rodger is looking after Sienna at Porritt while French trains on the track – once again bathed in sunshine. Rodger, who is centre manager for Athletics Waikato Bay of Plenty, has known French for many years, and her son Logan is a good friend of Camille’s and Cameron’s, so she jumped in to help as French returned to training, looking after Sienna at Porritt in the early days and picking it up again now.
Rodger can appreciate French’s intense training regime, knowing how tough it is. In her day, though, there were differences. It’s incredible to think of it, but when she competed at the 1976 Olympics, the longest distance available for women was 1500m. She was 19, inexperienced, and failed to qualify from her heat.
By 1984 at Los Angeles, both the 3000m and marathon were introduced, as women’s distance events belatedly started to arrive. Rodger made the final of the 3000m, qualifying ninth.
It was a crazy race of high drama. The American crowd darling Mary Decker and barefooted South African Zola Budd, running for Great Britain, came into contact with each other at the front of the field just over three laps from the finish. Decker fell and her race was over, while Budd faded to finish out of the medals.
Rodger had meanwhile narrowly avoided a similar collision near the back of the bunch, but it had sent her wide on the track with ground to make up. She still recalls the noise from the hypedup crowd after Decker went down. “[It] always stays with you.”
Rodger finished ninth, as ranked, but given the chaos there’s room to wonder what might have been.
Running was all Rodger ever wanted to do. She forged a career that included road racing in the US, and took in one marathon. She had been dropped from the NZ world cross country team and decided on a whim to run the Long Beach marathon in California to see what it was like. She won and turned her attention to the 1988 New York marathon.
Her form was probably the best it had ever been for distance running, but she got a stress fracture 10 days before the race and had to pull out. “That was it. I gave up after that.”
So Rodger, from that golden generation, is both a trailblazer for French and, depending on how you look at it, a cautionary tale. Injury is an everpresent threat, and there’s no way of knowing what will unfold on race day.
But for French it has all been worth it. Today she is finally training at Porritt not to qualify but to race. On April 19 her name was among the initial 15 athletes announced for Paris, one of only two women runners selected, along with sprinter Zoe Hobbs.
The Olympic marathon, with no pacers, is a very different proposition from Valencia or Nagoya. It’s a hilly course and will be run in the heat of summer.
French thinks top-16 is within her grasp. Each country can send no more than three athletes, regardless of how strong they are in the sport, and the total number of runners is capped at 80.
French has the experience of two marathons under her belt, and these have given her confidence.
The fastest Olympic winning time is 2:23:07, set in 2012. The winning time at Tokyo was 2:27:20.
The scale of the challenge, however, is reinforced by the fact only one New Zealand woman, Lorraine Moller, has medalled in the marathon, a bronze at Barcelona in 1992, in a time of 2:33.59. Moller was 37, four years older than French.
It all comes down to the day. For French, that day is August 10, taking on 79 competitors around the hills of Paris, with her family in support, and a lifetime of preparation behind her.
‘‘Why do I do it? I’m in too deep [to stop]. No, I think I felt that before, but now I do it because I want to. I do it because I enjoy it.’’
Camille French on her motivation