HAMMER & SICKER
SPORTSFILE Bennett: Oz horror was down to bottle
Alan Robertson Chris Bennett sat crying his eyes out as he waited for the flight home.
It would be the longest journey of the 28-year- old’s life – despite being out cold for 16 hours of it.
The hammer thrower didn’t board the plane back from Australia with one of Team Scotland’s 44 medals.
Only a sense of frustration at his second successive Commonwealth Games flop and desperation not to see his career defined by it.
So much so he was back training in Glasgow at 9am, 11 hours after he touched down, with Birmingham 2022 in mind.
As far as the Rio Olympian is concerned, the problem isn’t physical, it’s psychological.
Bennett, who failed to make last month’s final Down Under after finishing 10th, said: “I had a near mental breakdown after getting on that flight.
“I did pay for an upgrade and it was still the worst flight I’d ever been on. I took sleeping tablets and was out for the count so I slept 16 hours of the two flights and it was still the longest of my life.
“I’m a very social person and everyone had left by the time I was going. I was sitting at the airport just crying my eyes out – I wanted to go home.
“That was hard but we’re back now, Gold Coast is done, can’t change it. It happened.
“I hated Australia by the end. If it’d gone better it would have been fine but my God it was terrible on the way home.
“The main thing that went wrong was competition so I wanted to train and make it right but couldn’t because they closed the facilities.
“As athletes you can take disappointment but when it’s as bad as that it’s not nice. You question why you still do the sport but if you let moments like that define you, you’re quitting when it gets hard.”
And Bennett isn’t in the mood for quitting. Neither is he about to trot out cliches of failure being fuel to the fire.
After all, Gold Coast had been billed as his shot at redemption after failing to make the final in Glasgow.
He’s started working with psychologist Dr Zara Lipsey again after she helped him when his dad and coach died leading up to the 2014 Games.
Bennett said: “I need to take emotion out of it as when there’s emotion, there’s pressure – or I feel pressure – and my bum collapses. It’s a hard one to take. I have four years to fix it.
“I don’t want to be defined as somebody who has been to three Games… you hear these guys who are 50, 60 years old, ‘Oh I used to play football, I had trials for Celtic’, you sound like one of those guys.
“You want to win medals. You feel embarrassed when you come back with nothing.”
Bennett heads to Germany this week before targeting a top- two slot at European Championship trials in June, the start of his journey to the next Commonwealths.
He said: “It’s a clean slate for four years now so whatever happens, happens.”