Jana Pittman’s past Olympic pain is the motivation driving her towards Rio.
The two-time 400m hurdles world champion, who ditched the track in 2012 for bobsleigh and a place at last year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, is putting the spikes back on in a quest to make next year’s summer games.
Typically forthright, Pittman is taking an all-or-nothing approach to her Olympic bid, and is aiming to qualify in her pet 400m hurdles event rather than just trying to secure a spot in Australia’s 4x400m relay team.
Pittman says she isn’t just hoping to make up the numbers in Rio, admitting a lack of Olympic success is the one black spot in her career record.
The 32-year-old debuted at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and ran fifth in the 400m hurdles final at Athens in 2004, just one week after undergoing surgery on her knee.
But injuries cost her spots at the 2008 and 2012 games and it is that unfinished business which has motivated her for one last crack at Olympic glory.
“I’ve been very lucky to have a very successful career at a world championship, Commonwealth Games level, but I grew up as a child only ever wanting to go to the Olympics,” Pittman told AAP.
“For me it’s the ultimate of all achievements … it just has that beautiful pinnacle of Olympic games attached to it.
“As Australians we really put that on a pedestal.”
Since Sochi, Pittman has shed the 14 kilograms of muscle she stacked on for her bobsleigh career and also given birth to five-month old daughter Emily.
Pittman credits a nutrition program from an American company as both the saviour of her career and the key to transforming her from a track sprinter to a bobsledder.
She will once again use the company in her Rio bid, with her first competitive race slated for December.
A successful return to athletics will also create a dilemma with the 2018 Winter Olympics clashing with the Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in the same year.
“It would be wonderful to come out and win the Commonwealth Games, that’d be my third Commonwealth Games title, and then say ‘I’m done’ but I really do love bobsled,” she said.
“It really comes down to how the next 12 months progress from a track perspective.”
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