Tamsyn Lewis: You Go Girl! 12/3/2008
Tamsyn Lewis is an Australian Athlete who unfortunately is very pretty and pretty outspoken when asked her opinions. These two things have caused her some grief during her career particularly as she has not been able to live up to everyone else’s expectations of her athletic capabilities. One coach went as far as labelling here as “A B-Grade athlete and a C-grade Celebrity.”
Despite being disappointed to the point of wanting to quit and just walk away, altogether from Athletics after comments like this, she continued on and recently won the World Indoor Championship over 800 metres. This is not her top preferred distance and yet she still managed to finish two places ahead of the recognised world Champ over that distance.
And so the Compliments are finally flying her well aren’t they? Well not from all it seems.
In the Melbourne Herald Sun paper on the 12th of March, someone wrote in saying,’ She did extremely well in winning the World indoor Championship but, in a tactically ran race, her time was poor. It would be nowhere near good enough to reach an Olympic final.”
Now this person may yet turn out being correct, but at least Tamsyn is winning and not just against lesser runners either. So why is she not getting acknowledged by all for this? Why do we continually belittle people, even when they are winning? Even when Tamsyn runs her best ever time over that distance and wins, someone is still not happy!
Instead of discouraging people all the time, why don’t we try and encourage them once in a while too. Again I am not talking about false platitudes or giving false hope, but do give credit where credit is due.
As for Tamsyn Lewis, my advice to her would be, “Keep plugging away there, girl. You have to be in it to win it and if you are in it, who knows what will happen? Remember Steven Bradbury, coming last in a field of 6 Ice-skaters at the 2002 Winter Olympic Final? What happened? He won the Gold, that’s what happened!”
Oh sure, he only won because those in front fell and brought the rest down, but he maintained his balance and finished the race! That’s my advice to all the Tamsyns, and even all the Walters out there too: “Finish the race. Give it your best Shot and finish the race!” You won’t always win but you will never know if you don’t have a go, will you?