Grigorieva jumps at chance to live again

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http://www.smh.com.au/news/athletics/gr ... 33454.html

Grigorieva jumps at chance to live again

By Jessica Halloran
March 16, 2006

THERE were days when Tatiana Grigorieva would sit in the dark and grieve. Those days when she stayed in bed, shunned the sunshine and felt it impossible to venture outside were her lowest.

She says it was a dark time. But she needed those troubling hours to become who she is today. "Basically the last two years was when I was reborn," Grigorieva said. "I died and I was reborn."

Since her marriage break-up in mid-2004 Grigorieva says she's learnt to be independent and is stronger than she's ever been.

When she split with Viktor Chistiakov her spirit crumbled and she almost lost her will to pole vault. "I found myself in a very difficult situation," she said. "I had a choice to give up or do something about it. And I wasn't about to give up."

When Grigorieva came to Australia from Russia she was given a picture of a frog stuck in a hawk's mouth. "It's already in the mouth but the frog's hand is coming out of the mouth and holding the bird by the neck. The saying on it is, 'never ever give up'. There's always a way out. So I tried to find a way out. Once I realised my old life was never going to come back to me again, I started to build up my new life."

She moved from Adelaide to the Gold Coast, where she fell in love with the sea and taught herself how to surf. She was lonely but gradually made friends and has become close to two families on the coast. She has done lots of soul searching. "And looking for the answers to the questions that I had," she said. Importantly she started to do things her own way in her new life.

"I've got a new approach to my professional life. I've changed my training routine. I changed my mental approach to what I am doing as well. There's been lot of big changes. I think it was a difficult two years but I think it was a productive two years as well.

"Unless you push yourself out of the comfort zone you are never going to improve. It all happened against my will. But I'm pretty happy it's happened. It was a massive learning curve."

While her personal life was dealt a crushing blow in 2004 she was also struggling to jump high. The Olympic silver medallist and Manchester Commonwealth Games gold medallist could not jump high enough in 2004 to make the Athens Olympic team. Hamstring and personal troubles plagued her lead-up to Athens and she contemplated quitting pole vaulting. Her Italy-based coach Vitali Petrov was her rock and encouraged her to keep going.

In 2005 she broke her finger but made the final at the world championships and at a meeting in London jumped 4.47 metres, her best vault for nearly four years.

And now she is in Melbourne, reborn and ready to defend her Commonwealth Games gold medal. But she has new rival, Kym Howe, who leapt to a Commonwealth record of 4.61 in Canberra on Australia Day this year.

"She's ranked No.1 in the Commonwealth," Grigorieva said. "I'm ranked No.3. But big competition is always different from anything else and it is all decided on the day. I'm going to have lots of my friends watching, and that's very exciting because not very often do I have my best friends watching me compete."

Asked to compare the woman who jumped high enough to become the darling of the 2000 Olympics to who she is today, Grigorieva takes time to think.

"Tatiana from Sydney? I would like to think I'm a bit more mature now … Hopefully I'm wiser. I'm still loving what I'm doing."