BARBER Kelsey-Lee

General
EYES ON TOKYO
She plans to use her experience from the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro to help improve her performance at the 2020 Games in Tokyo. Her training was disrupted ahead of the 2016 Games due to a stress fracture in her back, and she was eliminated during the qualifying stage of the javelin competition. "I had by no means the ideal preparation for Rio. I had delivered a childhood dream to qualify, but until you are in that environment you don't realise that the medallists are only a very small portion of what happens at an Olympics. Rio wasn't great for me. I really have to turn that around and make Tokyo my best, and I'm going in saying that my goal for this Olympics is to be on the podium." (olympic.org, 02 Nov 2019)

HUSBAND AS COACH
She is coached by her husband Mike Barber, who she met while she was training at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra in 2014 and later took on as her full-time coach. "Those lines can get blurry at times because athletics is part of what we love, but we're both aware that when we start to talk about it too often we can call each other out, 'Okay, that's enough javelin talk for tonight, let's watch a movie'. We've always been diligent to separate work time and home time and it works because I have so much respect for Mike as a coach. When I rock up to training, I'm there to listen, to learn, and for that partnership to be holistic in the way I act as an athlete. When it comes home, we try to leave coaching at the door." (spikes.worldathletics.com, 14 May 2020; worldathletics.org, 29 May 2020; 7news.com.au, 24 Apr 2020)

POSITIVE MINDSET
She says that thinking positively and concentrating on processes rather than results helps her focus during competitions. "Whenever competitions start up, the lesson I'll take from last year [2019] is the value of self-belief. My whole career, I believed that I could one day win a world title, but last year was when I finally matched my body to that belief. The lesson now is to hold on to that belief. Because even in situations when you're down to the last throw, sometimes that's all you need. Using positive language and mindset and making it be process-driven rather than result-driven is so important. You have one more opportunity to let your body do what it does really well. You need to find that element on the runway which I do really well when I stick to my process." (spikes.worldathletics.com, 14 May 2020; the-riotact.com, 21 Nov 2019)

FROM SOUTH AFRICA TO AUSTRALIA
She was born in East London, South Africa and moved to Corryong, VIC, Australia in 2000 with her family. (spikes.worldathletics.com, 14 May 2020; olympics.com.au, 30 Jul 2019)

She became the first Australian athlete to win a gold medal in javelin at a world championships when she triumphed at the 2019 edition in Doha, Qatar. The result saw her become the second Australian to win world championship gold in a throwing event after Dani Stevens' triumph in discus at the 2009 edition in Berlin, Germany. (SportsDeskOnline, 10 Mar 2021; abc.net.au, 01 Oct 2019)