My parents wanted me to have every opportunity to participate in life to the fullest, and they encouraged me to take up basketball, a sport in which my height and weight could be a positive attribute. I absolutely loved it. To this day, there is nothing that gets my blood pumping faster than the smell of a freshly bounced basketball in summer. Basketball is one of the only places in the world where being my natural size put me at an advantage. I hardly had to run at all because I was so big and strong that I could lob that kid-size basketball halfway down a court with a simple flick of the wrist. Sure, I wasn’t super quick, but my height did afford me status as a defender. I can still hear the voice of an opposing coach yelling out to his team at a finals match, ‘Get on the big girl! Stay on the big girl!’ I didn’t care what he called me, because on that court I was trying, and winning. On that court I mattered.
My will to win wasn’t limited to basketball.
Although I never saw my Dad pick up the rusty épée and foil that hung in the shed—by the time I came along, he was retired from sport, and just your everyday family-law solicitor with a beard who spent his weekends perusing the Trading Post—I was still well aware that I was, technically, the daughter of A Champion. The sight of his green-and-gold tracksuit in the cupboard next to his suits always filled me with a kind of pride, and one day a happy thought occurred to me: what if I too possessed inside me a kind of … Olympic potential?
But which sport to choose? There were no fencing lessons on offer in my neighbourhood in the 1980s, but the local Rotary Club did run Little Athletics at a nearby oval, so I went along. When they tested all the kids’ various strengths and weaknesses, it became clear that what I was really good at was chucking things, most notably the blue spaceship-shaped object one of the men called a ‘discus’.
I loved the feeling of that little blue spaceship in my hand. I loved knowing there was something I could do that other kids my age could not. The feeling lit me up from the inside and, week after week, I showed up and practised.
In time, I invented my own special pre-throw move: I’d breathe out, nod my head as I dragged my left foot like a bull preparing to charge, then I’d spin my fat little body in three huge circles, yelling, ‘One, two, threeeeeeeeeeeee!’
At night, in bed, I’d imagine myself doing my special move, practising it in my mind and watching that discus fly through the air again and again until I fell asleep, a champion, like my father.
I still practise important things in my head over and over before I fall asleep—piano lines, speeches, dance moves. It’s a habit that has stood me in good stead through all the stages of my career. But I no longer practise The Discus.
By the end of year I’d proven myself worthy and was chosen to throw the discus for our Little Athletics team in the local championships. I remember how proud I felt that day, how I threw just like I’d been practising in my head at night: once, twice and then (whistle) look at her fly! Even before the discus had landed, I knew that I’d won a place.
And I was right.
When my name was called over the loudspeaker and I walked to the podium to collect my ribbon, I thought of my father. It felt so wonderful to be the one who was going to carry on his grand sporting tradition. Everything seemed golden that afternoon.
After the ribbon was pinned to my chest, I turned to walk back to the bleachers, but was stopped by a volunteer who kindly invited me to ‘really enjoy this moment’ and to go and stand with the other champions on the dais.
Listen, when you’re a big kid you get a feeling for maths and volume. It’s a matter of self-preservation. The last thing any fat kid wants to do is draw attention to their size by accidentally breaking someone or something. I looked at the dais and had a very bad feeling. It was made of chipboard, for a start. My dad had taught me that chipboard was no good. So I politely declined.
But the volunteer mistook my hesitation for shyness. Taking me by the hand, she said, ‘Come on, Clare Bowditch, you deserve this! That was a beautiful release. You get up there with the others.’
She was right, I thought. I did deserve this.
So I stepped onto the dais. Looking out at the cheering crowd, noticing the blue sky, the light sunshine, feeling the cool wind on my face and neck, I experienced three of the happiest seconds of my entire childhood.
Four seconds in, I heard the sound of something cracking, only to realise it was the dais beneath me. I should have known it was all just too good to last. I felt my feet hit the grass and, with them, my dignity.
Although I tried to ham it up—to make the crowd laugh by jumping up and out of that hole like a pogo stick and making crazy faces as I ran in little circles of adrenaline on the grass—deep inside I felt weak with shame. I already knew what the older boys at school would say when they found out. They’d say, ‘Fatty-boom-bah. Fatty-boom-bah. Fatty-boom-bah.’
By the time I was ten years old I no longer fitted into clothes in the children’s department. Mum now had to take me shopping in the ladies’ section.
I don’t know how I got the idea of going on a diet, but one day in Year Four I came home from school and told my mother that I had had enough.
‘Enough
