Olympic shot put legend Dame Val Adams has officially hung up her size-14 throwing shoes, after two decades at or near the top of the world.
After two Olympic gold medals, eight world titles (four outdoors, four indoors), three Commonwealth Games crowns and two babies, Dame Val, 37, has announced her retirement from athletics, capping her incredible career with an emotional bronze medal at Tokyo last year.
"After winning my bronze medal in Tokyo, I contemplated whether to embark on another campaign," she says through tears. "I took some time to really process this thought to see if it was something I actually wanted to do again.
"My heart, mind and body simply answered the question for me, so it is time for me to call it a day."
Adams burst onto the international stage as 2001 world youth champion and added the world junior title the following year, while also taking Commonwealth silver as a teenager. She won her first Commonwealth gold four years later at Melbourne, her first world title at Osaka in 2007 and tasted Olympic success at Beijing 2008.
Dame Val's second Olympic gold came in controversial circumstances, when she was comprehensively out-thrown by Belarus thrower Nadzeya Astaphuck at London 2012, but was later elevated, when her rival returned a positive drugs test.
Significantly, despite her dominance of the past 20 years, Adams (21.24m) ranks only 22nd on world all-time rankings, 1.39m behind Soviet world recordholder Natalya Lisaovskaya from 1987. Most of those above above her date back to the 1970s and '80s, an era notorious for suspected doping.
After losing gold at Rio 2016 on the last throw of the competition, Adams took time out of the sport to have daughter Kimoana, returned to take silver at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, then gave birth to son Kepaleli, before another comeback for Tokyo - her fifth Olympics.
Dame Val has been named NZ Sportswoman of the Year seven times, twice taking out Halberg Supreme honours, and was 2014 World Athlete of the Year.
Famously, she shares her champion genes with 17 siblings, including Paralympic shot put gold medallist Lisa Adams, whom she will continue to coach, and NBA basketball centre Steven Adams.
"Representing Aotearoa for the last 20 years has given me so much joy," she says. "As my life's work, I am humbled to show that little New Zealand has what it takes to be the best in the world.
"While today marks the end of my shot put career, athletics will always be a part of my life. I have given my heart and soul to the sport, loved and nurtured it from a young age, watched it grow as a girl now to a woman, fully grown.
"It is beautiful and exciting, at times hard and unforgiving, but always honest, ever inquiring."
After her third place at Tokyo, Dame Val wept over the emotional toll her most recent campaign - made more difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic - had taken. She did not immediately rule out another tilt at this year's Commonwealth Games at Birmingham, but clearly her priorities had changed.
"Lots of things have happened, with pandemics and medical illnesses within my own family with my baby," she said. "To be able to overcome those things, make some really difficult choices, move cities to make this dream come true... and here we are.
"My children don't know what's going on and I appreciate that. If I can get my children on the phone, and I can show them animals or I can show them colours, and I ask them 'what is this?' and they repeat it back to me, that brings me so much joy."
