Photo Credits: Victorian Institute of Sport

Article preface:

As part of the second edition of the Elixir Sports spotlight series, I was fortunate enough to speak with Australian Olympic racewalker Jemima Montag. 

At the young age of 24 years old, Montag has already established quite the impressive resume. 

She recently competed at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, representing her home country, and finished sixth in the 20km event. Other athletic accomplishments include winning the gold medal at the 2018 Commonwealth Games in Queensland, Australia. Montag is also an International Olympic Committee (IOC) Young Leader, with her ‘Play On’ project, which addresses the participatory barriers that lead adolescent girls to drop out of sports. 

As if her plate wasn’t already full, Montag is also currently enrolled in medical school at the University of Melbourne.

In our conversation, Montag discusses her childhood beginnings in athletics, her experience training for and participating in the Olympics and her passion for supporting community-focused initiatives, particularly through sport.

Early Beginnings – Her Introduction to Racewalking

Jemima Montag comes from a sports-oriented familial background; her mother competed in track & field as a 400-meter hurdler, and her father played Australian rules footy and cricket. Despite her parents’ athletic prowess and background, Montag came to discover her passion for racewalking without any added pressure from her family. 

“I’m the oldest of three girls, and [my parents] sort of threw us into a whole range of sports. But we were really generalists growing up, so sport wasn’t even my favorite hobby. There was also music and dance, and the academic side of life was also important to me. I feel like I could’ve gone in a number of directions and didn’t really pick one until the end of high school.”

Montag fell in love with racewalking while taking part in Little Athletics, an Australian activity program involving modified athletics events for children aged 3 to 16.

“After having tried a whole bunch of team sports and sports that required speed and power, I was not so great at any of those. And then trying endurance running and race walking in Little Athletics, I was finally like, ‘I can get a medal in something, I can stand on the podium — this feels nice.’”

Successful role models and athletes within the world of Australian racewalking were major influences that inspired her to take up the sport. 

“We’ve had a number of Olympic medals in the last decade or so. And I think that meant that as an eight-year-old at Little Athletics, I could look up to these people representing Australia at the time at the Olympics and think, ‘there’s a really visible path and I could follow it.’”

I asked Montag if she could comment on certain misconceptions that people may have about racewalking, given the complex and difficult technique involved in the sport. 

“I think it is something that’s quite peculiar, but it is more challenging than running. And I can say that because I do both. You’ve got much less momentum with that straight knee. And the heel-toe landing means that there’s a whole lot less force that you’re putting into the ground and getting back up. You’ve got the judges watching that may disqualify you from the race, adding another layer of challenge.” 

Perhaps the term ‘racewalking’ should be labeled as a misnomer, as onlookers are often surprised by the sport’s pace.

“There’s a difference between power walking and racewalking, and racewalking is very close to running in terms of speed. I think one of the main misconceptions is about how fast it is. I get told every single day by the everyday runner, ‘Oh, you might walk faster than I run.’ And I feel like responding with ‘Yes, I’m quite sure that I do,’ because our race paces are anything from 4:00/km to 4:20/km, which is like 15km/hour.”

And while pop culture may poke fun at racewalking’s unique motion, Montag is able to take the witticisms in stride.

“We’ve got some television shows here in Australia, like Kath and Kim for example— and other comedians around the world — sort of making fun of racewalking. I think that ties into the general public’s perception of how silly it looks when they really overemphasize the hip action. None of that really gets to me. I’m more than happy to laugh.” 

Participating in the Olympics During a Global Pandemic

Last summer, Montag competed on the biggest stage, the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, for which she had to embrace the challenges of preparing herself physically and mentally to counter the suboptimal circumstances produced by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I had done a lot of work with my school psychologist to be able to deal with that nervous energy that I expected to feel on the start line. It was terrifying to be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with these women that I’d idolized my entire career — and some of them are up to 10 years older than me. It was also boiling hot, about 33 degrees at about 70% humidity. So those are things we trained for, we had done a lot of heat chamber work and sauna work, we’d sat in an icebox before the race, hyper-hydrated. All these physiology interventions to cope with the heat was another factor that added to the enormity of it.” 

The results paid off, as she finished sixth despite being ranked 16^th prior to the race, based on season bests.

“When conditions are tough, when it’s really hot and humid, when COVID has disrupted people’s training regimens in the lead-up, when people don’t have family around, when it’s the Olympics and the whole world is watching, people can be off their game. And it really comes down to how well you can manage up here in your brain.”

Community Initiatives – Increasing Women’s Participation in Sport

In addition to being a world class athlete, Montag has always maintained a passion for community service, whether it was working part-time for The One Box, a food security charity, or organizing fundraisers while in school. 

Montag was nominated as an IOC Young Leader, a testament to her longstanding passion for social impact. She is among the twenty-five young individuals who receive funding to create sport-based social businesses in their areas of interest that align with sustainable development goals. 

With the knowledge that teenage girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys, Montag launched a pilot project with the backing of the IOC, designed to combat the participatory barriers she experienced first-hand in her late teens: “For me as an adolescent girl, I pretty much gave up at about the age of 17 or 18, there were just too many challenges that are often unique to young women.”

It’s aptly named “Play On,” an allusion to the common sporting term yelled by referees to continue the gameplay after athletes come to a halt, thinking that something is wrong (e.g. a foul or injury). Instead of creating a motivational, female-oriented style Instagram page, Montag wanted to create a more educational website outlining the guidelines that helped her return to her sport after quitting. 

“The key things that have helped me have been learning key lessons about female athlete health, nutrition, and mental health through things like podcasts and finding awesome women experts on social media, or reading their books. Equipping myself with all this knowledge helps me overcome any challenges that I encounter, and therefore stay in sport.” 

Montag thus built a team of 14 women experts from diverse backgrounds who specialize in the aforementioned areas, with female athlete health, nutrition, mental health, and inclusive spaces making up the website’s four main modules.

“Together through the last year or so, we’ve hopped on Zoom. They’ve [each] done about a 20-minute presentation, which I’ve recorded, and [I’ve] compiled all those different topics into the form of a website and call it ‘Play On.’ […] I’m hoping that this resource and the mentoring that I can do with the young girls that I offer it to is their symbol that even if they’ve come to a stop suddenly and they’re feeling like quitting or something’s wrong, […] you can play on. Here’s the knowledge and skills from the women who have come before you, and here’s all the support for you to continue enjoying physical activity.”

According to research conducted by the UK-based charity Women in Sport, girls encounter personal, social, and contextual barriers preventing them from engaging with sport at the same rate as boys. For instance, 29% of girls aged 14-16 say not being good at sport stops them from taking part in the school sport, and due to the perception that sports are for boys, 80% of girls feel they do not belong in sport.

This is a shame, as the long-term positive effects of playing sports are evident, as research conducted by Ernst & Young in 2015 revealed that 94% of women in C-Suite positions have a background in sport. 

The success of Montag’s “Plan On” initiative, which has been offered to a few local girls sporting clubs in her community, will be gauged by measuring enjoyment and participation levels to target the issue of dissipation. Furthermore, surveys are to be provided measuring young female participants’ baseline knowledge around the four main themes in order to evaluate how to properly tweak the modules so that the message comes across in a clearer way.

While the website’s key emphasis is to retain young girls’ involvement in sports, Montag believes in the power of sport to elevate young women and potentially bring about positive change on a wider societal level.  

“How that connects back to the broad goal of the IOC Young Leaders with connecting to the SDGs is that I have been able to see that women and girls in sport develop that confidence, that teamwork, even just having women and girls in sport visibly [has benefits]. I think it really can shift things from a gender equality point of view because we’re seeing women in visible leadership roles. We’re seeing them hopefully earning the same amount of money as their male counterparts going forward, and all of those personal skills, like confidence and feelings of empowerment —I really think you can start on the sporting field, and it translates across how society functions.”

Big Future Plans

Montag has an exciting future ahead of her. This year, she will be competing in the Track & Field Championship in Oregon, as well as in the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, England. Moving forward, she will attempt to build on her solid performance in Tokyo and prepare for the 2024 and 2028 Olympics in Paris and Los Angeles, respectively.

“I’ve got two more in me as long as my body holds up and I don’t get injured too much. And it’d be amazing to get on the podium at one or both of those. That’s certainly what my coach is starting to talk about and what the Australian athletics is funding me to do — to anchor those medals next time. I feel like I’m well-set-up, I’ve got the ingredients there, [a] really strong support team of family and professionals. And if we made sixth work with all those interruptions and [with me] being quite young, then I’m sure we can make a medal work at either Paris or LA.” 

Montag has long emphasized how female role models in sport were integral to her success. Perhaps now, young girls in Australia will now have one more to look up to.