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Alison Shanks - Source: Photosport -
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New Zealand track cycling ace Alison Shanks has just lost her crown.
She was last year's 3,000m Individual Pursuit World Champion and she had come to Denmark, the home of Hans Christian Andersen, to capture her own fairytale. She dreamed of a repeat of her victory in Poland 12 months earlier.
But she was handed a cold Copenhagen reality - that to repeat is harder than to capture. She managed just fourth place in a performance she described as bitterly disappointing.
Now that's where the hyenas come in.
I am covering my first cycling event. I had never met Ali Shanks before. She knew we were around because management told the team the day before that ONE News was coming. Her career has been on the rise and rise until today. She is saddled with the greatest disappointment of her cycling career to date and the bloody cameras are here!
She sidestepped us, with good reason, after her unsuccessful qualifying race, but she was forced to deal with us after her more devastating loss in the ride off for bronze. (If you'd mentioned bronze to her the day before she probably would have called it "burnt orange smorange".)
Alison Shanks stepped up. She spoke with incredibly good grace. She was eloquent. She was honest and she answered my questions with the courage of a champion.
Contrast her to New Zealand's most celebrated sportsmen - the All Blacks. Remember in the black and white days when an All Black scored the match winning try and stoicly jogged back to halfway without showing an ounce of emotion? While today's All Blacks can run, dance and hug each other after a touchdown, try engaging them in an interview and they talk like those black and white days. Emotionless, cliched and insincere. There is rarely an original insight, an original thought and certainly not an answer to any question that you didn't hear in the interview you did with the last player.
They employ media minders to transform All Blacks into a dull and uninteresting grey.
Thank God for second tier sports. They don't have budgets for media trainers and we are all the better for it. Honesty, speaking from the heart and enthusiasm makes for a person we all want to know better and a sport we want to know more about. And the media are just like everyone else. We just want to have a good chat with a real person.
The hyenas don't want to eat you. They just want to get warm by the campfire next to you. I hope Alison Shanks won a few more fans today.
Read more of Paul Hobbs' blogs.
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