City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Hard wired, life, death and triathlon, by multiple world champion Emma Carney ; Jane E. Hunt

eng

Includes bibliographical references

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

Hard wired

bibliography

by multiple world champion Emma Carney ; Jane E. Hunt

life, death and triathlon

Multiple triathlon world champion Emma Carney dreamed of becoming an Olympian as a child, converted from running to triathlon as a young adult, won the 1994 Triathlon World Championships as an unknown rookie, and set her sights on the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Yet Carney's autobiography Hard Wired starts with a dramatic first-person account of her experience of Ventricular Tachycardia in 2004, setting up a story that is about much more than the pursuit of Olympic glory. She details the peculiarities of the Carney family before narrating her athletic rise to fame and dominance on the international triathlon circuit from 1995. Carney presents the two years before the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games as ones of heightened conflict with Australian triathlon officialdom, athletic struggle with injury and fatigue, a relentless search for ways to improve and miraculous performances under duress. This section concludes with a forensic analysis of the controversial selection and appeals process that saw Carney's Olympic dream evaporate. That is not the end of Carney's story. In a series of raw and moving chapters Carney struggles to come to terms with non-selection, a life-threatening cardiac condition, and her older sister's death from cancer. Carney locates her failed marriage in the emptiness of those years. Carney's younger sister also dies - briefly - due to a heart condition. Describing the life and death struggle to save her younger sister, Carney embodies her own refusal to give up in the face of adversity. In the closing pages of Hardwired Carney is hopeful - she has a child whom she adores and finds resolution to unrealised athletic dreams with Hall of Fame recognition. Looking to the future, she affirms the central themes in her story - the world of international triathlon, which her dominant performances as an athlete helped to shape, and family