In 1980, a nine-year-old Aboriginal girl in Darwin, Nova Peris, watched the Moscow Olympics on television and told her mum that she was going to be an Olympic athlete. Alone at home in Melbourne, Raelene Boyle was also watching those Games on the telly, bawling her eyes out and desperately trying to get drunk. Raelene was twenty-nine years old, a veteran of three Olympic Games, with three silver medals. She’d qualified to run in Moscow also, but by then frustration, confusion and disillusion had set in. For athletes, mid-life crises come much sooner than for most of us.