Esti Olivier – battle-hardened by life’s hard knocks and ready for Olympic debut

Esti Olivier. (Photo: Team South Africa)

By Gary Lemke in Paris

5 Aug 2024

Canoeist Esti Olivier has endured a turbulent few years, but is ready to make her mom proud in Paris.

Esti Olivier’s mom will be in Paris to watch her daughter compete in her first Olympics. As much as it’s a cliché, it really is a dream come true for both.

That could well be the case for so many Olympians who have defied the odds and obstacles that life puts in the way on the journey there.

Yet there was a time, not long ago, that neither would have expected to be at the Games, let alone share the experience. The canoeing venue where Olivier will be taking to the water is Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium, about 40km from the Olympic athletes village, but close to Disneyland Paris theme park.

It’s the land of fairytales. You’ll see why.

Olivier has been fighting demons over the past few years, including a business that fell apart, heart issues, ongoing depression, and the shattering cancer diagnoses of her mother and aunt.

Read more: Olympic Games Paris 2024

As if that wasn’t enough, there weren’t funds for her trip to the 2022 world championships in Canada and, seemingly, no more hope to cling to, to fulfil an Olympic dream.

Her mind led her down dark alleyways into areas where there’d be a voice in her ear saying, “it will be easier if you finish it all now”.

Many will know her as Esti van Tonder, the African Games champion from 2019 and a powerhouse in the kayak sprints.

Now married to Gerhard Olivier, the 31-year-old has finally got the opportunity to show on the biggest stage what the canoeing fraternity has known over the past years – that the South African belongs in this company, competing with the very best international athletes on a planet that is covered by 70% water.

Of the competition that lies ahead, she says: “I’m really relaxed. I’m racing the same people as at World Cups and World Champs, so I’m not racing a brand new crop of athletes. I’ll be here racing my own race, proving that the work that I’ve done and the hardships I’ve gone through are worth every single stroke.”

Hardships

The tears come easily for Olivier. It’s a healthy outlet. There’s no sense of embarrassment, and she’s a role model for the realities sports stars face outside their competition.

Instead of a South African flag on the door to the rooms of the Team SA psychologists in Paris, there should be a poster of Esti Olivier.

She leaps into the conversation, unafraid.

“It’s important to address the psychology side of sport. Mental health had been my barrier up until the point I faced it.

“I didn’t think facing the reality that was breaking me would be so difficult. It’s important for people to understand that aspect of sport. It’s not just the shiny bits that people see on the podium.

“More awareness might encourage similar sufferers to get the help they need, or at least realise they need help.”

It feels like it’s been a lifetime since we saw Olivier (then Van Tonder) with a bounce in her step while carrying her canoe out the water after winning gold at the 2019 African Games in Morocco.

Tokyo 2020 beckoned. The Olympics were calling. Except, they weren’t.

Covid-19 came calling instead.

Those Games were postponed by a year due to the global pandemic, and then came the heartbreak that canoeing wouldn’t be part of Team SA’s representation. Van Tonder’s flame was extinguished. More body shots were to follow. In every sense of the expression.

Heart scare

In 2021 Olivier had been in Covid-19 quarantine and started a prescribed return to the programme after the pandemic. She noticed that after her first week of training her heart rate was fluctuating wildly.

“One day it was resting at 40, then 90, then 80, then 120, and I said, ‘what’s happening?’ I hadn’t over-trained. I went to the heart specialist and took medication to settle things,” she said.

“Then, last year on 27 December I had yet another relapse, the day after I was going on holiday. It came suddenly. I came off the water and thought ‘this is it. This is the end. I’m having a heart attack. I was dizzy, had chest pains, and felt terrible.’”

Her condition was a cardiac arrhythmia called atrial fibrillation, or A-Fib, and is non life-threatening, and affects millions of people around the world. Many international athletes have experienced the condition.

Esti Olivier with the Olympic mascot. (Photo: Team South Africa)

However, while common, it often requires an ablation procedure to correct. The attacks started to come, as if she didn’t have enough to deal with.

We’re filling in the gaps from the African Games champion in 2019 to Paris 2024.

Covid-19 came and eventually went, sucking up most of 2020 and 2021. She wasn’t selected for Tokyo. She got married in July 2021 around the time that the Games were taking place. She had already started experiencing sporadic A-Fib episodes.

They didn’t prevent her from qualifying for the world champs that August in Lake Banook, Canada.

But, what people didn’t know was that she had reached rock bottom.

“There was no way I could afford to go to Canada, it was simply too expensive,” Olivier said. “I had also come off a series of disappointing races and I wasn’t getting over this heart thing.

“That’s when guardian angels stepped in. My flight was covered and a friend of a friend of a friend put me in charge with two special people called Fred and Helen, and I stayed with them. I was made to feel so special by the entire community. It felt like a second home to me.

“Everything aligned there in Canada and it was part of my healing process. I said to myself, ‘you can still do this’. That was my turning point. I started seeing the light.”

More blows

However, life hadn’t finished kicking her yet. While she was competing in the 2023 World Championships in Duisburg, Germany, her mom was rushed to ER.

“I knew she was ill before we left South Africa, but we didn’t realise how sick,” Olivier says. “My mom’s colon had burst. They found she had stage four cancer. They ended up saying they couldn’t do anything.” She pauses and looks blankly into the distance.

“Three days after that I got back from Europe and heard my aunt had sarcoma cancer and needed her leg to be amputated. We had to face that with her. All of that short-term stress triggered me again, and it was a horrendous time.”

That was a year ago.

Olivier had been dealing with mental struggles for a large chunk of her life.

“When I met Gerhard, I was 18 and I was actually quite suicidal. For many years I never understood why he stuck around because I was this crazy chick and I was just dark and terrible to be around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hw5xlvbiBPI

“This last year was similar, except for the fact that I had promised myself I would never allow myself to fall that deep again. That was why I was able to identify this was a bad spiral.”

Her cardiac issues are a thing of the past and she’s in great physical shape for these Paris Games, where those dreams are coming true. But the tears are never far away.

“There are so many triggers. I cried last night watching a movie,” she said. “There’s a scene where the mom had cancer and she was holding a living memorial. That hit hard.

“Although my mom’s still fighting stage four terminal cancer, she’ll be in Paris experiencing my first Olympics with me. Not knowing what the future holds is a trigger, but a positive trigger. I’ll be racing for her.”

Indeed, she will be. As well as countless others still struggling to face reality and to come to terms with the fact that they need help. Esti Olivier is an example that you can fight. You must fight. The alternative is too ghastly to contemplate. And if you ever doubt there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, give Esti a call. DM

Gary Lemke is in Paris as part of Team SA

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