If Valerie Vili wins an Olympic gold medal on Super Saturday, her mind may track back to two poignant moments.
The first was eight years ago on a couch at an Auckland hospice where the then 15-year-old was keeping a vigil at the bedside of her mother Lilikia.
"We were watching the opening ceremony for the 2000 Sydney Games and I remember thinking, 'one day I want to be part of that'," Vili recalls.
"The next morning mum passed away. At that moment, it hit me. It was pretty amazing. I thought, 'I want to be there' [at the Olympics]."
The second was in an ancient amphitheatre near Athens in 2004. Valerie Adams (as she was then) was a teenager when she competed at Olympia, venue of the original Olympics.
"We all learn from our disappointments," she says. "I was a teenager back then and I finished eighth. I am 23 now. I have so much more experience under my belt."
In New Zealand we have venerated Vili as a certainty for Olympic gold since her world championship triumph in Osaka last October. She just shaded Belarus' Nadzeya Ostaphcuk in a duel which served as an Olympics precursor.
Ostapchuk . . . with a name like that, she was born to biff solid orb objects. Like Vili, she has a happy knack of tossing a 4kg metal ball out beyond 20m.
The Belarussian has delivered four of the top five throws in the world in 2008 – her streak broken only by her compatriot Natalie Mikhnevich. She has hurled the shot out to 20.98m, 20.90, 20.33 and 20.23. Vili's best have been 20.13 and 20.0m in Auckland late last summer. She recorded 19.41m at a pre-Olympics meet in Beijing last May.
Vili acknowledges Ostapchuk will be her "biggest rival". "But, to be honest, everyone will be up for it . . . you can never under- estimate anybody when you go into a competition. Ostaphcuk has been putting in some big throws lately, but that won't change the way I approach the competition."
Vili's formula is to toss out a big throw on her first or second attempt, then watch the rest of the field scramble to catch up – if they can. "You can never plan to make your biggest throw your last throw," she says.
However, she's had to at times, including at Osaka where she ousted Ostapchuk.
That is why Vili means no disrespect to Ostapchuk, Mikhnevich, Germany's Nadine Kleinert or any other rival when she says her greatest threat is "not to throw your best".
Vili can be an emotional person – after the event. When she won her Commonwealth Games gold in Melbourne two years ago, she looked skyward in Lilika's memory.
At the height of her duel with Ostapchuk in Osaka last year, her coach Kirsten Hellier exhorted her to "do it for Dad", in memory of her father who passed away the previous May.
But during competition, Vili is in the zone, the epitome of mental toughness.
Vili has said she "owed it to my mum" to persist with her sporting career, "to continue and go as hard as I could" in the early years after Lilika's passing.
Her fast-track path took her to Athens and her first Olympic experience, bitter- sweet though it was. Four years older, she is stronger, physically and mentally, and in total lockdown mode.
Just her and Hellier, her trusted coach and friend, against the world. "Being world champion doesn't mean much at an Olympic Games," she says. "All it means is that more people than normal will be trying to take you down.
"There are no second chances at an Olympics."