The women who told the truth about Olivia Podmore's tragic death

Otago Daily Times

29-04-2025

By Dana Johannsen
Once adversaries, Nicholle Bailey and Jess Massey found themselves united in a shared goal following the suspected suicide of a Olympic cyclist Olivia Podmore: To tell the truth for their friend. Dana Johannsen reports.
Nicholle Bailey rounded the corner of the grocery aisle at Cambridge Countdown and stopped in her tracks.
She thought about reversing course, but she had already been spotted. Inwardly, she cursed the poor timing of her evening supermarket run.
Soon she was cursing out loud.
The woman before her offered a polite "hello", which was enough to tip an incensed Bailey over the edge.
"I told her to 'stay the f*** away from me' and said she was just a trouble-making bitch," Bailey says, cringing at the memory.
To athletes within Cycling New Zealand's elite programmes, Jess Massey was who you wanted by your side in a crisis - she was the problem-solver, the fixer, the rock. She knew her way around a spreadsheet too, managing the eye-watering logistics of getting 30 athletes and staff, 60 bike boxes and 100 cubic metres of equipment around the world for any given event.
To Bailey however, the Cycling NZ campaign manager was overly officious, meddlesome, vindictive, even dangerous.
This was the woman who, in Bailey's mind, had been spreading wild rumours about her husband, a top cycling coach, and appeared hellbent on destroying his career.
"She was poison, in my opinion," says Bailey.
Massey stood frozen to the spot.
"I didn't react," Massey says of the confrontation in late 2016. "I basically just stood there and took it. Because I totally knew at that point the depth of the lies and manipulation."
"I think I just said, 'one day, you'll see the truth'."
Eight years on, the two women sit side-by-side in the cramped public gallery of courtroom seven of the Hamilton District Court, at the 2024 inquest into the death of Olympic cyclist Olivia Podmore, together reliving the pain, anger, grief and competing narratives of the past decade.
Earlier that week - as New Zealand sport was still basking in the afterglow of the triumphant Paris Olympic campaign - Massey and Bailey had each taken the stand, and turned the spotlight on some of the darker elements of high performance sport.
Together, their testimony was crucial in exposing what two major inquiries into Cycling New Zealand and the wider high performance sports system had failed to reveal - the horrifying extent of what Podmore endured in a programme that was utterly dysfunctional.
"People tried [to expose it] before, but the circumstances meant that not all the facts were brought forward and the realities were watered down and minimised or hidden," Bailey says.
"For me, it's been really critical this time that all of those things can be brought out into the open and addressed fully and properly, and hopefully understood.
"It's just really f***ing sad that it's taken this to get there." Red flags
A track bike has no brakes.
The sleek carbon-fibre machines used by the elite cyclists are a fixed gear without a freewheel. To slow down, riders ease off the pedals and let gravity and the steep banks of the velodrome do its work.
But there is no way to come to an immediate stop. Not without crashing.
Jess Massey was worried things were happening too fast for Olivia Podmore.
Massey had known the prodigiously talented young rider since she was 14, when Podmore was invited to attend a national age-grade camp in Invercargill.
The Canterbury teen, still relatively new to the sport, had caught the eye of the selectors after her audacious performances at national championships that year. As Massey describes, Podmore was a cycling "unicorn" who excelled in both sprint and endurance events on the track.
It wasn't until a few years later, at the 2015 junior world championships in Kazakhstan, that Massey got to observe Podmore up close in a pressure environment.
The young rider's performances in Kazakhstan, where she won silver in the team sprint and bronze in the 500m time trial, put her on the radar of the national coaches, who saw her as a strong prospect for the Olympics.
But it was what was happening off the track in Kazakhstan that concerned Massey.
Massey, who worked at Cycling New Zealand for 10 years, says she saw red flags in the way the usually gregarious Podmore shut down "socially and emotionally" after being told she would not ride the scratch race - an event she believed she was capable of winning. Team officials had reasoned Podmore had already had strong success at the meet, and made the decision to give the start to another athlete who had yet to compete, given the cyclists' families had shelled out a lot of money for the athletes to be there.
Massey believed Podmore's inability to cope with the disappointment of missing the event was a sign of a lack of emotional maturity. In a "hotwash" debrief with fellow team officials, Massey flagged her concerns that the then-17 year-old was not ready to be taken away from her family and support network in Christchurch and thrust into the cut-throat environment of Cycling New Zealand's elite track programme.
High performance sport is challenging enough for any young athlete, but Massey was also acutely aware that the culture within the centralised training environment in Cambridge was deeply unhealthy.
For much of the previous year she had been documenting concerns about the repeated misconduct of one of the coaches, including her unease about an "inappropriately close relationship" the coach had formed with one of the female athletes.
Ultimately, Massey's concerns about Podmore's emotional readiness for the high performance environment were ignored. She was fast-tracked into the national sprint team, following a tug of war between Cycling New Zealand's sprint and endurance coaches for her talents.
Initially it appeared to be going well for Podmore. Just months after joining the squad she was selected for the 2016 Rio Olympics, where she was the second youngest athlete in the 199-strong New Zealand Olympic team.
But weeks out from those Games, Massey's fears for Podmore's wellbeing were realised.
At a pre-Olympic training camp in Bordeaux, Podmore, in her youthful naivety, inadvertently exposed an affair between a coach and athlete. The young rider had reported her teammate missing late one night after she failed to return to the team hotel after going for a ride into town. Just as team officials were gathering in the lobby to go and search for the athlete, she returned in a taxi alongside the coach. The "highly inebriated" pair were seen kissing.
"And yeah, it all unravelled pretty quickly after that," says Massey.
"That was the start of her being targeted and bullied, and told to keep her trap shut. It was horrendous. And it didn't let up for two years."
Following the incident, Massey had strongly advocated for the coach to be sent home. Instead, Massey herself was sent back to New Zealand, when the coaching and high performance staff closed ranks. Massey says she was told it would be a "conflict of interest" for her to remain with the team for the Rio Games.
Meanwhile, Podmore would head off to her first Olympics, an alien, unpredictable landscape, facing intolerable bullying from within her own team. Alternative reality
The coach's wife, Nicholle Bailey, was oblivious to most of this.
Her insight into what was happening within the Cycling New Zealand environment was largely filtered through her husband and what she describes as "an old boys' network" of coaching and support staff.
She became even more removed from what was happening in the sport after separating from her husband in 2017, and returning to her hometown in Australia while the coach "worked on himself".
By early 2018, after five months away, Bailey came to the decision that she couldn't keep her life on hold any longer. She enrolled in further study at the University of Waikato and returned home.
Back in the Cambridge bubble, Bailey soon began to see signs that things were amiss, but it wasn't until the team were away at the Commonwealth Games in April that she finally learned the truth.
A friend who was connected to the squad called Bailey to tell her of the escalating tensions on the Gold Coast amid another dysfunctional campaign. The cause of the disquiet: an ongoing relationship between her estranged husband and one of the athletes.
Bailey immediately got in touch with Cycling New Zealand chief executive Andrew Matheson. She says he told her he had been aware of the relationship "for quite some time", but said he was unable to do anything unless Podmore stepped forward and made a formal complaint. (In his evidence to the inquest, Matheson told the court he did not recall this conversation with Bailey.)
What happened next remains one of Bailey's biggest regrets.
She becomes emotional as she tells how she texted Podmore and asked if she would be willing to catch up for a coffee.
"I just have so much guilt for dragging her further into this," she says, wiping away tears.
"There's so many times I've gone back and thought about that decision and I regret it so much, because that then brought a whole other shitstorm onto her.
"I just wish I'd found another way."
The young cyclist, who was at that point just a few weeks shy of her 21st birthday, readily agreed to meet with Bailey.
She went to the Cambridge home Bailey had spent two years painstakingly renovating.
"I loved that house. I spent some of the worst years of my life there, but I absolutely loved that house," says Bailey.
Sitting in the large open-plan living room, the light gleaming off the newly polished concrete floors, Podmore would spend the next two hours shattering what was left of the facade of perfect order.
Podmore recounted the events in Bordeaux and the bullying and intimidation that followed. She told Bailey how she had been blamed for the disruption in the camp in the lead-up to Rio and pressured to lie to protect the coach and athlete.
How, even after complying and "covering up" for the pair, she remained the target of ridicule in the team.
How she was berated about her haircut, what she ate, the size of her bottom, the men she was dating, and how many people she had slept with on an almost daily basis.
How her attempts to talk to support staff about the impact the environment was having on her would get back to the coach and the information used against her. "Don't let the crazy out," the coach would taunt her.
And how she had been systematically disadvantaged in the programme, being denied access to the same top-of-the-line equipment that her teammates were.
"I remember sitting opposite her and just being so stunned by how brave she was, and how actually low key she was. Because I had been fed this story that she was this crazy person, you know, she was young and silly - a pain in the arse, basically," Bailey says.
For so long, her view of events had been seen through the prism of her husband. But the more Podmore spoke the more things clicked into place, and the walls of alternate reality Bailey had been living came crumbling down.
Then she remembered Jess Massey's words to her at the supermarket that evening back in late 2016 - "one day you'll see the truth".
Bailey reckons it took about three days for her to summon up the right words that could convey to Massey her deep sense of remorse.
"It was one of the hardest things I've ever written," says Bailey.
Massey knew little of what was going on in the cycling bubble at that time, having made a concerted effort to leave the toxicity behind when she went on maternity leave in early 2018. She was in Samoa on holiday with her partner and four-month old baby when a message from Bailey popped up on her phone.
"It must have been 300 words long," laughs Massey, sitting next to Bailey on the terrace of her rural home.
"She said 'I'm so sorry, I treated you so badly and you never deserved any of it. It has taken me two years to see through the bullshit'.
"From that moment we were reconnected again." Crazy women
Bailey wasn't the only one to be deeply affected by the conversation at her house that day. Shortly afterwards, Podmore made an arrangement to meet with Matheson and make a formal complaint about the coach.
Things moved quickly after that. The coach resigned and in the public fallout that followed as details of the dysfunction in the sport were reported in the media, HPSNZ launched a major inquiry into Cycling New Zealand.
The investigation - headed up by former solicitor general Mike Heron KC - revealed "sinister and distressing examples of bullying", poor leadership, a lack of accountability and a culture where poor behaviour was accepted by those deemed critical to the success of the programme.
Those same narratives Bailey had bought into not so long ago, she was now experiencing from the other side. She had officially joined the ranks of "crazy women".
"I was painted as the jaded, bitter ex-wife who was out to screw over her cheating husband," recalls Bailey.
"Even if that were true, which it couldn't be further from the truth - it doesn't change the facts of what was brought forward. An independent investigator found clear failures by a number of people.
"If people want to minimise what went on, then they should question their own motivations, not mine."
During the final days of the protracted inquest last week, forensic psychiatrist Dr Erik Monasterio zeroed in on the psychological impact of speaking out about an organisation.
Monasterio, who is assisting coroner Louella Dunn as an independent expert witness, told the court that the research shows whistleblowers inevitably "don't do well".
"What happens when people release information about a person or organisation, they're often sidelined, harassed, ostracized and treated unfairly," he said.
"We know that people who are whistleblowers carry a significant burden, and there are considerable risks of serious psychological distress thereafter."
Those words hit home for Massey, who says she has also paid the price for speaking up.
"For both Liv and I for the three years post the reviews, we definitely felt tarnished by this whistleblower thing, whether we were named in reports or not, it was pretty easy to work out where the information had come from," says Massey.
"I think professionally I got pushed sideways the moment I started speaking up around anyone in senior leadership positions. If I had a differing view to the coaching network or the way [HPSNZ] was handling something I wasn't heard or listened to. I was marginalised and made to think I was the one with the problem."
For Massey, the psychological scars of that period did not fully become evident until early 2021 when she returned to work after the birth of her second child.
She says she found certain conversations around the office, particularly among staff who seemed to lack an understanding of what it was like to live through the dark era of the sport, to be "triggering".
"One day, I flipped out. I did not act rationally."
Massey sought out help through Cycling New Zealand's employee assistance programme and was soon diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from her repeated attempts to get officials to act, leading to her being sidelined and ostracized.
"At that point, I thought Liv was in a much better place than me," she says.
"But she was very good at hiding and deflecting what was going on." Liv's Legacy
After the day at her house, Bailey and Podmore became fast friends, spending days at the beach "getting way too burnt" and the odd night "probably drinking way too much".
"We obviously got to know each other through quite unusual circumstances, but I think it kind of bonded us. She was like my little sister," says Bailey.
"She was just the most vivacious, amazing, beautiful, loud, funny, magnetic person that you could possibly imagine. Anyone she came across just adored her."
Over 2020 and 2021, however, Bailey could see Podmore's spark beginning to fade as she dealt with the crushing disappointment of missing selection for the Tokyo Olympics.
In April 2021, Podmore once again sat down in Bailey's living room and made another confronting disclosure.
"She was sitting right there," Bailey says, somberly nodding to the couch in the living room of the rural home she shares with her new husband.
"She told me she was having suicidal thoughts. It was just so heartbreaking to hear.
"I was really concerned and I remember asking if she was getting any professional help [which she was], what sort of things she was talking to them about, what advice they were giving her.
"She was open, but she also turned the page on the conversation quite quickly."
Bailey says she was comforted that Podmore had been referred to an external psychologist and was getting professional support outside of the high performance system.
She was also comforted that despite lows Podmore was experiencing, there were moments when she was her old mischievous self, as well.
In May 2021, while she was in hospital following another episode of a heart arrhythmia, Podmore entertained herself by causing chaos on a local community Facebook group.
Under the alias "Karen Smith", Podmore posted on the Cambridge Grapevine an urgent plea to residents to keep an eye out for her miniature donkey, Mavis, who had mysteriously disappeared from her pen overnight. She speculated that Mavis may have been stolen.
The story of Mavis' disappearance seemed to capture the whole town.
A few days later Podmore posted the good news that Mavis had been found safe and well, and was happily back in her pen. The post attracted more than 500 reactions from the relieved townsfolk.
The saga kept Podmore's friends entertained for days.
"She was just so funny," says Bailey.
What Bailey and Podmore's other close friends did not know was the repeated episodes of heart arrhythmia in 2021 were likely a physical manifestation of her mental distress, according to Dr Monasterio.
Medical evidence presented at the inquest revealed Podmore had disclosed to three health practitioners that she was experiencing suicidal ideation.
But the events of 9 August 2021 were a shock to everyone. Just hours after the closing ceremony of the Tokyo Olympic Games, Podmore was found dead in her Cambridge flat.
That afternoon, Bailey received a bewildering phone call from a mutual friend who had seen a post on Podmore's Instagram page and was worried "she might have done something".
Bailey began frantically trying to call Podmore. When she didn't get an answer she jumped in her car and raced to the young athlete's flat.
There she joined a shellshocked group of Podmore's other close friends at the front of the home.
"When we got confirmation that she was gone, I can't even tell you what that did to me," Bailey sobs.
Massey was helpless. She was laid up on the couch recovering from surgery and could only "tag team" with other friends making attempts to phone Podmore.
A couple of agonising hours passed, before a neighbour who worked in the emergency services knocked on Massey's door and told her the devastating news.
Massey did not attend Podmore's funeral in Christchurch. She says she was wrongly told by her bosses that Podmore's family had requested that no one from Cycling New Zealand be there.
She instead watched a livestream of the funeral at Cycling New Zealand's offices at the Cambridge velodrome that had for so long been the scene of Podmore's torment.
"I don't think I set foot in that building again [after the funeral]."
A few weeks later, Massey says she met with chief executive Jacques Landry and handed in her resignation. She would see out her notice working remotely.
Massey's final piece of work for the organisation she had worked for for more than a decade was compiling the information and documentation required for a second major inquiry into Cycling New Zealand.
The review, which had been prompted by allegations in the wake of Podmore's death that the sport still did not take athlete welfare seriously, was also led by Mike Heron.
Massey sent her final notes off to Heron, then she closed her laptop and walked away. Into the light
Massey was the first witness to be called in the inquest before coroner Louella Dunn.
In the three years since Podmore's death, which captured headlines in New Zealand and around the world, the then-teen's role in the Bordeaux scandal and subsequent inquiry had been widely reported.
But Massey offered a gripping play-by-play account of the chaos and confusion playing out behind the scenes.
The former team manager methodically outlined the events in Bordeaux and the aftermath, offering searing insights into the actions, or inactions, of Cycling New Zealand's leadership.
Despite being at the coal face of the issues during the critical 2016-2018 period, Massey only became involved in the investigation by the coroner's office after Bailey recommended they speak with her.
"When the coroner's office finally got in touch they said, 'Jess your name does not come up in anything we've been given'," she says.
"I find that really strange given the number of reports I have compiled for Cycling New Zealand over the years, that none of this reached the coroner until someone else mentioned me."
Bailey followed with her evidence on day two.
In an emotional morning of testimony, she delved deeper into the details of the bullying Podmore experienced, including the devastating revelation that she was taunted by her coach just minutes before she made her Olympic debut.
Bailey chose to have her name made public, even though her ex-husband has been granted permanent name suppression.
"Previously, I didn't speak out publicly because I would have been written off as 'oh that's just the bitter ex-wife talking'. It's not the case. It was never the case," Bailey says.
"But also I think of Liv's last message [on social media]. I feel like she was saying 'I'm passing over the baton - someone has to do this, because I can't do it any more'. So I feel like this time I had to do it for her."
Massey too elected to forgo name suppression, making her identity public for the first time after a decade of trying to drive change behind the scenes.
She reasoned that stepping forward into the light would ensure the full story could be told, without the need to launder crucial details that may have identified her.
"What Liv experienced, people needed to face up to that." Where to get help: Need to Talk? Free call or text 1737 any time to speak to a trained counsellor, for any reason
Lifeline: 0800 543 354 or text HELP to 4357
Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 / 0508 TAUTOKO. This is a service for people who may be thinking about suicide, or those who are concerned about family or friends
Depression Helpline: 0800 111 757 or text 4202
Samaritans: 0800 726 666
Youthline: 0800 376 633 or text 234 or email [e-mail]
What's Up: 0800 WHATSUP / 0800 9428 787. This is free counselling for 5 to 19-year-olds
Asian Family Services: 0800 862 342 or text 832. Languages spoken: Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, and English.
Rural Support Trust Helpline: 0800 787 254
Healthline: 0800 611 116
Rainbow Youth: [phone]
OUTLine: 0800 688 5463
Aoake te Rā bereaved by suicide service: or call 0800 000 053
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.