“It definitely rocks you.” Australian track cycling star Matthew Glaetzer is reflecting on a “whirlwind” month that has seen his preparations for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics derailed by a cancer diagnosis. “When you hear the ‘C’ word – you always think it won’t happen to you, but suddenly you have to deal with it yourself,” he tells Guardian Australia.
Glaetzer is Australia’s best male track sprinter at the moment, with two world championship titles and three Commonwealth Games gold medals to his name. But Olympic success has eluded him. Once at London 2012 and twice at Rio 2016, Glaetzer finished fourth – a bronze medal agonisingly out of reach. “I was feeling confident I could get the job done in Tokyo,” he says. “I believed I could finally clinch a medal at the Olympics.”
But in October, the 27-year-old felt a twinge following a gym session. “I thought I had hurt my neck.” When two weeks of physio led to minimal improvement, Glaetzer underwent an MRI. Doctors expected to find a bulged disc. Instead, they discovered nodules on his thyroid gland. An ultrasound and biopsy followed before the Adelaide-based cyclist dashed to Melbourne to test equipment for Tokyo 2020 in a wind tunnel, determined not to let his mysterious medical malady disrupt his Olympic plans.
In a taxi on his way home from the wind tunnel, Glaetzer’s phone rang. “It was heavy to get that call,” he says. On the other end of the line was a doctor, delivering a diagnosis of thyroid cancer. “Thankfully we caught it early,” Glaetzer adds. Surgery soon followed, and the South Australian rider is currently convalescing.
His recovery period will be short; Glaetzer will soon be back in training at the Cycling Australia’s high performance centre, with his eyes on back-to-back UCI Track World Cups in New Zealand and Brisbane in December. “I am not sure what state I will be in,” he says. “I am going to do the best I can. To be honest I need to race, just to qualify for the Olympics. I need points.”
Following these competitive outings, Glaetzer will have another round of treatment before, qualification permitting, he begins preparations for Tokyo. “I do not want this stopping me from doing what I love,” he says. “This has been a setback, but as athletes we are always working with an injury here or there. I am just treating this like a little injury. If all goes well, it won’t hold me back.”
Glaetzer has dreamed of Olympic glory since he first burst onto the international track cycling scene as a teenager. After winning world championship rainbows aged just 19, the tall and muscular sprinter became a poster boy for Cycling Australia. But if Glaetzer is to win his first Olympic medal on the third attempt, and ensure his place in the pantheon of Australian track greats, he will need overcome this medical scare.
“It is frustrating that the journey will be even tougher now,” he says. “I have won pretty much everything other than an Olympic medal. I know how hard it is to perform when the Olympics come around, and how good the rest of the world is on that day. I have dedicated my life to this, so a medal would be huge. But the first step is to just to get there.”
On that road to Tokyo, Glaetzer – a devout Christian – is taking strength from his faith. “As soon as I got that call I started praying. I thought: ‘God, it is out of my hands, I put my faith in you, and I will draw on you for strength during this period.’ I am blessed to have that source of support.”
His faith proved particularly important following the diagnosis, because Glaetzer initially opted to keep the news quiet. “It was a massive elephant in the room,” he says. “But I did not want my Grandma to find out from anyone else, before I had the surgery.”
He has now gone public in the hope it will encourage others to take medical concerns seriously. “So many guys have the ‘yeah that’ll be right, it’ll get better’ mentality,” he said recently in a statement. “But you don’t know what it could be, or how it could impact you and your family in the future. If there’s anything unusual, just go and find out what’s going on.”
Whether or not Glaetzer qualifies for the Olympics, his outlook has changed. “This has helped me see the bigger picture,” he says. “It really puts everything into perspective.” If he can rapidly return to form and stand atop the Tokyo velodrome medal dais in July, it will mean a great deal to Glaetzer and his supporters. But after this scare, he knows there is something even more important than Olympic gold. “I just want to live life and have a positive impact on those around me,” he says.