Mackenzie Little won Commonwealth Javelin silver in 2022 and World bronze in 2023. She won those medals whilst qualifying as a medical doctor.
Following her bronze at the Worlds in Budapest, she was due back at the hospital to continue her training, but had to delay her departure for Australia so that she could attend her medal ceremony. She describes how flying back from a Worlds or an Olympics and going straight into a night shift is a very grounding experience with no time to dwell on the highs or lows of competition.
After her medal in Budapest, there were patients who couldn’t have cared less where she’d just been. Equally though, after personal disappointment at the Paris Olympics, her patients’ enthusiasm and excitement for her even being at the Olympics gave her a sense of perspective on what she had achieved.
Mackenzie is currently a second year doctor. She explains how she plots a course through life that allows her to continue her medical training and her track and field career. We recorded this episode in Oslo, where Mackenzie had used some of her annual holiday allocation to fly from Australia to Norway in order to compete at that Diamond League meet. On those ‘whirlwind’ trips to Europe, as well as competing, she says she gets more sleep than when she’s at home working shifts as a doctor.
Briefly, having graduated from college in the United States before starting med school in Australia, Mackenzie competed for a European season as ‘just’ an athlete, and found that she was ‘rubbish’. Mackenzie believes she is at her best when balancing her academic commitments with the demands of being a professional track and field athlete.
Mackenzie won the US Collegiate title twice and was also a room-mate of another former Warm Up Track guest – the double Olympic discus champion Valarie Allman.
We discuss imposter syndrome, which Mackenzie feels both ways. She wonders whether her fellow athletes think she’s a part-timer, who hasn’t sacrificed enough and isn’t fully dedicated to her sport. The anxiety is also there in a medical setting – but this time it’s the worry that her fellow doctors might think she’s an ‘air-head athlete’.
The Australian thinks that being a javelin thrower makes the balancing of her two careers possible. If she was, for example, a middle or long distance runner, she knows that there wouldn’t be enough hours in day to fit in her training around her day job. Mackenzie believes that the real world demands of medicine, full of situations ‘where you’ve just got to do it’, stands her in good stead in an athletics environment. It might be raining, she may have lost her luggage, but she can switch into competition mode and get it done.
Mackenzie isn’t sure whether she’ll have to choose one path or another, or when that decision might need to be made, it’s about what she can achieve now.
Image: Bronze medalist, Australia's Mackenzie Little celebrates with her National flag and medal after the women's javelin throw final during the World Athletics Championships at the National Athletics Centre in Budapest on August 25, 2023. (Photo by Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP) (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)