The Team Kovacs Is Gearing Up For 2020 Olympic Games

The Team Kovacs surely went through moments of the up and down

That collaboration of Joe and Ashley Kovacs was key after moving to Ohio in Fall 2017 to start a life together, Joe experimented with a new technique that he worked on with long-time coach Art Venegas. Joe struggled with that technique, lost his passion for the sport, and was considering retirement. Ashley officially transitioned into coaching him full-time at the start of 2019, she said and feels her love of coaching also played a part in Joe’s decision to stick with his athletic career.

World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar in 2019 was the turning point of seeing hope. He was in fourth place and his wife was right there with him — and not just metaphorically. As the men’s coach for Team USA and Joe’s personal coach, Ashley told him right before his last turn, “Take a chance. Trust yourself and go after it and see what you can get. You have nothing to lose at this point.” He then threw a personal best 22.91 meters and claimed gold by a mere one centimeter. It was the farthest throw in 29 years, according to NBC Sports, and equaled the third-farthest in history.

Ashley’s advice before the crucial fourth throw wasn’t just generic pump-up stuff. It was based on seeing how low her husband, a mountain of a man at 183cm and 134kg, had fallen just eight months earlier. Joe calls the “pinnacle” in Qatar, he was lost. He wasn’t throwing hard or far. He’d was in the kind of quicksand that swallows you deeper the more you struggle against it. So he called his family together for what he likes to call the Kitchen Talk.

He was thinking about quitting.

“If you want to quit you can, I’m going to support you either way,” Ashley said, there in the kitchen with Joe’s mother and his stepdad. “But I don’t really understand why you think you can’t throw far anymore. Either way, this half-in, half-out stuff has to go. I’m tired of looking at it.”

For a sport that might appear to the untrained eye as a matter of brute force, the shot put is as mind-bendingly technical as fly tying. Joe loves this part of it. He has the natural instincts of a tinkerer. It’s something Ashley doesn’t want to discourage, but, with her “coach hat” on, she needs to have what they both refer to as a sense of “tunnel vision” to keep Joe from heading off on an experimental training tangent.

“For me it’s always been really exciting to know that, well, if I did this a little better, then what? What if I changed that a little?” Joe said of the endless permutations and possibilities available to change, improve or refine the technique, which combines what he describes as “abstract thinking, gymnastics” and the “looseness” necessary to generate a “natural whip” through the body.

“It’s the coach’s responsibility to make sure that you’re not too far from the path,” Ashley said, a small smile on her face sitting beside her husband, shoulder to shoulder, and knowing his quirks and his methods. “Sometimes he kind of goes off to explore a little bit. But that’s how he ticks and I don’t want to stifle that. I think it’s one of the things that makes him who he is and has made him a great competitor.”

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