Joe and Ashley Kovacs: The making of a human cannon

American shot putter Joe Kovacs was at a crossroads.

He had one throw left at the 2019 World Athletics Championships in Doha, Qatar. He was in fourth place and it was all-or-nothing time – when all the training and lifting and obsessing that’s seeped into your muscles and hidden out silently waiting for the moment of truth either turns into victory – or it doesn’t.

“Trust yourself,” Kovacs’ coach told him in what might sound like canned patter, meant to encourage but not overwhelm. “Take a chance. Go after it.”

He did just that.

Kovacs hurled the ball 22.91 metres. It was the winning throw on the day. It was a personal best. It wasn’t just the third-farthest throw in history, it was the farthest throw, by anyone of any nationality, in nearly three decades. And when he embraced his coach after the victory, attained by only one thin centimetre, there was more relief than joy.

You see, no one in the world knows Joe Kovacs – his strengths and his weaknesses – better than his coach, who also happens to be his wife, Ashley Kovacs.

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. “My emotions are different with Joe because he’s my husband,” said Ashley, in her sixth year as throws coach at Ohio State University. “I try to be very analytical in my work, but he [Joe] was in a real hole.”

Low-down to top of the world

Eight months before what Joe calls the “pinnacle” in Qatar, he was lost. He wasn’t throwing hard or far. He was in the kind of quicksand that swallows you deeper the more you struggle against it. So he gathered 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.”

That was February of 2019 and Joe had just thrown a 19.52m at a meet in Columbus, Ohio. His mother, who’d travelled seven hours to see her son compete, was in the stands. He felt like he was letting everyone down. There was concern – not just about Joe’s throwing but for his well-being. It became clear what he needed was a new coach, one who understood him on a granular level. Knew where to push and when to lay off.

It was Ashley. And they both knew it.

“It was never my intention to be Joe’s coach,” Ashley told Tokyo 2020 via video chat, sitting at that same table where the two share meals and plot training strategies. “It just kind of happened and made sense. I see it as more of a partnership and less of an ‘OK, drop and give me twenty [push-ups] situation’.”

Joe Kovacs is 31, a veteran athlete. He doesn’t need anyone to tell him to think about the shot put. It might, in fact, be the opposite. His knowledge of the sport, its peculiar physics and technical elements, become clear after two minutes. “It’s my job to be a human cannon,” said Joe, who began dating Ashley in the summer of 2017 and married her in November of 2018. “So if the ball’s not going far, you’ve got big problems.”

Sweating the small stuff

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.

“To me it’s never perfect. It’s never complete,” said Joe, born and raised around the blue-collar city of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he first discovered the shot put – and athletics in general – as a way to stay fit for the football (gridiron) season. “And that’s really what keeps me so engaged with it for all this time now.”

Ashley’s job is, in many ways, about enforcing finite limits and timetables. She can’t let Joe go too far down what they both call his “rabbit holes.”

“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.

“I trust him. I have to, added Ashley. “He has a different and more advanced mind than almost anyone in the world in this event. He’s taught me things from his little side-tangent experiments.”

Scholars of the shot put

It helps that Ashley knows the mechanics of the shot put better than most anyone in the world too. Competing under her maiden name, Ashley Muffet, she was a four-time All-American shot putter at the University of Kentucky (where she also coached) and holds the school’s records in both discus and shot put. Since 2014, she’s been coaching both men and women throwers at Ohio State and she was named to the national team coaching staff for the 2019 world championships in Doha.

Joe likes to joke that: “She [Ashley] loves the shot put more than I do.” And Ashley, smirking a little at the assertion, won’t deny it.

In the end, it’s the small adjustments and the big picture – the fruits of Joe and Ashley’s never-ending labour – that combine to create the one centimetre, the little fragments of distance as thin as a fingernail, that saw Joe win the world title on his last throw in 2019.

“The only thing that matters is the tape measure,” said Joe, whose silver medal at Rio in 2016 still feels like a disappointment despite the obvious pride at being on the podium. “There’s no judge. There’s no questioning. It’s either you are or you aren’t farthest. You have to prove yourself every single time, every single competition.”

In the eight months between when Ashley began coaching Joe and the meet in Doha, his throws went from the worst in his professional life – so bad that he considered packing it all in – to a personal best and a world crown.

Since then, there have been complications. For one, COVID-19 hit.

The official postponement of the Olympics in January 2020 at least brought the Kovacs duo some clarity. “In the beginning [after the postponement] we took some time. We played a lot of golf. We had a lot of fun,” Joe said as Ashley nodded. “The goal was to not get out of shape, to keep my strength high. But it was nice to unplug for a second.

“I don't think we talked about throwing for maybe two or three months [early in the Pandemic Year] other than keeping my weight room in shape, like, obviously, lifting heavy,” Joe made sure to clarify, with his sights firmly set on the Olympic Trials (rescheduled for 18-27 June 2021 in Eugene, Oregon). “I was in the basement. She [Ashley] was my spotter. I benched more and squatted more with her as a spotter than I've ever done my life!”

Silver as a reminder

Joe’s silver medal in Rio serves mainly as a motivator. “I came away with a silver medal,” he said. “There's nothing to be upset with when you come away with a medal in the Olympics, but you're always hoping for the gold and it hurts when you know you're capable of it.”

His focus in 2016 was so intense that his memories are still tinted by his desire, while there amid the hoopla and the Olympic mythology, to remain totally committed to the task at hand. “I was only in the [Olympic] Village for a few days,” said Joe, who kept a distance from the picture-taking and soaking-it-all-in of his fellow athletes. “Eventually I got a hotel that was closer to our training area. People used to tell me crazy stories about the Village and stuff. But the USA tower wasn’t like that because everybody who makes a team is expected to come back with some hardware.”

For Joe Kovacs there’s a goal down the road that’s worth forgoing some of the fun and games. “When I walked out into that [Olympic] stadium [in Rio], I walked out like it was any other stadium,” he said. “There's no better feeling than somebody putting a flag around your shoulders when you win. Not all shot putters like running around the stadium to celebrate, but every single shot putter loves having that flag over them!”

Both Joe and Ashley hope that somewhere down the “rabbit holes” and at the bright end of that “tunnel vision” is the sparkle of Olympic gold in 2021. The recipe isn’t simple – there’s a lot of push and pull to go before finding the right balance.

“When you hear the national anthem. You get to see the flag go up,” said Joe, with checklists and little tweaks flooding his mind, Ashley nodding beside him in agreement. “That's when all those feelings settle in and you can enjoy.”