When your teammates, fans, media and international competitors all label you the best female hockey player in the world, you know you’re not just any ordinary player.

Alyson Annan is that rare breed of sportswoman. The proudly out lesbian, and recent new mum, is widely regarded as one of the best hockey players to ever pick up a hockey stick. As a player, Annan was the instrumental goal scorer in the squad that won a gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, and remarkably, led the team to victory again at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Her contribution to the popular sport is one of the key reasons that the Hockeyroos were able to emerge as one of the most successful Australian sporting teams of the past few decades.

The gold medals weren’t the first time that Annan tasted success however. After making her international debut in 1991 at the age of just 17, Annan became the highest ever goal scorer in Australian history at the 1998 Commonwealth Games, scoring a whopping total of 149 goals in 201 international games.

But it was only when Annan retired from competition that the next chapter of her life really began. Just after the Sydney Olympics Annan divorced her husband, moved to Holland and struck up a friendship with her former rival, the Dutch hockey captain and fellow Olympic medalist Carole Thate, who she triumphed over at both Olympic Games. The friendship controversially blossomed into a relationship and, eventually, into marriage.

In May of this year, Annan became a mother to Sam Henk Brian Thate. "One of the great gifts of life is being able to have a baby,” she told the Sydney Morning Herald when she gave birth. “I think motherhood is the most amazing thing in the world. You see your child grow in your stomach, then you give birth. It is a big responsibility but there is no part of motherhood I find daunting. It comes very naturally to me.”

As is befitting for the child of two successful sporting parents, there’s always the faint glimmer of a sporting career for their son. “As soon as he can hold a hockey stick in his hand he will have one,” she joked. “Then a football. But if he tells us he has more fun playing volleyball, then he can. We want to bring him up so that he plays outside and is active. It is too easy to put kids in front of television or computer.”

Annan’s influence over the sporting community is immeasurable, consistently ranking as one of the greatest sporting heroes Australia has produced and proudly living her new life out in open in her lauded biography, “Beyond The Limits”.

She currently lives in Holland where she works on providing education for athletes, and adores her new life and all that comes with it. "Our relationship - and now Sam's birth - has never been frowned upon," she said. "We live in a street where there are twenty kids under the age of three. Everyone has accepted us as a couple.”
Annan is in a great stage of life and she knows it. "Being a mum is feeling the satisfaction of winning a medal every day," she says. And you can’t argue with that.

By Tim Duggan