Cancer can’t stop woman of Steele

Watching the legendary Ironman New Zealand event in Taupō earlier this year, Harriet Steele had her first “big wobble”.
She’d coped with a shock breast cancer diagnosis in January, followed by an emergency mastectomy and chemotherapy getting underway. But being sidelined at an Ironman event, watching her partner compete, was almost too much to bear.
“I had a little meltdown,” Steele, a policewoman, says. “I really wanted to be doing it. And I thought: ‘The only reason I’m not is because of the stupid cancer’.
“Then I said to myself, ‘I want to take part here next year’.”
It was a moment which galvanised Steele and led to her applying for the 2025 Tony Jackson Scholarship, an award which gives a deserving athlete an Ironman New Zealand event package.
Now, having been named as one of two recipients of the prestigious scholarship (alongside Justin Tito), Steele will receive support in pursuit of her dream to complete Ironman New Zealand next March. And she’s looking forward to finding out what she’s capable of.
“What better way to prove you’ve kicked cancer in the butt than dragging your body across the finish line at an Ironman,” the 37-year-old says. “If you can do that, you’ve proved to yourself you’re a lot stronger than you think.”
Having always wanted to race an Ironman event, Steele is convinced it’s the right time to embark on her bucket list goal, despite her ongoing cancer journey. And she’s finding it helpful to have something positive to work towards.
“It’s definitely a short turnaround post-chemo to be doing it,” she says. “But there’s never a perfect time, and you’re never going to be 100% ready.
“I’ve always put it off previously. But not having been able to do it this year, and knowing you never really know what tomorrow brings, it felt like the right time to say, ‘Yes I’m going to do this’.”
Steele has a multifaceted background in sport to draw on as she prepares for the formidable event. She completed her first triathlon, the Rotorua Suffer Half-Ironman, over a decade ago, and has finished numerous others, too.
Growing up in Kerikeri, “doing as many sports as possible” – including cricket, surfing, and cross country running – football became her first love, and she went on to play in the National League for Auckland. Later she become a strength and conditioning specialist for High Performance Sport New Zealand and New Zealand Football, supporting the Football Ferns and other leading Kiwi athletes.
One of the highlights of this chapter of her life was attending the 2016 Rio Olympics as lead sports scientist for the women’s football team.
Now working as a police officer in Tauranga, where she lives with partner Roy Sparey, Steele’s hard-won sporting wisdom has prompted her to begin Ironman training slowly and listen carefully to her body.
“Some days I get home from work and I’m absolutely cooked,” she says. “Other days I feel like I’ve got enough in the tank to do something.”
It may not be how she’s accustomed to training, but she’s approached some things differently since her breast cancer diagnosis.
“It sounds cliched but my perception on a few things in life has already changed,” she says. “I haven’t always been good at treading water. I always had to be achieving – sometimes forgetting to live for the now. But you go through something like this, and you realise how important your friends and family are.
“The big one is wanting to uplift others around me. At the end of your life, no one’s going to care what you did for work, but people are going to care how you treated others.”
Consequently, Steele’s Ironman quest is about much more than proving something to herself. She has pledged to raise over $20,000 for breast cancer research and hopes her story will encourage others.
“If you can get one other person checking themselves or thinking about it,” she says – especially as she almost didn’t follow-up her own early signs.
Her breast cancer journey began late last year when she found a lump while showering. Being young and healthy, Steele wasn’t particularly fazed. But in the back of her mind, she knew her parents would urge her to get it checked.
“Without their voices in my head, I probably wouldn’t have done anything about it because I didn’t expect it to be anything,” she says.
Convinced it was nothing, she didn’t take a support person with her to the post-mammogram doctor’s appointment and was completely unprepared for the news and the ensuing whirl of medical treatments.
Without delay, Steele had a mastectomy – instead of attending her brother’s wedding – followed by a round of IVF to harvest eggs before the cancer treatment affected her fertility.
Having now completed chemotherapy, Steele is following a five-year treatment plan that involves monthly injections and daily medications. Among other side effects, her ability to remember everyday things – she calls it “chemo and menopause brain” – is yet to return to normal. However, her ability to look for the positive is better than ever.
“There’s never any explanation for why something like this would happen to you,” she says. “There’s no point pondering it because it is what it is, and you just have to get on with it. But if I can get across the finishline, I will have done something positive.
“Cancer will never be good, but this can be the silver lining.”
Envisaging the Ironman event next year, Steele says she feels equally terrified and excited, but takes inspiration from Tony Jackson who the scholarship was created in memory of.
An Ironman NZ finisher 28 times, Jackson had his own battle with cancer, completing his 24th Ironman while undergoing treatment for a brain tumour.
“I feel incredibly honoured to be a Tony Jackson scholar,” Steele says. “It’s humbling to be representing someone who went through such a journey themselves. And to cross the finishline and know I did the scholarship proud, I did myself proud, and I raised awareness and a bunch of money for cancer – I will be pretty chuffed with that.”