Do we like them?

Do we like Dame Valerie Adams?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record and real good work for athletes, but we found little from her on the bigger social questions, so it stops short of the top.

Valerie Adams is one of New Zealand's greatest ever athletes. She retired in March 2022 after a 22-year shot put career: Olympic gold in Beijing and London, silver in Rio, bronze in Tokyo. She was made a Dame in the 2017 New Year Honours and carried the flag at the Tokyo closing ceremony.

On the scandal front, we came up empty. Searches for court cases, lawsuits and allegations against her turned up nothing about her, only people with similar names. For a champion with a career that long, that's a clean sheet. Not finding anything isn't proof, but it's a good sign.

The harm check: we found no words or acts from her that hurt LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet. We also found no public statement from her on trans athletes in sport, so we won't guess her view. What we can see is the company she keeps: since 2023 she has chaired the World Athletics Athletes' Commission, a job her fellow athletes elected her to.

Nothing new has broken on her lately, so there's no fresh stoush. The latest news is good. In February 2026 she was inducted into the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame at the Halberg Awards in Auckland, and World Athletics named her ambassador for the 2026 World Indoor Championships in Poland.

The good stuff is the quieter work. She uses her post-sport profile to back the next lot of athletes, and World Athletics ran a feature in April 2026 on her mentoring of women and young girls in the sport. In her retirement speech she said athletics would always be part of her life, and she's been true to that.

So where does that leave us? She sits on the right side of both tests as far as the record shows, and she's built a career on hard work and then given back through athlete advocacy. The only reason it isn't a perfect score is that she keeps her public politics to herself, which leaves us with less to judge.