My healing hands

Andrew Mathieson
THE hands of a Geelong fitter and turner have made their way to the finest athletes in the world.
For Stuart Hinds, casting aside his previous career at Ford was an easy call.
Rather than greasy palms and strong twists of the wrist, he found body oils and a soothing touch more to his liking.
Within 10 years, the soft-tissue therapist was rubbing shoulders at the Sydney Olympics.
And what shoulders they were.
Cuban man-mountain and soon-to-be-triple-Olympic-gold-medallist boxer Felix Savon was one of his patients.
There was no favouritism on his well-worn table.
Each patient was just another faceless sports star lining up among thousands of others.
“I treated this big Cuban boxer, I forget his name – the guy who won the heavyweight competition,” Stuart attempts to recall.
“He wanted an hour and I just didn’t have an hour.
“He demanded an hour and, yes, he got an hour.
“You certainly weren’t arguing with him.”
What the diminutive masseuse does recall was the size of the man who maintained a remarkable 362-21 amateur record from 1986 until retirement in 2000.
“Hise fists were like that,” says Stuart, holding his two fists together.
The Olympics have proven to be Stuart’s crowning glory, continuing onto Athens in 2004 and Beijing this year.
Looking after all types of athletes for the IOC at Sydney provided many challenges.
Religion, language and cultural sensitivities were among them.
“With Muslims, you can’t touch their females,” Stuart discovered.
“On other Muslim athletes, like a runner, you have to work on the glutes but you just can’t because they are very protective in their faith.”
Taking on a role with the Australian team from 2004, the 41-year-old now saviours Petria Thomas’s swimmer’s cap from her gold-medal performances.
The cap is proudly framed on the wall of his Newtown practice.
Like many of the Aussie swim girls, she had some of the widest shoulders around, Stuart observes.
But they just didn’t compare to the tension inside the 150kg body of Brisbane weightlifter Damon Kelly.
“When he lifts weights, he’s certainly locked in,” Stuart remarks.
The most fun is dealing with Paralympians, though.
They like a laugh.
“You go into the cubicle and they’d have their artificial leg on,” Stuart chuckles.
“They ask you to rub it because they reckon it’s feeling a bit tight.”
A cycling injury requiring ongoing treatment led Stuart into a career as a soft-tissue therapist.
Stuart had quit at the end of his fitter and turner apprenticeship, spent a couple of months in West Australian mines and returned to find Pyramid Building Society had crashed.
Education in massage therapy was his escape from the financial mire.
“I sold my car and that paid for the first-year fees,” Stuart admits.
The Moriac man nowadays lectures remedial massage students at University of Victoria. He has a reputation as the most eminent authority in the field.
When applying for the lecturer’s job he described the proposed course outline as “crap”.
The university appointed him a week later and the curriculum changed forever.
Earlier, out of school, Stuart’s first part-time jobs combined time at a chiropractor’s practice, a physiotherapy sports clinic and another practice in Melbourne to make ends meet.
Now the demands for his services extend to cyclists on the annual Victorian Herald Sun tours, countless Geelong footballers at Skilled Stadium since 2000 and South African cricketers on their last tour to Melbourne in 2004-2005.
But the real rewards, he says, are not those finely-tuned men and women.
“What is more challenging is working with the tradespeople who for a living have to flog their bodies, have to earn a wage and have to pay a mortgage,” Stuart says.
“They are usually the ones who are in a really desperate need and you get just as much as a kick out of helping those people as you do helping out elite athletes.”