Grant Bluett's life was a matter of racing and surviving.
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"It was pretty extreme when I look back. I was just living one month at a time wondering when the money was going to come next," Bluett said.
But that's the price you pay when you move to Sweden to pursue life as a professional athlete in orienteering - and Bluett, who is about to be inducted into the ACT Sport Hall of Fame, wouldn't change a thing.
For six months of the year he was travelling across Europe and Asia, winning races across the world, and for the next six months he was battling to get by.
Bluett started orienteering in Sydney in 1985 and six years later travelled to Berlin for a junior world championship event. From that moment, he was hooked. He moved to Sweden in 1996 - because if he wanted to make a living out of orienteering, that was the place to be.
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He would return to Canberra in 2005 with a resume including a World Games triumph in Japan in 2001. It has been hailed as the biggest upset in the history of world-level orienteering, his victory the first ever senior individual medal claimed by a non-European.
"I gave it everything. I probably wouldn't advise anyone to do that these days, but I just had a lot of fun. It wasn't about building wealth or anything like that, it was about trying to do the best I could," Bluett said.
"That's what I was doing at the time, it was so much fun at the time but God, when I look back at it, I was just scraping by sometimes.
"The first four years I was going all in on the professional athlete side. I was just racing and surviving I suppose. The season is only six months long so you think you're making good money for a little bit, and then the season is over and you have to wait another six months.
"I was doing that at the start, and then I got a job as a coach in what was sort of an equivalent to an AIS program over there. I got that job in 2000 and that made it a much more normal, sustainable life with superannuation, salaries and guaranteed income all the time. That made things a lot easier.
![Grant Bluett will join the ACT Sport Hall of Fame for his career in orienteering. Picture by Sitthixay Ditthavong Grant Bluett will join the ACT Sport Hall of Fame for his career in orienteering. Picture by Sitthixay Ditthavong](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/36vwtM5n3dmMVgNPycRBEHz/df705f24-27ea-4a2b-bc21-df9792b953c1.jpg/r0_471_5300_3463_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
"I really gave it everything for eight or nine years. They're great memories. They're distant memories, when I was living over in Sweden, so it's very nice [to be inducted]."
Bluett is hailed as a driving force for Australian orienteering's golden decade, spanning from 1997 to 2007.
He represented Australia at two junior world championships before moving to Canberra in 1992, where he would become a central cog in the ACT's dominance of the national landscape.
Bluett represented Australia at eight world championship events and peaked at ninth in the international rankings. Some feat for a man competing in what is "a very minor sport in Australia".
Bluett and his partner, Shannon Jones, returned to Canberra from Sweden in 2005 and had three kids who are now following their footsteps into orienteering.
"My kids are really involved now. They're young, they like it. We actually went back to Europe for the first time this year, we went back and raced in Italy and Sweden and showed the kids what it was like," Bluett said.
"That was really fun just introducing them to it in a bigger way. In Canberra, I do it more for the kids. I still keep fit and keep involved. I really hope they can stick with it. We'll keep encouraging and supporting them to do it. It's fun for them."
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