Chloe Tryon: 'Golf', avocados and going full tilt towards the World Cup
Image: Backpagepix
When the spotlight is on her, Durban-born Proteas Women all-rounder Chloe Tryon generally rises to the occasion with her big-hitting displays and a cheeky spell or two. But off the field, she's quite a simple, no-frills person who enjoys playing golf on her Xbox and eating smashed avocado on toast.
She's also something of a workaholic, taking 'just a week off' to unwind and reset following the recent West Indies tour.
Independent Sports caught up with Tryon, in an exclusive interview, just after a training session at the Wanderers in Gauteng, where several fellow cricketers are also preparing for The Hundred in the UK — the short-format tournament in which Tryon plays for Southern Brave.
Video Player is loading.
Play Video
Play
Unmute
Current Time
0:00
/
Duration
-:-
Loaded :
0%
Stream Type LIVE
Seek to live, currently behind live
LIVE
Remaining Time
-
0:00
This is a modal window.
Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window.
Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan
Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan
Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan
Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque
Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps
Reset
restore all settings to the default values Done
Close Modal Dialog
End of dialog window.
Advertisement
Next
Stay
Close ✕
Tryon sees the tournament as a valuable opportunity to sharpen her skills ahead of the ICC Women's Cricket World Cup in India this September.
'I just took, like, a week off once I got back. I saw some of my family and just kind of reset before getting ready for The Hundred — and making sure I'm ready for the World Cup later this year,' she said.
'I think it's going to be a big tour for us, and we want to win that trophy. I'm trying to stay focused on doing the right things right now.'
After spending over two years living in Durban, Tryon decided to relocate to Johannesburg due to work commitments.
'Moving to Joburg really just felt like the right thing to do. I spent so much time on the road and in airports. Now, at least after training or after games, I can go home and feel like I'm home,' she said.
When the green and gold comes off, Tryon enjoys 'just being normal'. Since leaving Durban, she's stopped cooking curries and instead relies on a trusty air fryer she's affectionately named Phillip.
'I use my air fryer quite a bit nowadays. I think once I left Durban, I left the curries behind, too,' she said.
'I enjoy steamed or grilled food. I think I'm quite simple, and I can eat the same thing every day. Some people call me a creature of habit — so yeah, I tend to stick to what I know.'
Tryon describes herself as a morning person who enjoys making the most of the early sun before switching off for the rest of the day.
Chloe Tryon best effort with the willow in T20I is a 57 not out. Photo: Backpagepix
Image: Backpagepix
'I always want to try and use my mornings in the best way I can. I like to get up and get stuff done, and then after 2pm just use the rest of my day to do things around the house and just be a normal person,' she said. 'I like playing golf on my Xbox.'
She admits that breakfast is often skipped, mostly due to early training sessions.
'I don't really eat breakfast — I struggle with that because I train in the mornings. I'm either running or in the gym, and I don't want to eat and then go into an intense session. By the time I'm done, I'll probably just have some avocado on toast with eggs on the side. It's either that or Futurelife.'
Chloe Tryon best bowling figures inthe shortest format of the game is 4/15. Photo: Backpagepix
Image: Backpagepix
At 31, Tryon believes she's now at the peak of her career and is intent on riding the momentum as long as she can.
'I feel like I'm hitting my struts at the moment, so I think I'll try to push as far as I can. If that means playing for another five or six years, then I'll take that. If it's shorter, then I'll take that too. I still want to enjoy every moment and play for my country.'
Looking beyond her playing days, Tryon says coaching — not commentary — is in her future.
'I've given it some thought, and I'd like to get into coaching so I can stay close to the game. Growing up, women's cricket wasn't as professional as it is now, so I want to be part of that development.
'I had the pleasure of working with people who had faith in me and wanted me to succeed, so I definitely want to give back as much as I can. I don't want to sit and talk about the game — I want to be hands-on. I want to come up with plans and strategies and help younger players get to know their game.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
IOL News
2 hours ago
- IOL News
Filmmaker, moved by the NSRI camera rescue volunteers, dedicates his time to raising awareness
Filmed at Strand Beach, the video features actress Shiefaa Hendriks in a portrayal that merges realism and symbolism Image: National Sea Rescue Institute SOUTH African filmmaker and ocean lover Kabeer Shaik has teamed up with the National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) to create a powerful new awareness video spotlighting the NSRI's Beach Safety Camera Project. He has donated his time and skills to help amplify the story of technology and teamwork saving lives along our coastline. Shaik visited the NSRI's Volunteer Support Centre earlier this year, where he was introduced to the Emergency Operations Centre (EOC) and the Beach Safety Camera Project. What he saw inspired him. 'I'm a filmmaker who spends a lot of time in the ocean, and I wanted to make a piece that supports the amazing work the NSRI does,' said Shaik. 'They're an incredible organisation that saves thousands of lives every year. This was something I knew I had to contribute to.' The creative campaign, now complete, is based on a true and emotional story from Strand Beach. An NSRI camera operator spotted 10-year-old Matthew being pulled out to sea in a rip current. With lifeguards not yet on duty, the operator activated Strand Lifeguards, who arrived in time to save the child. NSRI CEO Mike Vonk explains: 'Our operator never took her eyes off Matthew. She tracked him with the camera and relayed updates as lifeguards rushed to the scene. She was sitting in a control room, but emotionally, she was right there with him in the water.' Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Next Stay Close ✕ This emotional tension, the human heartbeat behind high-tech rescue, became the core of Kabeer's visual interpretation. 'It struck me that, although she wasn't in the water, she felt like she was doing the rescue,' said Shaik. 'That's the story I wanted to tell, not just about technology, but about the people who care so deeply and give so much.' Filmed at Strand Beach, the video features actress Shiefaa Hendriks in a portrayal that merges realism and symbolism. The team used rich golden-hour light and a cinematic approach to create an emotional and immersive experience. 'The biggest challenge was the weather. We needed a calm sea and high tide in late afternoon to match the story's emotional tone. After weeks of postponements, we got the perfect window in April and gathered an incredible team to make it happen,' said Shaik. The production was made possible through the generous support of the industry. Post-production partners, technical crew, and cast all donated their time and expertise. 'We are deeply grateful to Kabeer and every member of the team who brought this story to life. This campaign shines a light not only on the Beach Safety Camera Project but also on the heart of the NSRI. These are people who care enough to act, every day,' said Vonk. He added: 'We would also like to thank our friends in the media, television and cinema industries for the generous airtime they are giving this campaign at no cost. Their support helps us reach more people and, ultimately, save more lives.' SUNDAY TRIBUNE
IOL News
4 hours ago
- IOL News
An Open Letter to Pieter Kriel: Understanding Whiteness and Privilege in Bethlehem
South African social media personality Pieter Kriel. Image: X / @pieterkrielorg Pieter Kriel, the 21-year-old South African TikTok figure whose rise has been built on rapid-fire ChatGPT slogans about whiteness and Black pain, now saunters around the edges of Palestine, a land of grief, siege, and survival, setting the scene for his latest TikTok performance. From a cushioned chair in a Bethlehem hotel, he posted to his followers: 'Bethlehem is a sacred cage where the world comes to worship a baby born under empire, yet ignores the children growing up under occupation.' This is not OK. Pieter Kriel's post on X. Image: Screenshot / X That is why, Pieter, I am writing to you directly. As a prominent race justice activist, I know the terrain you are striding through, though you do not yet understand the weight of it. I know the ego that grows from the eros, the praise, poured onto those whites who appear to 'get it'. I know how easy it is to mistake applause for wisdom, to let your platform slip from truth into arrogance or paternalism. But when I came into the public eye, I was not twenty-one. By then I was already married to my life partner, Sipho Singiswa, raising a biracial child, learning to grapple with whiteness not as abstract theory but as intimate daily reality inside a Black family. Before those years, in the 1980s, when I was your age, I was a cultural activist. I was signing leases for suburban communes where Black musicians and artists could live, places where they could step into the economy of town performances under the nose of apartheid law. When we were evicted, we found another lease and carried on. I gravitated to the jazz and political underground, where people of all skin shades gathered, defying the disgusted gaze of the white state. Later, I trudged through township streets and squatter camps, walked through communities ravaged by mines and extractive industries, documenting harm, holding a camera for those whose voices were buried under power. I spent years doing video advocacy in places that were ignored and erased. I had this access because I was working alongside Sipho. It was Sipho who sat for hours, listening to the stories of Marikana widows, miners, and children who had lost their fathers in the massacre, listening in their own language, with no interpreter, no posture, no spectacle. It was then that I realised I was far more useful behind the scenes, as the film editor, shaping the testimony we gathered, rather than imposing my whiteness onto a landscape where my presence was just white skin — interruptive, uncomfortable, a distortion. There is a violence in forcing people to speak the pain caused by white power in the presence of whiteness. Learn when to step out, Pieter. After I took race justice and critical race theory to newspapers, I quickly ended up with two files fat with death threats and smear campaigns, now retired into archives at the SAHRC. I have been followed, stalked, recorded, threatened, and destabilised by the far right. I have been no-platformed by the liberal gatekeeping class, rendered ungovernable and untouchable by the very institutions that claim to champion freedom. But I never centred that. I did not have the energy to, and I did not have the resources to fight this. Our work was never monetised. I am only naming it now because we lost our son to suicide, a tragedy shaped in part by the deluge of false media narratives, by public calls to have me tried and arrested by a culture of punishment that played out in the full glare of a public hungry for blood. I want to heal my complex PTSD. I want justice for my brown boy child who, as a teenager, watched the world close in on his parents. Pieter, I tell you this so you understand that I am not speaking to you from theory. I am speaking to you from survival. You are simply not experienced enough to understand the depth of wounding whiteness can inflict on people not protected by white skin, even from the most well-meaning of us. Your post, sent from Bethlehem, from inside the cage of empire that you occupy through your white privilege, your passport, your ability to move freely, is the height of white arrogance. Bethlehem is not the Bethlehem of your Sunday school books or European art. It is the Bethlehem of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam, Jesus son of Mary, born of Maryam, held by Yūsuf, names still carried on the tongues of Palestinian Christians and Muslims alike. It is the birthplace of a brown-skinned child under Roman rule, a child marked by poverty, empire, and resistance. Before 1948, Bethlehem was a city where Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived alongside one another, sharing land, work, weddings, funerals, and memory. That world was torn apart by the Nakba, when Zionist militias stormed Palestinian homes, drove families into exile, and began the long, choking suffocation that today hems Bethlehem in. The apartheid wall cuts through its landscape. Illegal settlements spread across its hills. Military checkpoints sever its roads. Soldiers watch its streets. At its heart stands the Church of the Nativity, built in the fourth century by Helena, mother of Constantine, over the cave where Maryam is believed to have given birth to ʿĪsā. It is the oldest Christian church still in use, its walls darkened by candle smoke, its stones shaped by the knees and hands of centuries of worshippers. It bears the scars of the 2002 siege, when Israeli soldiers surrounded it, leaving bullet holes still visible. For the few Palestinian Christians left, the church is not a monument. It is survival. It is breath. It is a memory of belonging in a land that has never been allowed peace. And yet you sit there, Pieter, in your hotel chair, composing your post. You centre yourself. You wrap Bethlehem around your performance of atheism, as if your personal rejection of faith is relevant here, as if the mothers whispering Maryam's name over their dead, or the children holding onto the memory of ʿĪsā as a face like theirs, need your existential rebellion. I too fell into the trap, Pieter. I too mocked organised religion in my early years, imagining this was a mark of free thinking, not fully grasping that for those oppressed by whiteness, God is not always the white-bearded adversarial patriarch of European lore. God is the name called upon in the dark. God is the effigy that carries brown or black skin. God is sometimes the emancipatory presence when the state and the oligarchs have taken everything else. You do realise that sitting centre stage and telling people what to think or believe is just another form of toxic white patriarchy. It is hard not to see you. Even though I do not follow you every time I open my social media, there you are. But we have not yet seen you in Gaza, Pieter. We have not seen you at the places of danger, at the rubble heaps where families are clawing through debris to find their children, at the refugee camps where hunger hangs in the air. We have hardly seen Nkosi Zulu, the fellow podcaster you travel with, because you have, it seems, centred yourself. You have placed yourself in the frame, made this about your musings, your performance, your moment. So here is my advice to you. If you want to step into the crisis of meaning among Black youth, enter it with care. Understand that this crisis is not abstract. It is the crisis of growing up in a world that markets Blackness as cool but locks Black people out of power. It is the crisis of living with betrayals — by families, by leaders, by movements that promised transformation but handed down exhaustion. It is the ache of inherited trauma, the daily dissonance of being told to survive with dignity in a world built to break you. It is the pain of watching White people like you monetise their pain, presenting as hashtag revolutionaries while the poorest Black lives remain ungrievable. Do not mouth back at Black people what they already know or should think or believe just because you imagine your mind is so advanced. If you are going to enter this terrain, acknowledge the voices from whom you borrow your theory. Reference them. Honour them. We veterans know that not one original idea has come out of your strident, confident, know-it-all posture. To step into this fragile and painful space and position yourself as philosopher, as guide, as mouthpiece, begins to feel like decoy politics. Your white presence on the safe edges of Gaza, your curated benevolence, carries the stale scent of white settler colonialism, of benevolence politics we have long outgrown. We have long passed the stage where white boys in crisp shirts and borrowed slogans get to stand on occupied terrain and tell people how to feel about their ancient cultural and spiritual beliefs, as if their personal crisis of faith carries more weight than centuries of survival, as if their intellectual swagger counts for more than ancestral memory. If you truly care, take your seat at the back. Read. Listen. Name your sources. Understand the responsibility that comes with speaking in public. Understand that solidarity is not built on your centre stage. It is built where you are unseen, where others lead, where you stop feeding on spectacle and start dismantling the need for it. Explore the implications of privilege and race in Bethlehem as Gillian Schutte addresses Pieter Kriel's controversial TikTok post, challenging the narratives surrounding occupation and identity. Image: IOL * Gillian Schutte is a South African writer, filmmaker, and social justice activist. Her work interrogates systems of power, capitalism, patriarchy, and whiteness, and is rooted in the defence of the commons, decolonial justice, and the dignity of all life. ** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.
IOL News
4 hours ago
- IOL News
EXCLUSIVE: Proteas WTC Final triumph inspires Women's side ahead of World Cup, says Annerie Dercksen
"I actually went to the dress fitting today. So, excited to get a bit dressed up and all of that and see everyone again," Dercksen said. "I'm not really one for personal recognition. I can't say that I'm excited or even hoping to win anything, but I guess it's a great honour to be recognised." In an exclusive interview with Independent Media , Dercksen opened up about her preparations for what will be a night of celebrations, glitz and glam in Johannesburg. The 24-year-old is nominated for the SA Fans' Player of the Year award alongside the likes of Temba Bavuma, the Women's Player of the Year and the Women's ODI Player of the Year. A couple of months later, following yet another set of impressive performances in the green and gold, Dercksen has been nominated in three categories for the upcoming Cricket South Africa Awards scheduled to take place in Johannesburg on July 31. Annerie Dercksen started the year with the ICC Women's Emerging Player of the Year award following what was a brilliant 2024 for the all-rounder, where she played a key role in getting the Proteas Women to the final of the 2024 Women's T20 World Cup in the UAE. This year, Dercksen showed glimpses of the all-rounder that she could become for South Africa when senior players such as Marizanne Kapp move on from international cricket. The 24-year-old scored her maiden ODI century this year and did so in Sri Lanka, where South African batters tend to struggle given the difference in conditions between Sri Lanka and South Africa. Dercksen described the tour to Sri Lanka as her highest point yet, and that she felt invincible during that tour as she recorded consecutive scores of 61 not out, 81 and 104 in Colombo. Right after that series, the Women's side toured the West Indies, where Dercksen had a relatively quiet tour. "We had that Sri Lanka series where I guess you could say I was on a high. I felt a little bit invincible. Everything I tried came off, and I scored a lot of runs in that series. Then we had the West Indies series shortly after, where it didn't go as well as I'd planned," said Dercksen. "So, there's a lot of learning from both series. I think the Sri Lanka one gave me confidence in my ability and the way I want to play, and helped reinforce my gameplan in international cricket. But then, also the West Indies also threw different challenges at us with maybe slower wickets and slower outfields. "Reflecting on it, just navigating and how I can maybe better adapt my game. I also came in very different situations in the West Indies than in Sri Lanka, which maybe I wasn't accustomed to." The Women's ODI World Cup is scheduled to take place in India and Sri Lanka from September 30, and Dercksen highlighted that they are going into the tournament quietly confident despite what the world may think. Dercksen says they will take confidence from the Men's WTC triumph at Lord's last month. "I think, internationally, we probably won't be recognised as the favourites to do it. But in our hearts and within the squad, we are definitely silently confident that we can maybe bring that trophy home," said Dercksen. "I think the men have given us a great template now with the Test Championship victory. So, we are really looking forward to it. I think we've got a great mix of experience and youth at the moment, and we've got tremendous talent in all facets. I'm really looking forward to the World Cup."
