A sporting year to remember in a time to forget
Corralling the sporting moments of year like no other was a head-bursting exercise
See ya 2021, you won’t be missed.
Even though Covid-19’s trawl through the Greek alphabet promises more disruption in 2022, there is at least the sense that at some stage this year we’ll have adapted to living in the new normal.
Or maybe not, as I seem to remember thinking something similar around this time last year, long before a particularly infectious variant was first reported in India and which would become known as Delta.
Perhaps the single strangest element of the sporting year was the fact it was, from a New Zealand perspective, pretty bloody good and, if you came out of a womb a bona fide cricket tragic like myself, it was even better than that.
Then there was the splendid, contradictory Olympics. The majority of the residents of the host country didn’t want them; the majority of health experts warned against them; the restrictions around crowds hinted at a giant flop. Turned out the fortnight's diversion from the crushing existence of a pandemic reality was exactly what the world needed.
It was a great year for New Zealand sport. There will be mighty achievements that barely warrant a mention here, like Chris Wood’s goalscoring feats for Burnley and the performance of the Olywhites. Like Hayden Wilde’s breakthrough moment in the Olympic triathlon (injury permitting, there’ll be much more to come from him), and Ruth Croft’s trailblazing feats. Like Lydia Ko’s career revival.
Like more Paralympic magic from Sophie Pascoe, or Ajaz Patel taking 10 wickets, or skier Alice Robinson winning a GS world cup event, or Shane van Gisbergen having a ridiculously dominant year on four wheels, or a special NZ victory at the Melbourne Cup, or Steve Alker’s golfing life starting in earnest at 50.
Like Joseph Parker’s unbeaten year melded to David Nyika’s emergence, or Devon Conway’s debut at Lord’s. I mean, the America’s Cup was won and even now it seems like a mildly diverting regatta from yesteryear.
We won medals on the trampoline and in flippin’ tennis for goodness sake.
There’s just too much and my head is near bursting trying to remember it all.
BEST SPORTING MOMENT
No pineapple Fruju for you for guessing that my pick is the moment Ross Taylor picked up Mohammad Shami and deposited him into the square leg fence to win the inaugural World Test Championship.
Yes, there were some great moments on the water at Tokyo and the women’s sevens team lit up that tournament, but we’ve become accustomed to success in those sports. To be men’s world champions at cricket was something many, myself included, never thought would happen after falling so agonisingly short in the CWC final of 2019, particularly when you look at the raw and financial resources stacked up against the Black Caps.
It was everything you want in a sporting contest: dramatic, heartwarming and the good guys won.
The news today that Taylor is pulling stumps on his magnificent career makes it even more special.
I’ll dig a lot deeper into Taylor’s astonishing career closer to his last match but my fervent hope is that the (spoiler alert!) photograph selected below is immortalised in bronze outside the gates of the Basin Reserve before long.
Honourables: Emma Twigg single sculls gold, Men’s rowing eight, Women’s sevens gold, Ajaz Patel 10-for, Devon Conway Lord’s debut.
WORST SPORTING MOMENT
Within the space of 70 days the country lost two bright young people who also happened to be really good at sport. The deaths of Olivia Podmore and Sean Wainui were a reminder, should we have ever needed it, that athletic prowess does not insulate individuals from mental-health struggles and stresses. In many ways, certainly in Podmore’s case, it exacerbates it.
I felt uncomfortable about the amount of media coverage Podmore’s death attracted when you put it alongside Wainui, although I realise there were significant factors in this, including the willingness of Podmore’s friends and family to talk and, bluntly, the sheer unusualness of a young Pakeha woman taking her own life.
It feels confronting even writing that, so after a couple of years in which we’ve had a whole bunch of s*** thrown at us from multiple directions, check in with your mates over the holidays.
NZ SPORTSMAN
This was hard. I had to restrain myself from giving it to Kane Williamson because all he did in 2021 was score a test double-ton and ton against Pakistan and brilliantly skipper New Zealand to the WTC mace by being top scorer, and the World T20 final where he also top scored in a loss. However, he’d hate that because he is a team man and he might even argue that Kyle Jamieson was more influential in the WTC success.
For similar reasons of outside assistance I overlooked SvG, James McDonald, Chris Wood and Hamish Bond and instead landed on Paul Coll, the firecracker squash exponent from the West Coast.
The guy has had a career year, winning the British Open and climbing to No 2 in the world, and I’ve got a feeling it’s the start, not the end, of something. I’m happy with my choice, even if I'm not 100 percent sold on it.
Honourables: Shane van Gisbergen, Kane Williamson, Hamish Bond, James McDonald, Chris Wood, Burling-Tuke.
NZ SPORTSWOMAN
Lisa Carrington is a machine. Statistically the country’s greatest Olympian and while I’d still keep Peter Snell on that perch, Carrington could convince me otherwise in Paris, even though her favoured K1 200m event has been bladed.
Only a liar or a canoe racer would pretend to be able to deliver a technical dissertation about the sport but here’s what I love watching about Carrington in what is ostensibly a fairly short, uneventful straight line race: she looks exactly what you imagine kayaking perfection to look like. Carrington is serene in the start box, powerful at the gun, metronomically fast across the pond, first across the finish line, happy yet never exuberant in the aftermath and seemingly ready to paddle back to the start and do it all again (which she kind of had to do with such a busy programme in Tokyo).
A genuine phenomenon.
Honourables: Emma Twigg, Ruth Croft, Sarah Hirini, Lydia Ko.
GLOBAL SPORTING HERO
There’s something about this that still makes me wonder if it’s a cop out because, by her standards, the Tokyo Olympics were a glaring failure for Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast in history. She didn’t win a gold, but what she did was start a conversation about high-performance sport and athlete welfare.
That’s why in the end I leaned towards Biles. It’s not that what she did was particularly brave - though it was admirable that she spoke at length about it at the time and didn’t brush off the media - but the fact that the greatest ever at what she does made it okay to be vulnerable and, even more profoundly, made it okay to fail.
I also get it if you think any of the honourables deserved this make-believe gong more than Biles did.
Honourables: Max Verstappen, Phil Mickelson, Tom Brady, Emma Raducanu.
BEST NZ QUOTE
“Before I got here tonight I was going to die at 85, now I'm going to die at 80. It definitely took a few years off my life.” - The shot put judge nearly shaved a few years off every Kiwi sports fan’s life after wrongly raising the foul flag for eventual bronze medallist Tom Walsh.
Runner up:
“Unattractive, unsafe and ridiculously gladiatorial.” - All Black legend Ian Kirkpatrick assesses the charms of modern rugby.
PICTURE OF THE YEAR
Still gives me the warm fuzzies to this day.
THE WILL WE EVER SEE THEM AGAIN AWARD?
What have you missed the most? I’m guessing most of you will say things like a Warriors home game at Mt Smart Stadium, or the Breakers at a packed-out Spark Arena, but for me it is the two tennis weeks of the year.
It is slightly disorienting to feel this way because I spent quite a few years covering these ASB Classic tournaments and used to consider them the most overhyped and under-delivering sports events of the calendar. Now, for the love of Matt Brown, I just want to see them back.
In recent years the women’s tournament in particular has become fantastic, though the men will likely always suffer due to the difficulty of attracting superstars so close to the year’s first major, the Australian Open.
You can probably put the America’s Cup into this category too… don’t get me started.
Honourables: The Breakers, The Warriors.
GLOBAL SPORTS IMAGE
Arguably the greatest football player of all time leaves the only club he’s ever wanted to play for.
But he did win the Copa America with his countrymen though.
THE BOUNCE AWARD FOR BEST BOUNCE MOMENTS
Yes, I’m actually doing this. It’s mine and I’m allowed. Since starting The Bounce on September 6 I have posted 69 times. My first email drop went out to five people, this one will be landing in significantly more inboxes. My three most well-read posts were:
“I started having substantial memory issues. I was trying to get a passport for my son and I couldn’t remember his middle name, which was a significant moment. I was searching around for it in my mind for a good 25 seconds and had to go, ‘I’m really sorry, I’ve forgotten’, to the person on the phone trying to do the passport. ‘I’ve forgotten my son’s name’.
“I had temper issues, definitely, and then at this point of my life, it led down the track to what I’d consider alcohol abuse. I always enjoyed a beer with the boys but at this point I began drinking more. I didn’t know what was going on and the drinking brought a little bit of an escape for a certain amount of time. It would temporarily alleviate the symptoms somewhat but then, as you can imagine, the next day things would be back to how they felt before, if not worse. It was a vicious cycle I got caught in.”
If you’re looking for the flashpoint; the singular moment when a deal worth close to $400 million was taken - even if temporarily - off the table of an organisation who desperately wanted it, [the Brent Impey-Martin Devlin interview] was it.
As one source familiar with key personnel on both sides of the debate said: “For 25 years they [NZR and the NZRPA] had a relationship that was the envy of the sporting world and they blew it up in 10 minutes.”
As the reporter that broke the original story of the potential Silver Lake-NZR partnership, it seemed like a sudden and inexplicable turn of events.
It’s rare that a gift like Jamieson comes along. The sense of anticipation when he gets a red ball in his hands is palpable.
I get a different sense when he is handed the white ball in a T20. I feel nervous for him and selfishly protective. I worry that confidence lost in one format will seep into another.
I worry that the thing that has made him rich will make him worse.
The least popular was my summation of the Netflix-worthy end to the Formula One season, but in a terrible case of operator-error, this was emailed to zero inboxes.
SPORT WITH MOST TO PONDER
Rugby. Footy. Code. The National Sport. The Obsession?
Never before has the sport’s umbilical connection to the country seemed so fragile. I have written about this for The Spinoff recently. This feeling was only amplified when fellow Substacker Bernard Hickey forwarded me Google New Zealand’s Year in Search blog.
The year’s 10-most searched New Zealanders included six sporting figures: Lisa Carrington (1), Lydia Ko (2), Chris Cairns (5), Sophie Pascoe (6), Joseph Parker (7) and Valerie Adams (10).
The most searched for sports topics were: NBA, Australia v India (cricket), NRL, Olympic medal table, Cricinfo, Australian Open (tennis), Pakistan v New Zealand (cricket), Euros (football), America’s Cup, England v India (cricket).
Granted, searches are a blunt instrument to measure interest but if I was a rugby administrator, I wouldn’t write it off as a quirk. I’d assume it was a pattern.
If you highlight the sports flaws you’re labelled anti-rugby. In my case it couldn’t be further from the truth. I love the sport and I remain in thrall to its many possibilities but I will admit this: I think the game is in a dark place and I’m not sure New Zealand Rugby knows where the batteries for the torch are kept.
BEST LISTS TO FORMULATE WHILE AT THE GARDEN BAR OF BUTLERS REEF HOTEL (or other summer establishment)
Criminal All Black XV
Worst Black Caps Test XI
Top 10 Creepiest Sports Mascots
One Rule You’d Change For All Our Major Sports
American Golfer You’d Most Like To Smear With Jam And Put In A Bear Cage
Top 10 Classic Sport Strips
ON TO MMXXII
It’s a huge year for women’s sport, with the hosting of the cricket and rugby world cups, all the while preparing for the 2023 Fifa World Cup. The White and Black Ferns have got some work to do in a short space of time if they want to be hoisting trophies on home soil.
In the immediate future, I’m off to the Bay Oval for New Zealand’s first home showing as World Test Champions. Given Taylor’s news today, I’m also glad for the chance to watch one of his last trips to the crease. I’ll be filing daily from the ground and aim to put a unique spin on it for my paying subscribers (probably poor choice of words given the absence of Patel).
I’ll also be putting out a couple of newsletters a week that are not cricket focused.
Most of all though, I want to take this opportunity to thank you all again for your support, your words of encouragement and your occasional advice. It’s all deeply appreciated. While today’s newsletter is only loosely connected to the world of journalism, I can’t wait to get stuck into some meaty topics in 2022 and your support makes that possible.
Happy new year! Enjoy 'The Mount'- first day of the first home test in our house is a very special sporting holiday called 'National Leave Dad Alone Day'.
Superb summary Dyl. Black Caps all the way for best sporting moment…World Test Champions!