Olympique Daily: NZOC after a sprint finish
A health check on NZ's Olympics framed by the question, 'Do medal counts even matter?' PLUS: Ferg sends some backwash CRNZ's way, and another chance to enter book giveaway.
The last newsletter focused on the things I love about the Olympics - this one woke up slightly on the wrong side of the bed.
As we enter the home straight of the Olympics, it’s the right time to straighten up off the bend and take a health check on New Zealand’s fortunes.
Before reading, it’s important to have at hand a few grains of salt. When it comes to the Olympics, you’re a team in name only. The dreams and expectations of a 1500m runner in a stacked field are markedly different, for example, than those of a rower in the fours, where only a handful of countries have the resources to field competitive crews.
Hundreds of swimmers compete in the pool for 105 medals; hundreds of hockey players compete on turf for six medals.
Each medal might be forged from the same metal, they might weigh the same, look the same and carry the same weight on the medal table, but the paths to get there are not the same.
It is worth remembering this when in the clamour for more taxpayer money, High Performance Sport NZ tells the public how their systems and innovation-based approach enables this country to far outperform Olympic expectations. As you can probably tell, this cynic is less enamoured of that argument and would counter by saying they’re very good at one thing above all else: identifying ‘soft’ spots in the Olympic menu and getting the appropriate resources to those areas — mostly boats and bikes.
There is nothing wrong with that. It’s smart, but it’s also why I place next to no importance in either the official medal table or the mythical per capita medal table.