What New Zealand can learn from sport

Despite an opening ceremony that left many wondering how these games might be judged, the athletes took over the show, as they usually do, and ensured that the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris will be remembered for all the right reasons.

Our country had a wobbly start too. A few things didn’t go our way early on. Our men, a pre-tournament favourite, were out of the Rugby Sevens before the opening ceremony and a few early performances suggested that our expectations may have been greater than our ability.

But normal transmission resumed when the Women’s Rugby Sevens team set the medal ball rolling and our rowers and sailors started to chime in behind.

The result some two weeks later seemed beyond those early expectations, and with it an acknowledgement that, despite our many challenges as a country right now, there are some outstanding young people who call themselves New Zealanders, and who are able to stride the world’s stage with a confidence and demeanour that we should all be immensely proud of.

Of course, the Seven’s Sisters have developed the winning habit and we’ve become used to the talk of teamwork and family that accompanies their success.

Then came the rowing mums, Brooke Francis and Lucy Spoors, winning the gold medal in the women’s double sculls. Their talk of “relinquishing being a mum” and time away from young families highlighted that life is real, even for super star athletes, and furthermore, that every one of our people in Paris had endured big sacrifices to be there.

But when the women’s sprint cycling team won their silver medal early in the proceedings at the velodrome, Ellesse Andrews comment that her first thoughts were that “it’s just a privilege” should have put us on notice that this was a special team.

Then Hayden Wilde turned up. We are now in that post Olympic haze where we are asking each other about their favourite Olympic moment. I am yet to work out my answer to that question. But one of my undoubted highlights involved not a gold medal, but a silver.

Hayden Wilde’s individual triathlon was a race for the ages. It was one hour and forty three minutes of competition as intense as you would see in any event, anywhere. Seemingly out of it early on, he fought back to take a commanding, and what appeared to be unshakeable, lead early in the final leg, only to be caught and overtaken in what turned out to be a remarkable last few hundred metres.

As spectacular as the race was, it was Wilde’s interview, immediately after the race, which has me citing the scene a couple of weeks later.

When asked by the interviewer the inevitable question about how disappointed he must have been to be so close to a gold medal, only to lose it in the home straight, he responded with the positive air of a true champion.

First, he thanked his New Zealand teammate for supporting him during the bike leg and bringing him back to the bunch, saying he sacrificed his own race in doing so. Then he enthusiastically commended the performance of Alex Yee, the British athlete who beat him to the gold medal in that frantic last few hundred metres.

Only then did he talk about how he was feeling, and you could tell, despite the opportunity to be extremely disappointed, he chose not to be, and instead gave the impression that he was ecstatic with his own result.

The post-race interview probably only lasted a couple of minutes. But it’s impact on me was immense. Humble. Respectful. Grateful. No sour grapes. No excuses. An acknowledgement that he gave it everything he could and that someone, on the day, was better.

How you react when you win says a lot about you. How you react when you don’t win is even more important, and in this case, a young man’s character shone brightly at a time when his reaction could have been so different.

In Dame Lisa Carrington and Lydia Ko we have seasoned champions who know when to deliver championship results and how to respond to the world’s press in the aftermath.

They are equally uniquely us. Their respective reactions to their own success was again highly respectful of their opponents and graciously appreciative of their team mates and supporters.

Both were remarkably dominant in their respective arenas, with Carrington’s success hardly in doubt throughout the kayaking regatta, and Ko dominating the final day at the golf.

At the risk of pre-empting things, there is no point in the men turning up for next year’s Halberg Awards, other than to applaud these two remarkable young women.

But it was Carrington’s K2 partner, Alicia Hoskin, now all of a sudden a two time Olympic gold medallist, who totally surprised in her delivery on and off the water. Sitting in the seat behind Carrington in both the K4 and the K2, Hoskin seemed solid as a rock in the boat. But again, her post race comments brought a tear to the eye.

In her lakeside interview with Guy Heveldt after the medal ceremony she spoke off the cuff, and yet, as if off a well-rehearsed script.

There’s something about people who smile when they talk. They seem more engaged, confident and interested. Hoskin is one of those. Admittedly, with two golden reasons hanging around her neck that smile may have come a little easier. But as she opened her interview by speaking about the credibility and the legacy of the competing crews, particularly Germany and Hungary, there was what media types call an x-factor.

Hoskin spoke passionately about her predecessor as Lisa Carrington’s K2 partner, Caitlan Regal, saying that she learned plenty from the girls who had been there before her. She went on to say that “it really does take a village” to be successful as she thanked her supporters from “Gizzy” and elsewhere at home.

And then this. Even though her racing had ended on a high, a simple comment, “we’re not done yet”. She went on to say that the K4 team were all taking on the K1 tomorrow, getting out to support Lisa in her final event. We know how that ended up.

The outright celebratory enthusiasm of Finn Butcher, the Central Otago kayak paddler, who blindsided not just us, but even himself, with a performance that you wonder if he really expected. He was “fizzing to spray some champagne” before reflecting with a tear in his eye about a beloved mentor who is no longer with us.

His down to earth Kiwi parents talked about the effort we all put into our kids. You couldn’t write the script that they delivered.

Hamish Kerr was expected to be a contender in the high jump. For some reason he decided to put those of us watching through merry-hell as he failed two consecutive attempts at the ‘relatively easy’ height of 2.20 metres. That he summoned the mental strength to get over that height in his last attempt and go on to make the final used probably enough heartbeats for most of us.

But there was more to come. He won a nail-biting final and set off around the stadium on a genuinely joyous victory lap that had not just us, but the world celebrating with him. Finally, the eloquent Ellesse Andrews was left to win our final gold medal, and left us with the words that she was “living the dream”.

There is no question that these people, who have chosen the difficult and challenging path of high performance sport as their career, have endured incredibly tough days to get them to where they are today. Some of those tough days are now being experienced by the likes of Erica Fairweather and Aimee Fisher, both fourth in their chosen events by just tenths of a second, and left to ponder what might have been.

But what has impressed me the most, of all those performances, was the way our winners won. The way they behaved in victory and the respect they showed towards those whom they bettered.

I would like to tell these athletes, and in fact the entire New Zealand team, that these demonstrations of sportsmanship, teamwork, respect and humility have not gone unnoticed by us. They are a group of young people of whom we should be extremely proud.