No point saying it with flowers this book speaks so much more about romance
February 16th, 2008, 4:04 am Hobbies News
For an enduring gift I suggest Our Olympic Century, by Joesph Romanos. Here are some excerpts celebrating the romance of 100 years of New Zealand participation at the Olympic Games: There has never been an All Black Olympian, but there have been some near misses. Probably the closest was Mark Irwin, who played 18 games, including seven tests, for the All Blacks in 1955-60. Irwin was a fine oarsman and in 1956 was a member of the eight that was nominated for the Melbourne Olympic Games. However, the selectors decided not to send an eight, so Irwin missed out.
Bruce Hunter, an All Black wing in the early 1970s and 800m specialist, went within a whisker of making the team for the 1972 Munich Olympics. One All Black wing who was certainly good enough to compete at the Olympics was George Smith, who dominated New Zealand hurdling in the late 1890s and early 1900s, and won 14 national titles at hurdles and sprints. He even set an unofficial world record for the 440 yards hurdles in Melbourne in 1904.
No New Zealander competed at the Olympics until 1908, by which time Smith had turned his back on rugby and was playing rugby league professionally in England.
wThere was an intriguing curiosity to Peter Snells 1500m gold medal effort in Tokyo in 1964. Though he was the world record-holder over the mile, he had never run a 1500m race before his first heat at the Olympics.
So he was a 1500m novice, even if a fairly useful one.
John Walkers 1500m final at the 1976 Montreal Olympics began at 9.50 on Sunday morning (NZ time) and the starts of several church services were delayed to allow patrons to follow the race.
Four New Zealand Olympians died in service during the two world wars. The most famous was tennis star Anthony Wilding, who won the bronze medal at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics. Wilding died heroically in the second battle of Ypres on May 9, 1915.
In a sport in which most of the competitors are young and spirited, Mark Weldon, serious-minded and mature, stood out when he represented New Zealand in the 50m freestyle and 4×100m freestyle relay at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. In 2002 he returned to New Zealand as the innovative and media-savvy chief executive of the New Zealand Stock Exchange.
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