What price for a kilo of Olympic medals
April 18th, 2008, 7:53 pm Hobbies News
The notion that some medals are more difficult to win, and therefore more worthy, is a contentious one.
Athletes from so-called minor sports object furiously, pointing out that they work just as hard and are just as skilled, so deserve equal credit.
Ive always had my doubts.
To me athletics is the heart and soul of the summer Olympics, which is why I rate the gold medal performances of Jack Lovelock, Yvette Williams, Norman Read, Murray Halberg, Peter Snell and John Walker so highly.
At Olympic level, swimming is also a major sport, and others %26mdash; cycling and gymnastics, for example %26mdash; are just a notch below.
But modern pentathlon, wrestling, synchronised swimming and the rest %26mdash; give me a break! In the winter Olympics, skiing is the marquee event.
Other sports, from snowboarding to curling, are entertaining, but its skiing that draws the headlines.
I thought about all this when I saw an advertisement in the Sunday newspapers %26mdash; %26quot;WINTER OLYMPIANS WANTED Vancouver 2010%26quot;.
The advertisement, with the New Zealand Academy of Sports logo and the name of Sparc prominent at the bottom, called for %26quot;big, fast athletic males%26quot; to try out for the New Zealand bobsleigh team, with testing to take place next Saturday in the five main centres.
In worthwhile sports it takes years to develop skills to a world-class level.
Imagine a person trying out as a golfer next Saturday and then challenging Tiger Woods at the Masters in 2010? Or someone picking up a tennis racket for the first time now and being ready for Wimbledon in two years.
So how much value should we place on Olympic representation when it involves men who learn about the bobsleigh this week and are wearing the New Zealand silver fern at Vancouver in 2010? Back in the late 1980s there was a push to get a New Zealand bobsleigh team chosen for the Calgary winter Olympics and all sorts of people were urged to have a crack at the team.
Taranakis Murray Lilley, whose career as a world-class squash player a few years earlier I had followed closely, was living in Canada by then.
Apparently Lilley went close to making the team.
He had no background in winter Olympics sports, and certainly none in the bobsleigh, but was still fit, and relatively strong and fast, enough to get him to the fringe of Olympic status.
At the national swimming trials in Auckland last month 17-year-old Kurt Bassett broke Paul Kingsmans 200m backstroke national record, set 20 years ago.
Heartbreakingly, Bassett missed Olympic selection by one-hundredth of a second.
Its hard not to contrast how tenaciously Bassett has fought for Olympic selection this year, and his tremendous improvement, with an advertisement inviting fast athletic males to have a crack at representing New Zealand at the winter Olympics in two years time.
In one case, a young man has been breaking his neck to get to Beijing. In the other, some men who know little about the bobsleigh event are about to be fast-tracked through to Olympic representation.
To paraphrase George Orwell: all Olympic athletes are equal, but some are more equal than others.
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