NZ athletics to showcase diverse collection of world-class performers at ‘Track Stars’

Source: Radio New Zealand

World, Olympic and Commonwealth Games high jump champion Hamish Kerr stood in a room filled with New Zealand’s biggest sports stars and verbalised what everyone else was thinking.

“I want to apologise to any non-athletics fans out there, it’s been a good night.”

To be sure, track and field had dominated the 63rd Halberg Awards to an extent that must have had Sir Murray – himself a former Olympic distance-running champion and world recordholder – smiling from on high.

Distance phenom Sam Ruthe had predictably won the Emerging Talent award, James Sandiland was Coach of the Year for guiding Kerr to the top, sprinter Danielle Aitchison was named Para Athlete of the Year and Dame Valerie Adams was inducted into the NZ Sports Hall of Fame.

Kerr had retained his Sportsman of the Year crown and captured his first Supreme Award, joining a long list of previous athletics winners – shot putters Tom Walsh and Dame Val (three times), discus thrower Beatrice Faumuina, distance runners Allison Roe, John Walker (twice), Dick Tayler, Mike Ryan, Peter Snell and Halberg, walker Norm Read, decathlete Roy Williams and long-jumping sister Yvette Williams (twice).

The sport had three different nominations for Favourite Sporting Moment, voted on by the public – Ruthe’s sub-four-minute mile as a 15-year-old, Kerr’s dramatic world championship triumph and Geordie Beamish’s steeplechase victory, after being tripped and trampled in his heat.

Any of those highlights would have been worthy recipients, but as Athletics NZ chief executive Cam Mitchell dryly observes, they probably cannibalised each other, splitting the athletics vote so that none eventually won.

“We were looking at the nominations beforehand and you never really know how the Halbergs are going to go,” Kerr recalls. “You never know to compare golf and football and athletics and all these other sports.

“We were looking through all the categories and suspected there was a chance we might pick up a number of the awards, but you never know until it happens.

“We were all sitting at 2-3 tables, all next to each other, and celebrating pretty hard whenever an athletics name was called out and ultimately won. It was pretty special.

“It was also a credit to the community. I’ve felt like over the last few years, there’s been sense of understanding over where we, as athletes, were trying to get to and this was evidence of that.”

The occasion signalled something of a renaissance for athletics, which had slid from a former place of prominence to another sport that gained profile only during Olympic or Commonwealth Games cycles.

Over the previous 40 years, just three athletes had captured the Halberg Supreme Award – all throwers – while Nick Willis did his best to uphold the nation’s proud tradition in distance running.

From the halcyon days of the 1970s and 80s, when patrons crammed into Mt Smart Stadium to watch Olympic champions and world recordholders compete against New Zealand’s best, the sport had allowed itself to become, as Mitchell reflects, “understated”.

It never really went away, but as the sporting landscape expanded, it lost ground as a mainstream pastime.

On Saturday, athletics has another chance to showcase its resurgence through ‘Track Stars’, which gathers its top performers into a televised three-hour window as part of the four-day national championships in Auckland.

“The great thing is we’ve got this really diverse group of athletes,” Mitchell says. “Every part of the community will be able to see themselves in what they experience.

“Whether you’re a bigger person who’s powerful, whether you’re six foot, lean and can jump high, a lean, light middle-distance runner or a muscular sprinter, or somebody who’s missing a limb or in a wheelchair, the whole community is covered and then you have the Polynesian dynamic as well.”

While athletics was in hibernation, a very cool thing happened – it became much more than a long line of groundbreaking male and female distance runners, with success in events where New Zealand had very little previous history to draw on.

Faumuina’s 1997 world discus crown showed other Polynesian girls a viable pathway into throws, and Dame Val and – more recently – Maddi Wesche followed onto international podiums.

Walsh emerged around the same time as junior prodigy Jacko Gill, and after more than a decade of spurring each other on, a third 20-metre shot putter – Nick Palmer – joined them last year.

Teen pole vaulter Eliza McCartney shocked everyone with her 2016 Rio Olympic bronze medal, but now we have three women qualified for world indoor championships, with only two spots available.

Last year, Auckland-born South African Ethan Olivier gave New Zealand a world junior title in triple jump, shattering national senior records that had stood almost half a century.

Zoe Hobbs became the first Kiwi (or Oceania) woman to crack 11 seconds over 100 metres, providing us with perhaps our first truly world-class sprinter since Arthur Porritt in 1924. Tiaan Whelpton is just a few hundredths of a second and a friendly wind away from becoming our first man under 10 seconds.

New Zealand had never medalled in men’s high jump at Commonwealth Games, before Kerr took gold at Birmingham 2022. Then he became world indoor champion, then Olympic champion… then outdoor champion, each step uncharted territory.

“Probably what held me back at the start of my career was I couldn’t see a future as a high jumper,” he says. “It wasn’t until I was older and chatted to a few more people, I realised there was some potential.

“The biggest thing for me is you’ve got role models in every single event now. A child coming into the sport, as their body changes and they develop as a person… potentially the events they’re good at will change too and they can be OK with that, because there are now pathways in every event.”

Underpinning this growth has been the recent rise of teenager Ruthe and his rivalry with two-time Olympian Sam Tanner – something old school admirers of Snell-Halberg-Davies-Walker-Dixon-Quax-Willis can more readily identify with.

Ruthe captured the public’s imagination when he became the youngest male to break four minutes for the mile last March and his continued improvement has drawn crowds back to domestic meets this summer.

“Sam Ruthe is generating a lot of that, realistically,” admits Kerr, who will make his 2026 competitive debut at Track Stars. “Between him and Sam Tanner, and that rivalry, I get the sense they’ve re-awoken that supporter base with a memory of what it used to be and realising it can be again.

“Nowadays, not only do we have those distance guys, but we have sprinters and throwers and jumpers. You may come out for one thing, but you stay for everything.

“It’s exciting. I went to Cooks Classic at Whanganui to watch the Sams race before they went to the States, and the crowd there was pretty much the best crowd I’ve seen at that meet for 10 years.

“There were also sprints, and people came to watch Zoe and Tiaan, then stuck around to see the mile. We now have all these amazing athletes and you can be a fan of one of them, but turn up and become a fan of all the others while you’re there.”

The accord within the athletics community has seen administrators trying harder to help athletes towards their goals, like running sprints down the backstraight with tailwinds, while the athletes grow to understand they play a part in the bigger picture.

“If I reflect on the Halbergs, every one of those athletes thanked Athletics NZ in their speeches,” Mitchell says. “They also thanked High Performance Sport NZ.

“That’s rare. There are always strained relationships, but that shows the mutual respect for the work they do and also the role we play supporting them.

“It’s very much a partnership.”

Leveraging off athletes’ success is key to growing the sport at all levels.

In 2024, Athletics NZ established a national workforce delivering development programmes across its 11 regions.

“We used to have people sitting in an office here in Auckland, running national roles, but we had only five paid staff on the ground delivering support to schools, clubs, coaches, officials and athletes,” Mitchell says.

“We’ve gone from having five people to a workforce of 20 from Northland down to Southland. Every region now has a development officer working to a national plan.”

That team came together immediately after the Paris Olympics and Paralympics, where athletics accounted for nine of New Zealand’s 29 combined medals – our most successful single sport.

“The high-performance athletes have always been there to give us that profile, but we probably haven’t been able to leverage it was well as we could,” Mitchell says.

“The timing of that workforce was very purposeful. Having them hit the ground straight after that spike in interest enabled us to better support the clubs to a 10 percent growth at junior level.”

Even through its perceived downturn, athletics has remained an essential part of the sporting landscape through its Run-Jump-Throw programme.

“Athletics needs to be viewed differently from a lot of sports, because those fundamental skills prepare kids to go out and do other sports, which I think is a positive thing,” Mitchell says.

“One critical thing coming down the pipeline is the new physical education curriculum in schools. At the moment, in the draft curriculum that’s open for consultation until April, athletics is likely to mandated as a component of physical education.

“There will be elements that teachers will have to deliver that are athletics-based, so that creates a big opportunity for us.”

Another sign that athletes and administration trusted each other came when Kerr and Walsh used their influence to establish the Aotearoa Athletics Trust to help competitors financially cross the void from promising to world class – a glaring hole in the sport’s funding model that its biggest stars knew the national organisation simply couldn’t fill.

“If you get into your 20s and you haven’t achieved top eight in the world, you go into this black hole, where there’s nothing for you for a few years,” Kerr explains. “That’s particularly where you see a lot of athletes drop off.

“One of the key things for us was being able to relieve some of the stress over where the next paycheck was going to come from or how they’re going to pay rent.”

The trust supported four athletes to compete in Europe last year. Two of them – Whelpton and javelin exponent Tori Moorby – paid that debt forward, when they helped Kerr and Walsh run a community coaching clinic before Wellington’s Capital Classic last month.

Mitchell feels his sport is now on the cusp of attracting the sponsorship needed to catapult it back into the top echelon.

“Elevating the summer circuit, and doing more around marketing the brand and the athlete experience and exposure has been important, leading into the broadcast deal we have with TVNZ,” he says.

“It’s really important for our sport to be back in the mainstream – it’s hard to build profile if you’re not and you can’t build a commercial profile out the other side of it.

“We’re ready for it, we’re ready to capitalise on more big nights. Straight after Halbergs, we’ve got Track Stars.

“After Track Stars, we’ve got world indoors and then Commonwealth Games. Then the season comes back again, and the summer circuit will be bigger and better than this year, because of what we’ve learnt.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand