Cycling NZ in pursuit of funding

Cycling New Zealand are confident they can recover lost funding with strong performances leading up to the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

Cycling took a $500,000 hit from funding paymasters High Performance Sport New Zealand after a disappointing return from the Rio Games last year, when a solitary silver medal and four fourths was a poor outcome for $17.4 million invested over the four-year cycle.

New Zealand’s track team are off to the world championships in Hong Kong this week and there’s a confidence that they are moving in the right direction.

“The tricky part for us is concentrating on the here and now,” CNZ chief executive Andrew Matheson said yesterday.

“Hong Kong is a really important stepping stone. We want to bed in the things we learnt from Rio. We’ve got fantastic riders and coaching group. If we do our homework and perform as we believe we can, that funding will come.”

Head coach Dayle Cheatley bluntly reckoned the biggest learning out of Rio was if you don’t deliver “you lose half a million dollars”.

“We’d all love another half million dollars in the back pocket to play with. But we’ve learnt to cope with that. As long as the athletes aren’t missing out then we’re in a pretty good position.”

Matheson said, with the cloth having to be cut to fit, it sharpens the focus on where the funding must go, as opposed to where the bosses might like it to go.

“A lot of what we’ve done is making sure the important stuff is covered off. The nicer stuff we’ll leave for another day.

“We’re not going to take any shortcuts. We’re still very focused on the Tokyo outcomes. We’re in a pretty good space,” Matheson said.

The results out of Rio were sobering for CNZ. The solitary medal came from world champion men’s sprint team Sam Webster, Eddie Dawkins and Ethan Mitchell.

“For us it was a really good reminder that it’s a pretty tough world out there. We’ve got to make sure everything we do is world class,” Matheson said.

“We’re really confident we’ve got riders in our programme, or on the way [into the programme], who will give us a good shot in Tokyo. All the ingredients are there to do the job if we make the right calls across the next 12-18 months.”

Cheatley believes CNZ have been “pretty blessed” over recent years with the depth of talent coming through.

“We have tended to focus a lot on our junior programmes to make sure there’s a pipeline. The likes of [junior world champion] Campbell Stewart and [ world junior silver medallist] Michaela Drummond are two worldclass young riders coming through and they have a lot to add in the next few years.”

The world championships run from April 12-16. separating the two sides for the first 55 minutes, the Mystics would have been disappointed to let the visitors get away in the dying minutes as the Steel eked out a seven-goal win.

The late lapse cost the home side a bonus point — one most would agree the Mystics deserved having battled hard all night.

Determined to shake the tag as perennial underdogs in the new elite netball league, the Mystics were bitterly disappointed with their onegoal loss to the Central Pulse in a tense opening clash, after having a narrow edge for most of the match.

There was a lot to like about the Mystics’ effort last night. They displayed their trademark flair on attack, with the interplay between midcourter Elisapeta Toeava and Maria Tutaia producing some particularly stunning moments.

But they also showed a clinical approach and patience that has not often been associated with them.

The home side offered strong variety on attack, picking their moments to look long into Bailey Mes back at goal shoot.

The Mystics attacking unit needed to be slick. They faced a massive challenge to match the scoring power of the Steel, who boast one of the best strike weapons in the competition in Fowler-Reid.

As expected, the Jamaican import dominated the shooting stats, sinking 59 shots at goal. But she was well down on her usual accuracy rate, going at 77 per cent in the first half, largely due to the toil of veteran defender Anna Harrison.

Frustratingly for Harrison, the 1.98m Fowler-Reid was able to pull in the bulk of the rebounds.

With the scraps so hard to come by, the pressure was on the Mystics