Choppy waters for rowers
Some tweaking, and not a dramatic overhaul, is what Rowing New Zealand’s boss sees as necessary following a disappointing world championships.
The Kiwi team, which has collected huge medal hauls at previous world championships this decade could only grab three in Bulgaria last week – and none of them gold. It was New Zealand’s worst return in 15 years.
But Rowing NZ chief executive Simon Peterson believes that’s the basis for some fine-tuning of the high performance programme, not sweeping changes.
Peterson pointed to New Zealand boats making eight Olympicclass A finals as a sign the programme wasn’t far away from where it needed to be two years out from the Tokyo Olympics.
‘‘Very happy to be in eight A finals, disappointed with the final conversion for sure,’’ Peterson said. ‘‘The past results have been fantastic and this one isn’t where we wanted it to be, but there’s still three world championship medals and eight A finals.
‘‘There’s obviously some tweaking to be done.’’
There was a concern following the 2016 Rio Olympics when New Zealand’s medal haul was also three, after they’d dragged in nine medals at the 2015 world championships.
‘‘To be clear, we’re not happy about the results of this year’s world champs but it is about the Olympics in two years’ time. We’d rather be having those tougher conversations now and go into Tokyo with our eyes wide open rather than to be navelgazing after Tokyo and saying ‘how come we didn’t convert’.’’
Along with the achievement of making eight A finals, Peterson drew attention to continuing improvement at the age-group world championships.
‘‘The under-23s have had one of our best seasons for a long time and the juniors have had our best season for many years. So we’ve built on our depth – it’s just now getting that final conversion across the line.’’
What won’t change ahead of Tokyo 2020 is the $5.1 million funding Rowing NZ gets annually from High Performance Sport NZ.
‘‘One of the advantages of being a Tier One sport is we’ve got that funding long-term on a four-year basis,’’ Peterson said.
‘‘We’re accountable for these results – it won’t go unquestioned – but we have that ability based on our past results to have that Tier One funding in place.’’
Rowing NZ began an internal review in April into their culture and setup, which saw high performance director Alan Cotter surprisingly resign ahead of the world championships – although he stayed on to oversee the team in Plovdiv. Judith Hamilton has been appointed as an interim high performance director through until March next year.
‘‘We’ve got national champs in February and trials in March, so I didn’t think it was fair on the athletes and coaches having a change to a full-time person during a critical period,’’ Peterson said.