How New Zealand became a sporting behemoth
Isolation and a tiny population of 4.7 million works to Kiwis’ advantage,
‘We know that most of our elite athletes have had multi-sport backgrounds’
By thrashing England by an innings and 65 runs, the New Zealand cricket team are now unbeaten in eight home Test series, a run stretching back to 2015-16.
New Zealand are second in the International Cricket Council’s Test rankings. In the one-day format this summer, the Black Caps lost the World Cup final to England on boundaries scored after the super over had finished in a tie. But as my colleague Tim Wigmore has pointed out, this is a national team whose “annual revenue is less than Surrey County Cricket Club”.
This is far from an anomaly. New Zealand’s success across a range of different sports is wildly disproportionate to their population of 4.7million.
In rugby union, the All Blacks’ eight-year reign as world champions may have come to an end with their semi-final defeat by England last month, but their win rate this century remains well above 80 per cent.
New Zealand are world champions in the women’s XVS game and both men’s and women’s codes in sevens. In July, they won the Netball World Cup in Liverpool.
The nation’s golden touch extends to the water as the America’s Cup holders.
They also boast current Olympic champions in rowing, canoeing and sailing, and their haul of 18 medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics made them the thirdmost successful nation on medals per capita.
Too often when trying to explain New Zealand exceptionalism – particularly around the All Blacks – we focus on the sport itself without considering the wider context of the country’s geography, history and culture, which applies across all sports.
As Peter Miskimmin, the chief executive of Sport New Zealand, explains, much of their identity as a nation derives from sport. Nearly all of New Zealand’s national heroes are sportspeople, headed by Sir Edmund Hillary, who became the first climber to reach the summit of Mount Everest with Tenzing Norgay.
“Our place in the world comes from our worldclass sporting success,” Miskimmin told The Daily Telegraph. “We are the little country who can stand up and take on the world and do really well.”
An outdoors lifestyle clearly plays a role. A great emphasis at schools is placed on the physical literacy of having the ability to run, jump and throw. More than half of children will represent their school in a competitive sport in a single year. Crucially, Miskimmin believes that commercialisation and specialisation are twin evils to be resisted in youth sport.
“What we know from our elite athletes is that most of them have had multi-sporting backgrounds,” he said. “There is real evidence that, the broader the experience for kids, the better they develop.”
Rather than viewing their isolation and small population bases as weaknesses, Miskimmin argues they confer advantages as it forces them to maximise their resources and to collaborate across all sports. Under Sport New Zealand’s Coach Accelerator Programme, head coaches from all national teams are regularly brought together to exchange ideas of best practice.
Then there is the sense of Kiwi resourcefulness, or what they refer to as No 8 Wire. The idea that, like the wire commonly used in rural fencing, New Zealanders are both strong and flexible. They are enormously proud of their ingenuity and of providing the world with the jet boat, electric fence, bungee jumping and even the egg beater.
Translated into the sporting world, New Zealand are frequently at the cutting edge of technology in cycling and sailing, and with a fraction of the budget of rival countries.
“We don’t have the same chequebook that UK Sport do,” Miskimmin said. “In fact, I would say we have a quarter of that, but we need to make that work. Getting our own world-class engineers together and collaborating is an area in which we can outperform other countries.
“The America’s Cup is a really good example of that. We don’t have as much money as the rest of the world, so we have to out-think and outwork them.”