Coach and student set to represent NZ
A coach and student will be cheering each other on from the rinkside when they both compete in the Oceania figure skating champs in September.
New Plymouth student Niamh Quinn, 15, and her coach Michelle O’Doherty, 35, are both headed to Brisbane next month to represent New Zealand in the sport.
It will be first time Quinn has competed in the international competition but O’Doherty competed there when she was 16.
She then put her competing on hold while she had children, before making a comeback in the sport and winning silver last year.
O’Doherty only got back into the sport when she saw Quinn in a learn-to-skate class six years ago and realised her potential, and decided to coach her.
‘‘I actually spotted Niamh skating because I used to do roller derby, so I spotted Niamh and asked her who was coaching her and then that year we won the national title for her grade,’’ O’Doherty said.
‘‘I had four months to get her ready for nationals.’’
Quinn and O’Doherty both competed at the New Zealand nationals in July, with Quinn coming third in the cadet solo dancer category while O’Doherty won gold in the advanced masters division.
Unlike some of the other categories, Quinn said her dance was fairly structured.
‘‘You get given a pattern and music and then if you don’t follow the pattern or if you’re out of time to the music then you get, like, points down and then there’s all the technical things,’’ she said.
She said it was hard to explain why she loved participating in the sport so much.
‘‘Sometimes I wake up and I’m like I don’t want to do that I’d rather do another thing.
‘‘But then when I can’t skate, I get really...I don’t know, I get really sad when I can’t skate.’’
Quinn’s mum Merryn Quinn said her daughter had been taking dance lessons but stopped when the student nurse who was taking them had to move on.
After seeing an advertisement in the school notices for skating lessons, she took her along to try it out and said her daughter has never looked back.
‘‘It’s a sport, hard work and training and all those things, but it also involved performance and dance and creativity and then for the girls, make-up and the costumes,’’ she said.
‘‘It is quite a hard sport because you train all year and then you go off to nationals and you have two to three minutes on the floor to do your thing.’’
A helicopter is being used to scour rugged north Taranaki countryside looking for missing man Karl Roberts. The only sign searchers have found of the 31-year-old, since he disappeared on August 1, are his sand shoes stuck in mud. Senior Sergeant Thomas McIntyre said two police officers and a local hunter planned to spend two and a half hours in the sky on Monday hoping to discover fresh clues to Roberts’ whereabouts. ‘‘They will focus on where the shoes were located and they will do a grid search in that area,’’ McIntyre said. If the aerial surveillance failed to find any fresh information the official search for Roberts would be suspended until something new came to light, he said. Roberts has not been seen since he lost control of his car and crashed down a bank on Uruti Rd, about 45km northeast of New Plymouth, two weeks ago at 1.30pm. His shoes were discovered by searchers two days after the crash buried in mud about three kilometres from the crash site. Roberts’ family and the local community have continued to scour the area since his disappearance. The section of Te Henui Walkway beneath the Northgate bridge will be closed to people with wheelchairs, pushchairs and mobility scooters while manhole works are under way between 8am and 4pm tomorrow. Walkers and cyclists can expect delays but will be able to get through the site by following the direction of workers on-site. New Plymouth District Council has apologised for any inconvenience.