Miskimmin confident Rio Olympics will produce 14 medals but it’s not all beer and skittles

What better way to wrap up the year, than a chat with the don of New Zealand sport Peter Miskimmin.

“Sport is so important to this country,” he says. “It does something for this country that other things can’t do.”

Miskimmin was talking specifically about sport’s ability to unite us in grief — the deaths of Jonah Lomu and Jerry Collins, especially — and joy. New Zealand’s wild ride to the final of the Cricket World Cup and the back-toback success of the All Blacks on rugby’s biggest stage galvanised not just cricket and rugby fans, but casual followers and sports neophytes as well.

Unquestionably, the big-ticket items in our summer game and national sport went swimmingly well, but judging the overall health of the country’s sport by the performance of its two flagship teams would be like saying the economy’s great because Auckland and Wellington are buzzing.

“I look at our high-performance results and we’re just getting better and better,” says Miskimmin, Sport New Zealand chief executive.

New Zealand finished 15th on the medal table at the 2012 London Olympics, widely considered to be a great performance.

Using a metric based on the results from recent pinnacle events in the Olympic sports, New Zealand would be 10th now.

“That gives us a huge amount of confidence heading into Rio next year,” he says.

High Performance Sport NZ have set a target of a minimum 14 medals in Brazil and “we’re optimistic of reaching that and more”, Miskimmin says, pointing to likely hauls in rowing, cycling and sailing, plus the ever-present excellence of the likes of Val Adams, Lisa Carrington, Lydia

Sport is so important to this country. It does

something for this country that other things

can’t do. Peter Miskimmin

Ko and the sevens teams. “But you can have all the results in the world in the lead-up to the Games and it comes down to what happens on the day.”

While 2015 has seen more hits than misses, not all sports have made it to Christmas unscathed. Netball capped off the year with some positive results against Australia, but lost the one that mattered and the country’s five ANZ Championship franchises continue to fluster.

Despite the successful hosting of the Fifa Under-20 World Cup, it’s been annus horribilis for football, with an eligibility scandal, a bevy of disap- pointing results and uncertainty over the long-term future of the Wellington Phoenix in the A-League.

The men’s hockey team required a back-door permit to get to Rio and have had their funding trimmed, which has raised inevitable questions about HPSNZ’s funding processes.

“It’s a tough business and it’s about performing on the biggest stage,” Miskimmin says, noting that New Zealand’s high-performance spend was a drop in the bucket compared to the big nations and they were forced to be more ruthless when cutting their cloth.

In some ways, Miskimmin says, New Zealand has become victims of its own success. There were more pinnacle events to attend, more PEG grants to dish out. Tough decisions had to be made around funding and that meant some hardship.

You only have to look at the results as whole, he concludes, to realise we’re getting a lot more decisions right than wrong.