Raising the bar
Cortez Ratima is setting new benchmarks this season as part of an intriguing battle for the Chiefs’ No 9 position. Aaron Goile reports.
When Cortez Ratima saunters into the Chiefs gym, there are a few big boys who start to get a bit twitchy. After all, the closest a halfback usually gets to an invitation to hang out with the front-row club is at a scrum feed.
Except, Ratima isn’t your typical lightweight No 9, and when it comes to throwing a bit of weight around on the bench press, he is working well above his 87kg class.
In fact, try 165kg for size, when he last season broke the Chiefs’ inside backs record for the exercise.
But it seems Ratima has not been resting on his laurels in what shapes as a massive year of opportunity for the country’s halfbacks.
“Yeah, I ended up getting another
PB for 170kg,” Ratima revealed this week, on a Zoom call where he was parked up alongside halfback team-mate Xavier Roe.
“He’s probably got the record [for any current Chiefs player],” Roe quipped.
“Nah, Rossy’s [prop Aidan Ross] got 180-something,” Ratima quickly retorted. “But yeah, benching with the big boys, they’re not too happy with me sometimes. I think I keep them on their toes.”
Indeed, as far as reported records of rugby players’ bench presses go, it’s mighty impressive from the 22-year-old from Piopio, who takes his name from a Nike shoe.
“I don’t think I’d be able to do it [the 170kg] now, I ended up getting it in preseason,” Ratima said of his lift.
“It’s good fun, I enjoy the gym, but obviously it doesn’t have too much to do with the on-field stuff.”
Of course, there are numerous other more vital elements to a halfback’s game, though Ratima has already proven his strength to shrug off defenders to be a rather handy weapon in his toolbox.
So just where does that love of the gym work come from?
“I probably did start pretty young, like 14 or 15,” he said.
“The old man did a bit of PTing and I used to just hang around him. I guess that’s how it came about.”
Funnily enough, that was the very age Ratima and Roe’s paths first crossed. Well, sort of.
They did not play together at Hamilton Boys’ High School, and Roe, being two years his senior, didn’t know Ratima, but the reverse was not true, as back in 2015 and 2016, a wide-eyed Ratima would watch from the sidelines as Roe would “be out there running amok” for the First XV.
But even back then, the weights routines of the pair were chalk and cheese, Roe admitted.
“You’ll probably be able to ask Nigel Hotham, our First XV coach,” he said. “We were polar opposites. I used to just go in the gym and pretty much sleep. I’ve only kind of picked up the gym in the last two or three years.
“I’m not pushing 170, I think my max is around 120, which is still good for me, because when I first came to the Chiefs I was around 100kg max.”
Fast-forward a few years and here the pair are, not just pushing tin, but pushing each other, and pushing for higher honours, in a post-Brad Weber era at the Chiefs and a post-Aaron Smith era in the All Blacks.
Roe, who debuted for the Chiefs in 2021, has 19 caps to his name, and has returned with a bang this year, after missing all of last season due to shoulder surgery on a torn labrum, suffered, ironically, in the gym.
“It was probably a good thing,” he reflected on the injury. “I got to focus a lot on the gym work and my actual body, rather than rugby. And it was also good to bounce ideas off guys who had the same injury, like Tezzy [Ratima] – he had the same in 2020.”
Ratima is now in his third season, with 28 caps under his belt, and after an outing with the All Blacks XV in 2022, was also a call-up for their end-of-season tour last year.
The pair, who are also team-mates for Waikato in the NPC, have provided a dynamic one-two punch so far in an electric Chiefs backline, each having bagged a pair of tries through the opening two rounds of the season, as they aim to fill the big boots of departed former co-captain and centurion Weber.
“When we heard Spuddy [Weber] was leaving at the end of last year, we obviously knew that we needed to step up and make sure there was no lag with him leaving,” Roe admitted, of a man he noted was “always the hardest worker in the team”, and from whom Ratima said he learnt so much, from a leadership perspective.
“Just seeing the way he talked to the boys, the way he was able to be calm and collected in times where you’d find yourself in a bit of stress, that was probably one of the biggest ones to take away.”
While there’s now an opening at All Blacks level, this pair are merely focused on the job at hand with the Chiefs, where Roe is signed till the end of this year and Ratima till 2026.
They will be in a healthy battle for positions, which, against the Reds in Brisbane tonight, sees Ratima get a first start of the season and former All Black Te Toiroa Tahuriorangi come into the frame, on the bench.
“All three of us, there’s a lot of competitiveness, obviously we all want that No 9 jersey, but at the same time there’s a lot of respect between the three, so we know whoever goes out there has got full faith in doing the job,” Roe said.
Or, as Ratima puts it: “Iron sharpens iron.”