Bowls: Elderly Papatoetoe duo line up for Falklands

George Paice, 69, and Gerald Reive, 73. Photo / Steven McNicholl

There are two New Zealanders living in the infamous Tower 32 at the Delhi Commonwealth Games athletes' village - the one the Kiwi contingent rejected as unfit for human habitation and then moved.

But you won't find Gerald Rieve and George Paice donning a silver fern, doing a haka or singing God Defend New Zealand if they pick up a medal. That's because they are the Falklands Island lawn bowls team - in spite of the fact they both play at Hunter's Corner in Papatoetoe.

So it's fitting, if a touch ironic, that Reive and Paice should find themselves in Tower 32 - it isn't worrying them - while competing under the Union Jack accompanied by a sheep, part of the Falklands flag.

They are not young men. At 73, Rieve is the oldest competitor at the Games. His wife Shirley is the team manager. He was waiting patiently as she prepared to have her hair done in the village yesterday.

Paice is 69 and the pair are the oldest debutants ever to compete at a Commonwealth Games.

They live in New Zealand, playing out of the Papatoetoe/Hunters Corner club.

However, they spent much of their earlier years on the South Atlantic ocean archipelago, 250 nautical miles to the east of South America.

Ironically, the Falkland Islands don't actually have any bowling greens.

Rieve says it is a bizarre set of circumstances that he is here, but once the chance came up, he grabbed it.

"Never in my wildest dreams did I think this would happen, I thought my chance was gone."

That's because he has lived in New Zealand for 52 years and played bowls for 21. He is retired but used to work as a revenue investigator.

The topic of competing came up two years during a chat with a Commonwealth Games official - where it became obvious that a path to Delhi might open up for him. He has been training for four hours a day, three times a week since.

Rieve says it is part of the charm of the Commonwealth Games that people like him and Paice can provide a point of difference.

"I'm at my limit here, in fact I'm probably beyond it, we'll find out in the next few days. Especially when we play [New Zealand bowlers] Danny Delany and Richard Collett during pool play," he said.

Rieve's partner Paice only took the game up seven years ago, having worked in the cold storage business for 30 years.

He still considers himself a junior, having played bowls for less than 10 years.

They have been friends since growing up in the Falklands and moving to New Zealand for better livelihoods in the 1960s.

"You were free to do what you wanted," Rieve says.

"Your parents didn't have to worry about you, it was a small community [the population these days is about 3000] and everyone knew you. If you got up to mischief your parents knew pretty smartly."

Rieve says they also followed the country's fortunes closely during the Falklands War, fought between Britain and Argentina in 1982.

"I still had a brother there and we watched it avidly day by day. Only three Falkland Islanders were killed and that was in an accident when a British bomb landed in the wrong place."

On the topic of wrong places, the Falkland Islanders are housed with Jamaica in the infamous tower 32 which New Zealand initially rejected.

It is not causing them too many concerns.

"The workmanship is shoddy but they're quite comfortable," says Shirley Rieve. "Our chef de mission stood over them [the Indian workers] and made them scrub it up."

"There are no real problems," says Gerald. "They are perfectly adequate for what we want. Some are complaining but it's not that bad."