WORLD CLASS: Horouta J16 women celebrate winning silver in the V6 1000m at the world sprint champs in Australia. They are (from left): Shania Lee, Manutangirua Potaka, Kelsey Teneti, Teaorangi Kemp, Jessica Terekia and Gaibreill Wainohu. Pictures supplied
THREE girls from Tolaga Bay went the extra miles to train for the waka ama world sprint championships in Australia.
Shania Lee, Manutangirua Potaka and Chelsea Haami-Heron were in the Horouta Waka Hoe J16 squad who finished with two second placings and a first in the championships at Lake Kawana on the Sunshine Coast this month.
Shania, 14, won silver medals in the V12 double-hulled 500-metre and V6 1000m races. Manutangirua, 15, paddled in those two crews and the V6 (six-person) team who won the 500m final. Chelsea, 15, took up paddling only in November, was in a development team at the New Zealand sprint championships in January and was a reserve at the world champs.
Just getting there was a huge achievement for the trio, and something that could not have happened without the support of friends and relatives.
For the paddlers themselves, the commitment included 4am starts in their Tolaga Bay homes and travel in the dark to be ready to train in Gisborne by 5am. In school holidays and the final few weeks of competition build-up, the routine was two- to three-hour sessions twice a day, seven days a week.
Away from the water, the task of support people required dedication of a different but still essential type.
Shania’s mother, Paula Lee, drives school buses, cleans trucks, does farm labouring, works as a fleeco for shearing gangs, and does any part-time work she can find in Tolaga Bay. Shania is the youngest of four children, so most of the money goes to the family.
But with the world champs coming up, Paula’s drive for part-time work intensified, along with her duties on fundraising efforts such as weekend sausage sizzles.
Fundraising for Tahiti“We’re already fundraising for Tahiti,” Paula said, referring to the venue for the next world sprint championships in 2018.
“We did it in just four months for this one. I don’t want to do that again.”
Shania and Manutangirua were introduced to waka ama two years ago by Tolaga Bay Area School physical education teacher Geri Smith, herself a paddler with the Horouta club. This was before the school had its own waka, so the early training was done in kayaks. (Since then, the school has acquired waka and an Uawa crew from the school even qualified for the world champs and competed at Lake Kawana.)
Geri asked clubmate and world champion Vesna Radonich to teach six promising Tolaga Bay students the basics of paddling, so Vesna — then a new mother — hosted them and Geri in her home for two weeks of school holidays in July 2014.
“It was the middle of winter, our kids were wearing T-shirts . . . they loved it,” Paula said.
At the end of October that year, the Tolaga Bay paddlers were asked to join the J16 programme of Irene Takao (mother of national elite women’s sprint coach Kiwi Campbell).
Shania and Manutangirua were in the Horouta J16 team that won gold in the V12 500m at the 2015 national champs.
“Then in July last year, Vesna was asked to develop a team for the worlds,” Paula said.
“She rang Shania and Manutangirua, among others, and that’s when the hard work started.”
The first task was to earn the right to compete at the worlds by finishing in qualifying places at the nationals at Lake Karapiro. That meant finishing in the top six in V6 events; the top three in V12.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays from October, Paula drove Shania and Manutangirua to Gisborne straight after school for them to train from 4pm to 5pm.
On Saturdays, they would be up at 4am to be in Gisborne for 5am training, which would last until 8am. They would train again from 2pm to 5pm, stay overnight with friends or family, and repeat on Sunday. Land-based training meant not all that time was on the water.
School holiday trainingSchool holidays allowed more time for training. In the four weeks before the nationals in the latter part of January, they had only Christmas and New Year’s days off; otherwise, it was training twice a day, every day — from 8am to 12 noon and from 2pm to 5pm.
“I used to do a lot of cooking,” Paula said.
“I’d take our own food and a portable cooker on the back of my ute.”
They had one day off before they left for the nationals, and duly qualified for the worlds, though not convincingly.
Horouta took bronze in the V12; one V6 team were fifth in the 500m but disqualified in the 1000m, and the other crew finished sixth in the 1000m.
After a short break, training resumed in earnest. The secondary school nationals in Rotorua in early April served as part of their worlds preparation.
Shania, Manutangirua and Chelsea were in the Tolaga Bay J16 mixed team who won the W12 250m plate final. It was the first final the school had won at a competition they started attending only last year.
Training had been from 5am to 7.30am from Monday to Friday in Tolaga Bay, paddling on the Uawa River; and in Gisborne with Horouta on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 4pm to 5pm, and on Saturdays and Sundays from 9am to 12 noon and from 3pm to 5pm.
After a week-long easing of the regime following the school champs, it was back to twice-a-day training during school holidays. For part of this time, the girls were billeted in Gisborne; but Paula still did plenty of shuttling of young athletes between Tolaga Bay and Gisborne.
The coaching support was there, too. Vesna Radonich continued as technical coach, but as a member of the New Zealand elite women’s crew and a contender for a singles title (she won a silver medal), her own training became more time-consuming.
Sharni Wainohu took on the day-to-day oversight of the team, and national elite women’s coach Kiwi Campbell also had input into their development.
The results made it all worthwhile. Rather than be disheartened by the knowledge that they qualified at the lower end of the New Zealand entries, they lifted their game and in the world club champs won silver in the J16 V12 500m, silver in the V6 1000m and gold in the V6 500m.
At 4am on a cold morning, those rewards can seem a long way off. But not now.