Words: Dylan Cleaver
Design: Paul Slater

It says something about the ascendancy of Lisa Carrington over the past two Olympic cycles that the sprint kayaker not only debuts in this list, but jumps straight into the top five.

The curious thing is that the Ohope paddler has done it by dominating an event that was never designed to be the domain of any one athlete. The K1 200m should really be a bit of a lottery. The smallest mistake, whether it be technical or timing, or a capricious puff of wind on the course can derail a race in the fastest and most furious of kayaking disciplines.

Carrington seemingly never makes a mistake. She never lets fate play a part. She lines up, she starts and about 40s later she wins.

It’s an extraordinarily simple yet frighteningly powerful formula.

It is a formula that has taken her to two Olympic golds, while she’s added a bronze in the longer K1 500m, very much her secondary event.

Worryingly for her rivals, she appears to have lost none of her hunger for success. More medals beckon in Tokyo.

The numbers alone provide powerful testimony for her place in the pantheon.
Carrington, 32, is the only female New Zealand athlete to have won multiple medals at a single games and only Valerie Adams and Barbara Kendall can match her total of three.

She has seven world championships in the K1 200m, the last six consecutively, and holds the world’s fastest time for the event – an astonishing 37.898s set in Moscow in 2014, which was more than a second faster than any woman had gone before. She has been unbeaten in the event for a decade.

To define her career by numbers, however, would be reductive.
She is a small-town success story; a Maori success story and a powerful weapon against body-image stereotyping.

Carrington was born in Tauranga but grew up first in Opotiki before the family settled beachside at Ohope when she was eight. She is Te-Aitanga-a-Mahaki and Ngati Porou from her father Pat’s side and was judged the most influential Maori sports personality of the past 30 years.

Drawn to the water, as most beachside kids are, Carrington learnt her chops as a surf lifesaver before focusing on the flatwater. In fact, even that is a bit rear-about-face. When her dad took her to her first flatwater event at Lake Rotoehu, a sometimes overlooked body of water sandwiched between lakes Rotoiti and Rotama, netball was still her aspirational sport and she saw kayaking as a way of keeping fit for the surf ski.

It was soon obvious she had something special on the flatwater and before long thoughts of being a Silver Fern were trumped by dreams of being an Olympian.

There is nothing unusual about Carrington’s dimensions of 168cm and 63kg, but she is at once strikingly athletic. Her upper body and arms, the pistons that power her craft from start line to finish, are chiselled muscle, her biceps developed through weighted chin-ups.

That power-to-weight ratio propels her across the top of the water in a way never seen before, but it is the constant search for an edge that most impresses her coach, Gordon Walker.

In a widely shared quote, he told American Olympic network NBC:

Walker has calculated that Carrington is five per cent better than the field, meaning that when she crosses the line, if her competitors are at their best, they will be at the 190m mark.

“At no point in time is there any place in the race where somebody else is as good as or better than her,” he told the network.

That’s a level of intimidation that is impressive, but if anything it is Carrington’s step up to being a world-class K1 500m paddler that is more intriguing.

The 200m might be all about the transference of power, but the longer distance requires a greater fitness base. At less than two minutes, it is still largely an anaerobic exercise but you need to be able to hold your technique, your form, for longer.

It’s Carrington’s continual quest for improvement that has her in line to become New Zealand’s greatest female Olympian and, arguably, the country’s greatest Olympian full stop.

While retirement has not been mentioned, Carrington has recently the possibility of motherhood. She is engaged to marry long-time partner Michael Buck and has pondered whether to stop her career to have children and then restart, or wait until she has achieved all she can in the sport she loves.

That last part is loaded: what can she achieve?

Let’s start by saying that Birgit Fischer is the kayaking benchmark, with eight Olympic gold medals achieved over a span that started when she represented East Germany at Moscow 1980 and ended on Lake Schinias, just outside Athens, in 2004 as part of a German team that had long since ditched their compass-point designations.

As all but two of Fischer’s golds came in crews, it is possible, likely even, that Carrington will become the most successful K1 kayaker in Olympic history in Tokyo. Already she sits alongside Hungarian Danuta Kozac, Fischer and Lyudmila Pinayeva as the only athletes to win two K1 golds.

With the discipline she brings to her training and the laser-like focus Carrington has on winning, it’s probable that she would still be competitive as a 35 year old in Paris in 2024 and well within the realms of possibility that she could play a role in the K1s or crews in Los Angeles four years later.

If the hunger is there you would not bet against her because, as many can testify, betting against her over the past decade has been a fool’s errand.

Likewise, at the end of Carrington’s career, she might stand as the mightiest New Zealand Olympian of them all.

PART 1: Peter Snell
PART 2: Dame Valerie Adams
PART 3: Yvette Corlett
PART 4: Lisa Carrington
PART 5: Jack Lovelock

PART 6-15
PART 16-25