New Year Honours: Opua's Myra Larcombe's 71 years of swimming training rewarded with QSM

Queen's Service Medal recipient Myra Larcombe at her home in Opua. Photo / Peter de Graaf

Opua identity Myra Larcombe has been awarded a Queen's Service Medal in recognition of more than 70 years of teaching young Northlanders to swim.

The 90-year-old was honoured but also flabbergasted, because she believed she was too controversial and outspoken to be on the New Year Honours List.

The medal caps a run of honours for Mrs Larcombe who received a Lifetime Achievement Award in February's Halberg Awards, where sporting greats such as Peter Burling and Valerie Adams queued up to have their photos taken with her.

Seventy-one years after first becoming an instructor at Whangarei Swimming Club she is still teaching, these days as a Top Energy WaterSafe instructor at Opua and Russell schools where she finds herself teaching the grandchildren of former pupils.

She started swimming competitively in 1946, holding a raft of NZ Masters records, including for 200m long-course butterfly in the 70-74-year-old age group. The record she set in 1997 and bettered in 1998 stood for 20 years, broken only in April this year.

''About time!'' she said.

She attributed her fitness and love of sport to growing up ''free range'' on a Waikare Inlet farm, where her father ensured all the children were strong swimmers and she had to row 3km to catch a train to get to school in Kawakawa.

Her passion was helping people to swim efficiently, ''because efficient swimming is survival swimming''.

Mrs Larcombe took that interest a step further by immersing herself in the study of hydrodynamics to better understand how to make the body move more efficiently through the water.

Mrs Larcombe also has a long record of service in coaching and sports administration. In 1974 she co-founded of the Bay of Islands Swimming Club and was an administrator until 2010.

Her achievements are not limited to sports. She has become a go-to person for local history and in 1951 she joined the police, one of the first women to do so. When transferred to Whangarei in 1954 she was Northland's first female officer.

Other awards include Sparc Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), Sparc Northland Volunteer of the Year Award (2004), Swim Coaches and Teachers of NZ Award for Services to Teaching Swimming (2001) and Northland Masters Sportswoman of the Year (1999).