Better coaching needed in NZ says Mills

New Zealand needs to import more coaches from overseas and develop the skills of those already in the country if it is to improve on its Sydney Olympic performance, team chief Les Mills said on Sunday.

Mills had set a pre-Games target of New Zealand finishing between 24th and 30th on the medal table.

One gold and three bronze medals put it at least 13 places below that target.

"It would be nice to be in the top 30. We are below that and that is a shame," Mills said.

"It signals the fact that it is going to be very tough in the future. These Games have been tougher than we've had recently, although somewhat similar to Atlanta, and signal that we tend to be back where we were in Munich and pre-Munich when we would win three or four or five medals.

"The glory days of us being able to come in and win 10 or 12 medals like Barcelona and Seoul - Los Angeles was an aberration - are long gone."

An Eastern Bloc boycott of the 1984 Games helped New Zealand win its best-ever haul of eight gold medals, along with a silver and two bronze.

Part of Australia's successful formula behind its big medal tally in Sydney has been its quality coaches, many of them recruited from overseas.

"We certainly need to import coaches. We need to train coaches better. We need to focus on the development of quality coaches across all our sports," Mills said.

"I think in some sports, we are right up with the play. Our yachting internationally is as good as anyone's and we had not a bad regatta...

"In equestrian we can foot it with anyone. But in a lot of the other sports we definitely need to dramatically increase our coaching base."

Mills said he hoped the government's sports review took this message into account and recommended a remedy, as he did not believe the country's three new high performance centres would help improve the coaching base under their current set-up.

"I have talked here to the Finns and Canadians who have similar sorts of problems with small numbers of medals and they are saying the same thing. They've seen their coaching bases eroded and very little is being done about developing quality coaches."

Mills said illness and injuries such as those suffered by our track and field athletes and cyclists would always happen at the Olympics but New Zealand experienced two "genuine" pieces of bad luck.

One was the Soling yacht crew having to race off for the semifinals against the Dutch, who had protested against being omitted originally on a countback.

Mills said this was a political decision and without it, New Zealand should have been sailing for a medal.

The other was the series of problems with the eventing horses.

"That can always be on the cards, but it hit us right through from Chesterfield (dropping dead) as other horses didn't trot up and were unsound," he said.

"You can say that is a reason perhaps why we didn't have a couple of more medals. But there were a lot of very good performances in the team."

He cited Sarah Ulmer being pipped for a bronze medal in the women's cycling pursuit, the performances of the women's hockey team until the 7-1 thrashing by Argentina in their last game, swimming personal bests, and records set by weightlifters Nigel Avery and Olivia Baker.

"All in all we certainly have to look to the future and find ways to improve of our performance. That will be extremely difficult based on what's happened at the last two Olympics," Mills said.

- NZPA