Philippa Stevenson: Academic feats haul in medals

Eight months out from the Commonwealth Games the calculations are already being done on New Zealand's possible, probable, hopeful medal tally.

In the scramble for chickens yet to hatch, the same sort of number crunching is also under way for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

But outside a small circle of proud family and friends, too few of us know that already this year, New Zealand champions have brought home a silver and five bronze medals from Olympic-scale events.

In the same competitions, other contestants came within the equivalent of hundredths of a second of the victory dais.

Why do we pay so little attention to these successes? The answer seems to be simply that these feats have been performed in the academic field, not the sports stadium.

Against the world's best minds of their age, at Olympiads held in Mexico, Taiwan and China, our small teams of secondary school level maths, chemistry and biology Olympians put in brilliant individual performances and wrote New Zealand's name high in world rankings.

In maths, Heather Macbeth won a silver medal, Eric Kang and Tom Wang won bronze, and Chris Chambers and James Liley got honorable mentions, to place New Zealand 39th out of the 91 competing countries.

In chemistry, Devarshi Bhattacharyya won bronze and Daniel Chan was only just out of the medals.

At the Biology Olympiad, where New Zealand fielded a team for the first time, all-Auckland squad Cameron Cole and Eric Liu won bronze to finish in the top 120 in the world. Kate Duggan and Chinthaka Samaranayake missed a medal by just one mark with the result that on New Zealand's first appearance it achieved a credible mid-point ranking in a field of 51 countries.

Those are achievements that in sports would have representative bodies clamouring for support in the form of elite training academies and souped up financial backing.

Rotorua Girls High teacher Angela Sharples, who accompanied the biology team and was also an examiner at the Beijing event last month, said it was unusual for first-time contestants to be in the medals.

Sharples said most of the other teams were supported by the equivalent of their country's Education Ministry. Those that were not had university or corporate sponsorship.

In contrast, our biology team got a travel grant from the Royal Society which left each member to raise around $2500 at the same time as they hit the books and labs to prepare for the gruelling event.

It's not a competition for wimps. In one day, the students did four, 90-minute practical exams covering cell, plant, animal and molecular biology. After a day's break they returned for two, three-hour theory exams.

Cameron Cole, of Auckland Grammar, had an invitation to a DSIR lab, one of the few to come his way since returning triumphant nearly three weeks ago.

Other countries' medallists might immediately be guaranteed positions in Ivy League universities or be snapped up by large corporates with an eye for talent, but we do things differently here. Unfortunately.

Only yesterday Cameron's and Eric Liu's wins were announced at school assembly.

But is the DSIR on to him? Well, not quite. The Cole's neighbour, a dentist, happened to mention Cameron's win to one of his patients, a DSIR scientist who issued the informal invitation for the lab visit.

The contrast is not lost on Cameron who, in Beijing, competed against students who had trained for the event for six years. They had massive funding and were all turned out in suits and ties.

It made our world champ think about more than just biology. Here's what he would like to tell Education Minister Trevor Mallard.

"Maybe he should think about funding things that actually count rather than what may count. It seems a lot of money goes on the lower level to raise them up and not a lot for those who are close to the top and with a bit of help will reach the next level. It's always the reverse."