Not a lot to bleat about

By PETER CALDER

If watching our Olympic team falter and fail feels painful from where you're sitting, try and imagine how hard it is to be a New Zealander in the middle of all this.

The weekend finally brought a break in the medal drought when Mark Todd picked up bronze and Rob Waddell a gold, but the dreams of the moderate Olympic glory that we secured in Atlanta and Barcelona seem now as elusive as a scent of rain to a parched Canterbury runholder.

There is, of course, no shortage of Australians to rub it in. The Sydney Morning Herald has several hundred staff covering the Games, but many of them are on secondment from other papers in the Fairfax group like the Wee Waa Weekly. And woe betide any New Zealander who bumps into these blokes on a media bus. When they find out you're from New Zealand, their faces crease into something between a chuckle and a grimace of pity and they say: "Don't worry, mate, I won't tell a soul."

It makes you inclined to take the advice of Channel 7's irreverent and vulgar late-night comic roasters Roy and HG who advised us, if asked, to "deny you are a New Zealander."

Even when we win, we lose here. The Sunday Telegraph's story on Waddell's triumph in the single sculls began: "The bleats of joy could be heard from across the Tasman."

But hang around Sydney for even a few days, even when the world's elite athletes are not here, and you realise there's a lot more to it. Perhaps it has to do with the different circumstances in which our sense of colonial nationhood was formed. New Zealand was settled by hopeful but often downtrodden souls looking for a better life; Australia's First Fleet was full of convicts, many transported for petty crimes, who had to make a new start or die. We started full of dreams and apprehension; they full of the rage of rejection and having nothing to lose by looking to the north and hoisting a giant two-fingered salute at the Old Country.

That which we call arrogance and conceit in the Australians looks a lot more like self-belief. It shines out of every encounter you have on the street, every newspaper you open, every television programme you watch. The discourse about national identity does not begin with a shrug and an "Oh, well, never mind".

Australians expect and embrace excellence, in themselves and in each other. And they know that that excellence, in every sphere of life, depends on a robust public debate and all shades of self-expression (can you imagine a Roy and HG show on TVNZ lasting more than a week before the purse-lipped naysayers had it hauled off?). They also know that defeat is something only centimetres short of triumph.

When Australian pole vaulter Emma George, a former world-record holder, failed even to qualify for the final she said simply "I should have jumped better." Sure there were tears, but they were tears of frustrated disappointment. Compare her reaction with that of our high jumper Glenn Howard, a rookie with a big future who jumped well below his best and failed to make the finals. Forced to wait out the rest of qualifying in the competition area, he did so with a towel over his head, bent low by bitter shame.

Watching that sad sight, I felt I was looking at a man with more than the weight of defeat on his shoulders.

What slumped him low was the weight of being a New Zealander.