More Olympic gold medals and a World Cup win in a major code are the aims of a tough new approach to picking winners in sport. Andrew Laxon finds out how the Government wants to raise the bar even further.
New Zealand's top sports will soon have a dedicated high-performance unit aimed at helping athletes win more world championships and Olympic gold medals.
Sports Minister Murray McCully has asked for advice within the next few months on how to set up a specialised organisation to chase national targets of three world cups - in rugby, cricket and netball - and at least 10 medals by the 2012 Olympics.
He is also pushing for more money from business sponsors, as Olympic chiefs plead for double the $60 million they received for the last campaign in Beijing.
The changes are part of National's drive to push the emphasis in sports policy on to competing and winning, rather than participation and healthy lifestyles under Labour.
The Government is overhauling sports structures from the top down in an attempt to reverse years of often disappointing results in top competitions, from the Rugby World Cup to some favoured athletes and teams in recent Olympic and Commonwealth Games.
Mr McCully has questioned the wide brief of Sport and Recreation New Zealand (Sparc), which supports the country's top sports performers and tries to increase sports participation at school and club level.
He said it made sense to separate the two jobs as they required such different approaches.
"There is a different culture associated with getting the last tenth of a second, the last ounce of bio-mechanical strength into a particular effort.
"The question I've been asking is not do we separate that out - everywhere in the world it is run discretely. The question is do you take it outside Sparc or do you leave it sitting inside Sparc?"
Mr McCully said he had asked the board to come up with plans for change in the next two to three months, including how to tap into more private sector funding.
"It's not rocket science to work out that if we are going to lift ourselves up to the next level we're going to need to find some new money. One of the ways we can do that is to find more partners."
Some national sports organisations have expressed scepticism about creating a new structure for high-performance sport.
But change looks likely from Sparc's new board, appointed by the Government last month and headed by former Brierley Investments chief executive Paul Collins.
In the 1990s, Mr Collins chaired the Sports Foundation, an independent body which ran high-performance sport and secured corporate sponsorship for many top athletes. Its functions were taken over by Sparc in 2003.
One of Mr Collins' first jobs will be to find cost savings at Sparc in response to scathing criticism from the Prime Minister, John Key.
Speaking as National leader in last year's election campaign, Mr Key accused the organisation of wasting taxpayers' money.
He was especially critical of the $5.5 million spent on its Mission-On website - since scrapped by National - and the fact that it had 38 staff members paid more than $100,000 a year.
Also in the Government's sights are the 17 regional sporting trusts, which receive $20 million a year and will have an extra $8 million to spend on sport for school-aged children next year.
Mr McCully said he was well aware that some sports clubs regarded the trusts as a bureaucratic waste of money.
He hoped to bring them all up to the level of the best performers.
