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Sparc is considering ditching its controversial practice of specifying medal targets before Olympic and Commonwealth Games but outgoing chief executive Nick Hill hopes it will continue keeping the pressure on.
Hill last week resigned from the Government sports agency after six years and is unrepentant about medal targets, even after New Zealand fell woefully short in Melbourne and some sports complained about too much pressure.
Hill said the Sparc board would have to decide whether to publicise their Beijing target "but my personal view is it's important to keep up the visibility and accountability."
He believes taxpayers are entitled to feel the money was being spent so that it produced results.
Hill said a figure for Beijing was "beginning to crystallise" in his mind but would not say what it was. However, as the high-performance programme's mission is to bring back 10 medals from London 2012, you can assume the China figure would be between there and the five in Athens.
"We got raked over the coals after Melbourne and I remember that debate quite keenly," Hill said. "But if you don't make some sort of target you guys [the media] and everyone else will - so in many ways I think it's important we have an accurate reflection of what we should expect."
The Herald on Sunday understands that post-Melbourne there were some concerns over the accuracy of Sparc's results mapping, meaning the target was a little unrealistic. As a result, employee James Gibson tracks New Zealand's elite athletes and teams and his comprehensive database should provide more realistic expectations.
"The medal target falls out of that sort of work," Hill said. The music-loving administrator said despite New Zealand's doom and gloom prognosis - undoubtedly fuelled by terrible performances in cricket, rugby, league and netball this year - he is leaving sport in healthier shape than he found it.
"When I started in 2002, I think we had seven elite athletes or teams in the top eight in the world. Now we have something like 27. If you look across our Olympic disciplines and results in pinnacle events, the results are really exciting."
It is clearly of some frustration to him that New Zealanders tend to accentuate the negative when it comes to sport, but he claims the wearying nature of such criticism was not the deciding factor in his decision to leave.
"The outward negativity is more a reflection of our personalities.
"You tend to find there is a light and a dark side to New Zealanders and the dark side comes out more when it comes to sport because we are so passionate," Hill said, veering briefly into the philosophical.
He explained that the dark side of New Zealanders manifested itself in the vitriolic discussions surrounding sport but the light side included our openness, receptiveness and ability to innovate.
It is that final point, innovation, that some people have begun to question whether we still retain it in a sporting sense.
With high-performance systems based largely on overseas models, have New Zealanders lost that No 8 wire mentality that served us so well up to the 90s?
Hill said that was a difficult question to answer without going too deeply into specifics but there were fundamentals around high-performance sport, such as good governance and high-quality coaching, that had to be in place before anything could be achieved now.
"The idea that these great athletes will pop out of nowhere - it's just so much harder these days. The world really isn't like that now."
