The New Zealand team pursuit cyclists cast their shadows on the floor of the Olympic Velodrome in Athens. Photo / File
Money matters in sports funding, but getting it in the right places matters more.
ONE YEAR TO RIO
Day 1: Spotlight on the athletes
Day 2: New Zealand's Olympic landscape - How the country is looking in each sport
Day 3: Are we going to have a
rowing eight once again?
Day 4: The cost of a medal
Day 5: Is Rio ready?
Every four years, towards the end of the Olympic Games, some New Zealanders get very excited by what we now know as the Per Capita Olympics.
This make-believe ritual reimagines the Olympic medal table to reflect the ratio of winning to population.
At London 2012, New Zealand and its then 4.4 million population finished fourth behind Caribbean island nations Grenada, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago, according to medalspercapita.com. It represented a big step up from Beijing (29th), Athens (35th), Sydney (38th) and Atlanta (34th), and was close to our peak of second at the boycott-blighted Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.
It doesn't take a lot of soul-searching to realise New Zealand should perform well under this metric. We're a comparatively wealthy, outdoors nation with adequate sporting infrastructure. The tyranny of distance is a handicap to regular world-class competition but in broad terms, there are few roadblocks to our talented kids becoming talented adults.
Of more relevance is where New Zealand would rank on a medals won per high-performance sports spend table. This is difficult to impossible because we just don't know what biggies like China and Russia spend on central sports funding (though we can assume it would be a lot more than here). We do know that in this Olympic cycle, Great Britain is spending $65.1m on rowing, $60.8m on cycling and $50.9m on yachting, while Australia's breakdown of the same sports is $32m, $34.4m and $32.3m.
What we also know is that funding is a highly emotive subject among our national sporting organisations (NSOs), many who consider themselves second-class sporting citizens because they are not "targeted" by High Performance Sport New Zealand.
By and large, the emphasis on a few selected sports has worked, though those at the bottom of the food chain can be forgiven for feeling unloved and unable to mount the sort of campaigns that are required to win medals. In this respect there is a self-perpetuating element to the funding model. Sports, apart from swimming, that get the most win the most.
"That's true," says High Performance Sport NZ chief executive Alex Baumann, "but I've always believed there's a will and if there's a will there's a way. Yes, I understand if you don't have the resources you can't do everything you want to do, but it doesn't mean you can't have a plan to be the best in the world," he said.
"Because we have a targeted approach and focus on excellence, I believe it has raised the bar for a number of sports that don't get support from us at this time," the two-time Canadian Olympic swimming gold medallist continued.
New Zealand's medal counts are tracking in the right direction after a disastrous Sydney 2000 campaign, where our sporting nabobs were fooled into thinking proximity - and therefore a large team - would bring an increased podium presence.
The Olympic squads have made incremental gains since the post-Sydney navel-gazing. While funding was effectively targeted immediately post Sydney, it did not become official until Sport NZ's 2006-12 high-performance strategy was implemented. The six chosen sports were athletics, swimming, rowing, triathlon, cycling and sailing (three non-Olympic sports - rugby, cricket and netball - were also targeted). A number of factors were considered, including past success, future prospects, medals available in the sports and the rather nebulous "meaningfulness to New Zealanders".
Has there been a demonstrable increase in medals in relation to increase in spending? The obvious answer is yes, particularly when you consider that Athens was still a largely scattergun affair, with hockey, equestrian, basketball, shooting and badminton all getting large war chests.
To really get to the nub of the funding conundrum, we have to look at the targeted sports. Since Sydney, 24 of the 27 medals have come from the "targeted" sports. Only Ben Fouhy, silver, kayaking, Athens), Lisa Carrington (gold, kayaking, London) and the equestrian team (bronze, London) have broken the mould. We all know not all medals are created equal, so while cycling lords it over sailing and athletics, the latter two can point to two golds each, opposed to a fistful of minors for the cyclists.
Sport NZ dislikes the bang for your buck approach, believing it to be too blunt an instrument. They fund sports for wider causes than just the Olympics. As taxpayers, we're entitled to make some value judgments, however. Rowing delivers plenty of bang for its buck, cycling and sailing are headed in the right direction, while athletics has done well on the considerable shoulders of the once-in-a-generation talent of Valerie Adams. And the sheer audacity of swimming astounds.
This cycle the funding model has changed again (see graphic). A tiered system is in place that aims to put the money where it's going to be spent most effectively.
"The system has moved and evolved," Baumann said. "It's always difficult because you're dealing with a limited amount of funds. We've got $62m which sounds quite a lot but compared to competitors Australia and the UK it is substantially lower. One of the features of our system is we do target and prioritise, but we don't just look at historical results. We have to take a look at the potential of the sport - does it have the right coaches in place? Does it have the right structures in place? Then ultimately we make a decision.
"NSOs have to be accountable for performances. Some sports will get a four-year investment. Some sports will get a two-year, some a one-year. We also have campaign funding where we have the ability to support individuals. We do that in canoe slalom with Luuka Jones and Mike Dawson. We can support talented athletes. There is movement up and down." Swimming has suffered the most dramatic fall from grace (long overdue, most would say), moving from one of the chosen sports to out of the "tiers" altogether to be funded on a campaign basis only.
The Tier 1 sports - rowing, cycling and sailing - receive the most funding and will be expected to bring home the most medals from Rio. If world championship results are anything to go by, they most likely will.
High Performance Sport NZ have set a target of 14 plus medals.
"That is an ambitious number," Baumann said. "In 2012 the target number was 10 and we were fortunate enough to win 13. We're on target but we'll have a much better idea after the [various] world championships as to what our projections are."
Baumann said the Government agency was already looking ahead to Tokyo 2020 to make sure they "don't fall off a cliff" after Rio. On the subject of Japan, a sports delegation from that country is due here soon to analyse what New Zealand is doing right.
Their conclusion may well be: money matters, but getting money in the right places matters more.
Yes, the focus on funding might kill off some of the romance of sport but look on the bright side - New Zealand is unlikely to suffer through another Sydney farce again.
Few would argue that New Zealand sport is less effectively funded than in the past, but that doesn't mean everybody's happy.
Over the past two years the NZ Hockey Players' Association have argued strongly that the Black Sticks men and women are asked to train and live like full-time professionals, yet are paid like amateurs.
"That's the hard thing for us. Everyone in the team has to study or work alongside hockey," says star midfielder Stacey Michelsen.
"You don't earn money as a hockey player. It's not something you can live off. It's disappointing.
"You can't pretend that money is not an important aspect in terms of a campaign - it is.
"It would be awesome if we could increase the funding so we could have more of a centralised programme for a longer period of time. You're expected to commit like professionals, but we're amateurs.
"I would never consider there's too much [hockey and training] in the programme because I love what we do and know it's what we need to do to get to the next level, it's just a sad reality.
"We all know that hockey is not something we can do as a career; we'd love it, but it's just not the way it is.
"We're aware of it and commit to the programme knowing that."
Hockey is a difficult sport to get a handle on, fundingwise. The squads are large and they also required significant support staff. Ally to that the fact that there are only six Olympic medals up for grabs and New Zealand hasn't grabbed one since 1976, and you can see why it suddenly looks like an unattractive proposition.
To balance that, the women's team have come ever so close in recent years to joining the hockey superpowers.
- Dylan Cleaver
Listen to Radio Sport this week for sports editor Rikki Swannell's Year To Go interviews and features.
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