Cheree Kinnear is joined by NZ Herald’s Lachlan Waugh as they look ahead to the Super Rugby final, Supercars Supersprint plus more this weekend. Video / NZ Herald
OPINION:
Most attention, quite reasonably, has been on the chance for Scott Robertson to keep writing history, and to reinforce his claims to the All Black coaching job, when the final of Super Rugby Aotearoa is played on Saturday night in Christchurch.
Five titles in a row for the Crusadersin the most demanding club championship in the world would be an amazing achievement, but should the unexpected happen, and the Chiefs win (at the time of writing they're $3.70 to $1.24 underdogs at the TAB) then the story around the Chiefs' coaching group is just as extraordinary.
While Warren Gatland is in Britain, having recently announced his Lions team to play South Africa, Clayton McMillan, whose job in 2021 was basically to keep Gatland's seat warm at the Chiefs, has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams.
From being the whipping boys last year, when they lost all of the eight games they played under Gatland, now they're in the final.
A couple of weeks ago McMillan said: "I know a lot has been written in the media about the team going well and Gats being away. Our team is only going to be better with him being involved in this environment, and while I'm really happy to be leading the team this year in an interim role, I always knew it was going to be an interim role with Gats coming back."
Clayton McMillan has been influential at the Chiefs in Warren Gatland's absence. Photos / Photosport
There's no reason to doubt McMillan's sincerity, but ask any injured player if he ever feels at ease when a new gun gets a chance to shine in his place. In my experience coaches are usually just as competitive as any player.
Contracts and agreements mean there's no doubt Gatland will take over the Chiefs again next season, but to say there'll be pressure on the 2022 Chiefs to deliver the way they did with McMillan, is a bigger understatement than suggesting Boris Johnson's hair can look a tad untidy.
The likely selection of Laurel Hubbard for the Olympics opens up a discussion that makes brokering peace on the Gaza Strip look uncomplicated.
On the one hand there's no question that Hubbard has fulfilled all the regulations of her sport.
Sex tests used to be as simplistic as looking at the genitalia of female athletes. Now they're a lot more scientific, but, if anything, more fraught. Hubbard qualifies as a female competitor because she tests under a level of testosterone set by governing bodies.
That's complicated enough with a competitor who has lived all her life as a woman. In the British Medical Journal in 2019 Dr Sheree Bekker, arguing that some females competitors have entirely natural high hormone levels, wrote: "This is about natural testosterone levels. Are we going to go to a point where we are banning people who are tall from playing basketball or swimmers with long arms? Those are also natural advantages."
Things get more fraught with a transgender athlete like Hubbard, who had competed seriously in weightlifting as a man.
"It just isn't fair," one female athlete said when Hubbard went to the 2018 Commonwealth Games. "She may pass all the tests, but for most of her life she's been a man, with all the skeletal advantages that gives her in a strength event."
New Zealand's Laurel Hubbard competing at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. Photo / Photosport
It's a view shared by Tracey Lambrechs, a stalwart of female weightlifting in New Zealand, who said: "We're all about equality for women in sport. But right now that equality has been taken away from us."
The whole issue is a moral minefield, and the nearest to a solution might be, in the shifting world of sexual identity, that at some stage in the future sport will be divided into not two, but three sections, male, female, and transgender.
New Zealand sport is a less vibrant place with the passing of Steve "Coach" McKean in New Plymouth on Monday.
From the time he came to New Zealand from America in 1971 as a basketball player he cherished the country, and anyone who met him, from his wife Rachel to the kids he embraced working with at Sport Taranaki in the last chapters of his full, dynamic life, returned the warmth.
As our national basketball coach he will forever be remembered as the man whose men's team was the first, in 1978, to beat Australia.
He loved rugby too, and was as fearless with his opinions as he was astute. Before the 2007 Rugby World Cup he was gutsy enough to be one of the very few who questioned Graham Henry about the wisdom of taking our 24 best players out of the first two months of Super Rugby before the Cup.
McKean knew Henry from McKean's time as a skills coach with rugby in Auckland and questioned him about the conditioning plan. He gained little traction with his fears.
As McKean would say, "I just thought that if the All Blacks won the Cup they'd be the first team in the whole goddamn world in any sport that won without playing in their lead-up".
The All Blacks lost in a quarter-final with France in Cardiff.
My fond personal memories of McKean will forever be triggered by the fact the massive report on the '07 campaign by Mike Heron and Don Tricker, which involved interviewing more than 50 people over 18 weeks, took 47 pages to basically confirm what Coach had summed up to me in one of his typical rapid fire phone calls.
Vale Coach, someone who never lost the precious quality of enthusiasm.
