Whanganui athletes in Kiwi team perform at Australian All Schools Champms in Cairns

The silver medal winning New Zealand Swedish Relay team, Genna Maples, left, Emma Osborne, Tayla Brunger and Analies Kalma celebrate in Cairns.

The sixteen athletes in the New Zealand Schools team faced extremes of weather over the space of 10 days from the constant wind of Dunedin at the New Zealand Schools Championships to the almost constant tropical rain of Cairns a week later at the Australian all Schools Championships.

Conditions and travel may have affected some athletes nevertheless the team returned with one gold, three silver and a bronze medal with a further two fourth places and three fifth places.

The gold medal came from Kayla Goodwin (Sacred Heart College Hamilton) in the under 18 Triple Jump. Goodwin had to call on all her experience, which included the Olympic Games in Buenos Aires in October, as she faced elimination in the third round following two fouls in the opening rounds.

Her third trial was long but to her horror the red flag was raised. Goodwin approached the official at the take-off board and asked to be shown the mark in the plasticine and when none was clearly visible asked for the referee who agreed with Goodwin and overruled the red flag.

Goodwin was praised by coaches around me not only for sticking up for herself but doing it in a polite firm manner. Goodwin was rewarded with the gold medal with the third vital jump (12.43) a full 22 centimetres better than the silver medal winner.

Young Annalies Kalma (St Peters Cambridge) ran the race of her life to take second in the under 16 400 metres to take the silver medal with an impressive 55.25 seconds taking nearly two seconds off her personal best. The performance propels Kalma to the top of the New Zealand rankings in a year when there is real depth to the one lap rankings.

The addition of this promising young Waikato athlete to the 400 metre rankings suggests that New Zealand has a potentially strong under 20 4 x 400 team in the next couple of years.

Ten minutes later our own Emma Osborne (Wanganui Collegiate) also ran under 56 seconds for the first time recording 55.58 to take bronze in a strong under 18 field. This took over a second off both her heat time of 56.84 and almost a second off her personal best of 56.57. An hour later Osborne ran a storming 400 metre anchor leg to bring her team from fourth to silver medal in the Swedish Relay.

The Swedish 1000 metre sprint relay is a great event that constitutes a 100m followed by 300m, 200m followed by 400m. Three of the team were Wanganui Collegiate athletes.

Genna Maples ran the opening 100m handing over to Tayla Brunger for the 300m leg with Kalma running the 200m and Osborne on the one lap anchor leg. Osborne had a lot of ground to make up. After 300m she had moved her team into bronze position but still had a sizeable distance to make up. A strong run in the home straight brought the New Zealand team to second and within a second of the winning Queensland team.

Earlier in the afternoon Genna Maples finished 4th in the 100m under 16 final. Running into a stiff headwind Maples had a great start and was leading at 80m but slipped to 4th with a 12.29 second performance. On the following day Maples suffered from an event clash, not helped by heavy and persistent rain.

There were delays in starting the long jump as officials worked to get prepare the pit in torrential rain. Maples jumped early in the round and her 5.31 metre jump had her in second place at round end.

The delay meant Maples had to cross rapidly to her 200m final in which she finished 5th.Maples landed awkwardly in the third round having missed round 2 and then had to hurriedly cross for the 4 x 100m where the same quartet as in the Swedish Relay finished 5th and tantalisingly close to a medal.

Maples ended 5th in the long jump, losing 4th on a countback, but rues the interruptions as a medal in normal circumstances was a realistic possibility.

Tayla Brunger lacked a little of her normal spark fading in the closing stages of each of her sprints and just falling short of a final berth in all three events (100m, 200m and 400m). This promising first year senior sprinter will develop and learn from the experience and does return from Cairns with a relay medal.

New Zealand's other medal came from Cameron Moffitt (Otago Boys High School) in the 200m hurdles. Without a seeding time (the event is often run in New Zealand) Moffit had to run in a slower heat in the timed finals. He won the heat convincingly but had to settle for second overall.