This damning cycling report should be a wake-up call for all NZ Olympic sport
-
Loading... - Olivia Carrick
- 16 May 2022
- 320 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
It was instead a referendum into the funding and culture of high-performance Olympic sport in New Zealand and the verdict is in: It’s screwed.
It was also, curiously, a survey on Cambridge, the one-time farming and bloodstock service centre that has reinvented itself as an Olympic medal hothouse for sports like rowing, triathlon and cycling.
The independent panel of Mike Heron QC, Dr Sarah Leberman, Genevieve Macky and Dr Lesley Nichol was commissioned in the wake of the sudden death of cyclist Olivia Podmore and has tabled a 104-page report that criticises myriad aspects of the high-performance system.
They highlight a culture that is obsessed with winning medals at the cost of wellbeing, that muzzles athletes, that treats women particularly poorly, and which essentially forces its young into a centralised system that does more harm than good while paying them poorly for the pleasure.
While the focus was cycling, the broad picture painted by the report was similar to others of its ilk and could be applied across a range of sports that rely on government funding to run high-performance programmes.
It also includes this paragraph, which on merit deserves to be higher than its page 53 placement.
“Aotearoa NZ’s small sporting community tends to recruit or ‘recycle’ personnel from within ‘the system’. This was referred to as ‘shoulder tapping’, the ‘old boys’ club’, and ‘jobs for mates’. We perceive an over-reliance on bringing in recruits that people already know (even, in some cases, where past performance has been suboptimal). This curtails attempts to ensure diversity, introduce new ideas, and in some instances maintains and rewards poor behaviour.”
This is New Zealand sports administration summed up in a paragraph; there is no employment sector in New Zealand where you can fail so spectacularly upwards.
(A handful of sources in high-profile positions within high-performance sport have approached me in the past 12 months aghast at some of the appointments made at Sport New Zealand and its wholly owned subsidiary High Performance Sport New Zealand [HPSNZ] but none will go on the record, fearful of what happens when you rock the boat at an organisation you rely on for your existence.)
The sorts of things that provoke reports into the culture at sports including cycling (x2), hockey, football, triathlon and rowing happen when your very worth as an organisation is calculated at a jamboree once every four years.
These reports will continue to include cut-and-paste lines like this: “The vast majority of people we interviewed (and the survey results) told us that the [high-performance programme] funding model … prioritises medals over wellbeing, and that has had consequences that undermined athlete and staff wellbeing.”
This inquiry was prompted by the death of Podmore, 24, but it has its roots in a previous report into Cycling New Zealand, also authored by Heron in 2018. That report listed a number of recommendations after it found a dysfunctional organisation that lacked transparency, tried to cover up inappropriate relationships and had a disregard for athlete welfare. Read More…
