New Zealand Listener – August 10, 2019

86 LISTENER AUGUST 10 2019

amateurs had beaten the

state-sponsored – and

illegally pumped-up – East

Germans, International

Olympic Committee presi-

dent Avery Brundage chose

to present the medals him-

self. The medal ceremony

marked the first time God

Defend New Zealand was

officially played at the

Olympics.

Images of

Jonah Lomu on

the rampage –

colossal, exotic,

athletically

freakish –

thrilled the

international

audience at the

1995 Rugby World

Cup. Twenty-five

years earlier, Bryan

Williams, another

young, strapping

Pacific Island wing

from Auckland, took

South Africa by storm

and put the rugby

world on notice

that the Polynesians

were coming. By

turning England fullback Mike

Catt into the most ineffectual

speed bump in the Republic,

en route to the

first of his four

semi-final tries,

Lomu made it

brutally clear

they’d arrived.

He provided

rugby with

the globally

relevant icon

it had hitherto

lacked, and

persuaded Rupert

Murdoch to stage

the intervention

that facilitated

the game’s

comparatively

orderly transition

to professionalism.

Lydia Ko’s current

struggles – she has just

slipped out of the top

20 in the world rank-

ings that she previously

topped for 104 weeks

• serve only to
  reinforce the size
  of her achieve-
  ments. Quite
  simply, she
  ascended to a
  plane to which
  only the special
  ones can aspire.
  Renowned
  coach David
  Leadbetter
  reckoned her
  start in profes-
  sional golf was “probably
  hotter” than Tiger Woods’. An
  ESPN columnist suggested she
  might be “the most successful
  teenage athlete in professional
  sports history”. Before turning
  17, she made Time’s list of the
  100 most influential people on
  the planet. What do you do
  for an encore?

Team New Zealand winning

the America’s Cup in Bermuda

in 2017. After the fiasco of

the 2003 defence in Auckland

and the heartbreak of San

Francisco in 2013, and given

the event increasingly seemed

a plaything for billionaires

always on the lookout for

ways to exploit the wealth

gap, Team New Zealand’s

quest had taken on a quixotic

air. But nothing about this

campaign smacked of tilting

at windmills. TNZ did what

competitors dream of doing

on the really big occasion:

they turned a contest into an

exhibition. l

“The most

successful

teenage athlete

in professional

sports history.”

80 YEARS

Clockwise from top left;

Peter Burling holds the

America’s Cup in 2017,

the men’s eight celebrate

winning gold at the 1972

Munich Olympics, Lydia

Ko, All Blacks wing Bryan

Williams breaks a tackle.

GE

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Y (^) I
MA
GE
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