When you read something that pisses you off, like this did on Monday, you have a few choices - like kicking the cat, or taking your frustrations out on the keyboard and then firing it off to the media in the forlorn hope that someone might be interested.

Well, blow me down, someone was interested and if you're in NZ and interested, go and buy the Sunday Star Times and turn to Section B, page 11. Unfortunately it's not available online and at 1500 words I'm not going to post the original version here. The (extremely) short version is it is ridiculous to use medal targets at something like the Commonwealth Games as a measure of accountability for high performance funding for two simple reasons: one, success in sport is not necessarily judged by winning or finishing in the top three, and two, any sporting performance is not directly linked to the amount of (public) money spent in achieving that performance. Pretty simple concepts I would have thought.

Actually, if you have any interest in NZ sport, you should take an interest as to how the taxpayer's money going into sport is being used, and in some cases, abused. Over the last couple of weeks I've done a lot of thinking about the direction that SPARC are taking high performance sport in this country and in some areas they are IMO going down the wrong road. When I get the time to organise my rambling thoughts into some semblance of coherence I'll post them here.