Potshots
Sorry for the lack of posts over the last week - I am still sick as a dog. So excuse the rant that is about to follow, but a few things have got up my nose lately, including:
1. Mark Dickel.
WTF is this guy doing smoking a joint or three when in the middle of preparations for the World Basketball Champs??? Even allowing for the fact that getting high is a prerequisite for being a basketball player, this has to be one of the more stupid acts by a sportsperson in recent times, especially with the known possibility of drug testing. Dumb dumb dumb.
2. Ricki Herbert and the NZ Soccer, sorry, football, team.
Losing 5-0 to an English club side. FFS. Do you still want respect Danny? (Hay, NZ captain). The headline in this morning's paper is "All Whites look for positives in embarrassing loss". My guess is they're still looking. And out comes the coach with the angle of look we don't want to make excuses, but we had a shitload of players unavailable.
So what? That's a fact of sporting life, and the lower down the sporting food chain you go, the worse the problem is. You don't hear NZ Orienteering moaning about the unavailability of top orienteers at last week's World Champs, it's something you have to constantly live with. And it's not like the opposition (Blackburn Rovers) would have been at full strength and treating the game as the most important of the year - it was a pre-season warm-up for them for chrissakes.
3. SPARC (so what's new?)
The High Performance Review is apparently due out tomorrow and the Herald on Sunday had this article suggests one of the key findings is our top sporting potential is hamstrung by a lack of appropriate training facilities.
Oh really? Last time I looked, the Waitakeres that Snell, Halberg and Co used to run every Sunday is still there. Another bullshit excuse and I fear more sport and recreation money is going to be wasted developing things we don't need.
I never did finish what I was going to say after SPARC produced their Melbourne Commonwealth Games debrief but what hampers NZ sport is the "tyranny of distance". With a small population and economy, we get shafted because we usually have the furtherest to travel to a lot of world-class sporting events because a good proportion of them are held in Europe. Getting to Europe (not just people, but equipment) costs money, and a lot of it.
Many years ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Snell for an hour or so (he is an orienteer) and the subject of training came up. I asked him what would be his one single piece of advice for a budding orienteer would be, and his immediate answer was go and live in Europe. He made the point that Orienteering is not like many sports, with competitions held in locations that have specific characteristics, and you need to train in similar surroundings in order to become proficient.
He then mentioned athletics (track) and bemoaned the fact that many athletes believe they have to train and compete in Europe for long periods of time to get to the top. He thought it was a load of bull, for the requirements to train are a 400m track and a decent coach. You don't have to go to Europe for those.
So we are hampered by a lack of training facilities? Another bullshit excuse. Valerie Vili needs a grass field, a small ball made of lead and a weight room. She's doing all right from little ol' NZ. Swimmers need a pool, coach and weight room. Rowers need a lake, boat, coach and weight room. You get the drift. No doubt when the report comes out tomorrow I'll have something more to say.
1. Mark Dickel.
WTF is this guy doing smoking a joint or three when in the middle of preparations for the World Basketball Champs??? Even allowing for the fact that getting high is a prerequisite for being a basketball player, this has to be one of the more stupid acts by a sportsperson in recent times, especially with the known possibility of drug testing. Dumb dumb dumb.
2. Ricki Herbert and the NZ Soccer, sorry, football, team.
Losing 5-0 to an English club side. FFS. Do you still want respect Danny? (Hay, NZ captain). The headline in this morning's paper is "All Whites look for positives in embarrassing loss". My guess is they're still looking. And out comes the coach with the angle of look we don't want to make excuses, but we had a shitload of players unavailable.
So what? That's a fact of sporting life, and the lower down the sporting food chain you go, the worse the problem is. You don't hear NZ Orienteering moaning about the unavailability of top orienteers at last week's World Champs, it's something you have to constantly live with. And it's not like the opposition (Blackburn Rovers) would have been at full strength and treating the game as the most important of the year - it was a pre-season warm-up for them for chrissakes.
3. SPARC (so what's new?)
The High Performance Review is apparently due out tomorrow and the Herald on Sunday had this article suggests one of the key findings is our top sporting potential is hamstrung by a lack of appropriate training facilities.
Oh really? Last time I looked, the Waitakeres that Snell, Halberg and Co used to run every Sunday is still there. Another bullshit excuse and I fear more sport and recreation money is going to be wasted developing things we don't need.
I never did finish what I was going to say after SPARC produced their Melbourne Commonwealth Games debrief but what hampers NZ sport is the "tyranny of distance". With a small population and economy, we get shafted because we usually have the furtherest to travel to a lot of world-class sporting events because a good proportion of them are held in Europe. Getting to Europe (not just people, but equipment) costs money, and a lot of it.
Many years ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Peter Snell for an hour or so (he is an orienteer) and the subject of training came up. I asked him what would be his one single piece of advice for a budding orienteer would be, and his immediate answer was go and live in Europe. He made the point that Orienteering is not like many sports, with competitions held in locations that have specific characteristics, and you need to train in similar surroundings in order to become proficient.
He then mentioned athletics (track) and bemoaned the fact that many athletes believe they have to train and compete in Europe for long periods of time to get to the top. He thought it was a load of bull, for the requirements to train are a 400m track and a decent coach. You don't have to go to Europe for those.
So we are hampered by a lack of training facilities? Another bullshit excuse. Valerie Vili needs a grass field, a small ball made of lead and a weight room. She's doing all right from little ol' NZ. Swimmers need a pool, coach and weight room. Rowers need a lake, boat, coach and weight room. You get the drift. No doubt when the report comes out tomorrow I'll have something more to say.
posted by Rob Crawford at 8:33 AM
3 Comments:
Do athletes ever get charged with using drugs when they show up in tests? I am thinking more about Wendell Sailor's case as he has admitted using it - it is a class A illegal drug after all.
Why cannabis is banned for basketball is debatable, not exactly perfermonce enhancing, maybe just psychological because you just think you are doing better.
Anyway, as it says in the Southland Times column: "At least we know why he's called Sparky."
Don't hassle Dickel. He is the man.
Given the whole "high-performance athletes as role models" thing, sports have the right to try to appear "clean" by testing for and punishing of cannabis -or ather recreational drugs- use, but I agree it shouldn't be treating them as performance enhancing if they're not. Seems to be the way things are going in both these cases, with Mark Dickel's "punishment" staying in-house, and Wendell's serious ban seems to reflect being caught doing something illegal rather than any performance benefit he might have gained. On the other hand I remember a snowboarder who returned a positive cannabis test (cue all the obvious jokes) at the winter olympics being treated the same way as if he'd been caught with roids or EPO or whatever - doesn't seem right to me.
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