Champ dedicates his wins to sports mate who died

Tyrin Thomas had every reason to be smug and satisfied as he hit the gas pedal motoring home yesterday from the Waka Ama Marathon championships in Waitangi at the weekend.
Instead Thomas, who had two gold medals from his paddling efforts on Friday and Saturday hanging from his rear view mirror, was a bit morose.
Because his medal winning feats were not achieved alongside one of his long time waka ama paddling colleagues James Moore. Not in the flesh anyway. Moore died while on a training paddle earlier this year, and this was the first major regatta for Thomas and his mates from the champion Team Goodyear paddling team from Rotorua.
So Thomas dedicated his win in both the OC1 (single) event and the OC6 (six person) races, the two blue riband events of the regatta, to Moore.
"He (James) was a pretty close mate, and if he was still here with us I don't think we would have even made it to these nationals because we were set to go and paddle the Molokai race in Hawaii last weekend and wouldn't have made it back," Thomas said.
"As soon as he passed away it put a dampener on the whole aspiration to go over there, but then we decided to come up to Waitangi and do the business there," he said.
Moore drowned after capsizing his waka off Mt Maunganui's main beach near Tauranga in July. He was one of four people who set off on their outrigger canoes from Maketu to paddle to Pilot Bay in Tauranga Harbour.
Shortly after setting off, one of the group cracked the hull of his canoe on the Maketu Bar and headed back to shore while the remaining trio continued.
About 500m off Moturiki (Leisure Island), off Mt Maunganui's Main Beach, Moore's canoe capsized and his friends lost sight of him.
Searchers found the 33-year-old's body after it was washed up on Matakana Island.
Thomas said he wasn't one of the party of paddlers that fateful day, but the close knit community of waka ama paddlers in the Bay of Plenty had been hit hard by the tragedy. But what made the medal winning efforts at the weekend all the more significant was that, on the eve of the race, two of the Team Goodyear OC6 crew, brothers Paul and Lance Roozendaal, were forced to pull out after their mother was hospitalised.
"Boet (James Moore's nickname) must have been with us because we actually had to paddle the race with a scratch crew. A couple of hours before the race we actually only had five paddlers and then we pulled one of the young guys up from the youth crew.
"But it worked out because we nailed it."
Thomas won the single title despite battling strong headwinds on the homeward leg of a 17km race. The OC6 gold (36km course) came despite strong challenges from crews from Auckland and Counties.