A bid by Masterton swimmer Isaac Foote to qualify for next year's Commonwealth Games will be supported by an evening with former Commonwealth swimming champion and leading coach Gary Hurring and top sports commentator Keith Quinn, to be held in Masterton this month.
Foote, 20, took another step towards his goal of qualifying for the 200m butterfly at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games when he became the New Zealand short course 200m butterfly open champion at the national championships in Wellington last week.
Foote won in a personal best time of 1min 58.56s, breaking his Wellington Open record. He has six months to prepare for the Commonwealth trials in April, which ideally includes competing and training in Australia in December.
Born and bred in Masterton, Foote began swimming competitively at the age of 12 with the Masterton Swimming Club. He was the Wairarapa Secondary School Sportsman of the Year and Wairarapa Maori Sportsman of the Year in 2010. Since finishing at Chanel College that year, he has been training at the Wellington High Performance Centre under Hurring.
At the fundraising evening at the Masterton Town Hall on Wednesday, October 30, Hurring will talk with sports commentator Keith Quinn about what it takes to be a world-class athlete - the challenges, the inspiration and the tools and techniques he has learned over the years as a swimmer and coach. In 1978, Hurring won gold at the Commonwealth Games and silver at the world championships when he also won the Halberg New Zealand Sportsman of the Year award. He represented New Zealand at the 1984 Olympics, finishing fourth and fifth in the 100m and 200m backstroke events. Now coaching Wellington-based high performance, Olympic, Commonwealth Games and world championship swimmers, he was Swimming New Zealand's Coach of the Year in 2011.
