Foote showed plenty of ticker too

The two gold medals won by Neil Van Wijk have been well documented but he was just one of a two-strong team which competed with notable success for the Masterton Swimming Club in the 13 years and under section at the national age group championships in Te Rapa last week.
Isaac Foote, like Van Wijk, is in only his second season of competitive swimming and had the misfortune to become ill a week before the championships, spending a number of days at home recovering with the aid of antibiotics as a consequence.
This meant he missed the crucial tapering training which primes a swimmer for peaking at the right time and it also meant he lost a measure of fitness at a time when he could not recoup it.
His results, therefore, are even more commendable and his efforts to register personal best times, even in the gruelling 1500m freestyle and the equally taxing 200m butterfly, showed both the depth of his preparation, and his own tenacity.
For both Foote and Van Wijk this was their first national meet and so it was the first time they have had a national ranking.
They obviously thrived on their training regime, first under Olga Lepisova and since the Masterton club's January camp in Rotorua under the watchful eye of Jiri Mikolas. Who prepared them in the company of the club's senior squad.
In Hamilton they were attached to the highly successful West Auckland Aquatics club whose head coach is former Masterton club member Donna Bouzaid, herself a national level swimmer and Cook Strait conqueror
As Bouzaid herself was leaving with the New Zealand short course world championship team Foote and Van Wijk were coached by Simon Mayne, the WAQ's age group and youth coach and now also a New Zealand coach, having accompanied the national 16 years and under team to the recent Youth Olympics in Sydney.
The two boys were also in phone contact with Mikolas prior to each race so the combination of home coach and WAQ coach worked very well.
Van Wijk swam in six races, including the three breaststroke events. He won a gold medal in the 200m breaststroke, having gone into the final as the first seeded New Zealander.
A Japanese 12-year-old, Kanou, who was the overall winner, certainly dragged Van Wijk through as he stuck to Mikolas's plan of holding on to the Japanese for as long as he could. Kanou swam a time of 2min 35secs with Van Wijk's 2min 37.22secs representing a personal best by 7.85secs.
Van Wijk repeated this performance the following night in the 100m breaststroke. He was again seeded first New Zealander after the heats, where he bettered his pb by 3.72secs,and again in the final he was the best of Kiwis, second only to Kanou. His time of 1min 12.51secs left him just under 2secs behind the Japanese and he was nearly a second faster than the second New Zealander home.
The 50m breaststroke, held on the second day of the championships, had also seen Van Wijk with a first seeding after he had taken nearly 1.09secs off his pb in the heats but the pressure of competing at this level for the first time proved too much and after a slow start he came in fifth.
Van Wijk also swum in the 200m individual medley, 50m freestyle and 100m freestyle and posted personal best times in all of those events as well.
Foote too contested six races, including the difficult 1500m freestyle and 200m butterfly. It would be unusual to swim pb's in these events so soon after recovering from a bacterial infection and it was a testimony to his grit that he achieved just that.
In the 1500m freestyle, his favourite event, he took 5.66secs off his pb and can now boast a time of 19mins 19.10secs.
That gives him a ranking of 11th in New Zealand for 13-year-olds.
In the 200m butterfly, swum by Foote on the first day, he recorded a pb by 4.26secs and again improved his ranking to 11 th in his age group.
Personal best times were also swum by Foote in the 50m butterfly, where is he is now ranked 13th, the 400m freestyle and 200m freestyle, and he improved his rankings in those events as well.