Athletics: Inspiring moment for young sprinter

By JENNI RUTHERFORD

A shared love of the track quickly dispelled any awkwardness when 17-year-old paralympic runner Cameron Calkoen met his sporting hero, Peter Snell.

Snell, a triple Olympic gold medallist, is back home to be made a Distinguished Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in Auckland tomorrow night.

This week he also met the latest recipients of scholarships from the sports academy that bears his name.

Calkoen, from North Harbour's Rangitoto College, is one of eight promising young sports people to receive a $2000 grant in the awards announced by the Peter Snell Institute of Sport.

He was originally to have first met Snell, an athlete he has always admired, yesterday morning when the Olympian visited Rangitoto. But an impromptu meeting on Monday night overtook the teenager's plans to carefully consider what he would say to New Zealand's athlete of the century.

Cameron, an athlete with cerebral palsy - a condition that affects body movement and muscle control - harbours Olympic dreams of his own. He has mapped his road to the 2004 Athens Paralympics and will embark on the next part of his journey in September when he attends a world-class paralympics meeting in Pusan, Korea.

He won gold medals in the 100m and 200m sprint at the Australian junior paralympics last year, a taste of success he wants to sample again at world level.

In Pusan, Cameron - highly commended in the Herald junior sports awards for last year - will compete in the under-18 100m and 200m in T36 class.

Like Snell, Cameron got into the sport by chance. He started at Rangitoto after 18 unhappy months at Northcote College, and was in the same fifth-form class as Terrenzo Bozzone - the world junior duathlon champion - who suggested he try running.

"The school athletics day was coming up and he said I should give sprinting a go," Cameron said. "I did that and enjoyed it.

"The next thing Terrenzo was ringing me up asking me to go training."

That phone call not only boosted his confidence to know that he was accepted at school, but also laid the foundation for his rapid rise in athletics. As in Snell's case, some words of encouragement went a long way and maybe Cameron, too, will one day stand on the highest step of the victory dais.