Currie urges no knee-jerk reaction to Games medal haul

MELBOURNE - Care should be taken to avoid knee-jerk reactions to a frustrating New Zealand medal haul at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, chef de mission Dave Currie says.

New Zealand won 31 medals, the lowest Games tally since Brisbane in 1982.

Currie said it would be better to look at individual sports, rather than the team as a whole.

"Some sports have done better than expected, some sports have done as expected, some haven't done as well as expected," he said.

"We can't have any knee-jerk reaction. You've got to go back and analyse the results and decide where do we go from here?"

New Zealand athletes had improved, only to find others had improved more, he said.

"It's been one of the most frustrating Games I've been involved in, I guess. You make your own luck, but it just didn't seem to go our way on too many things."

New Zealand athletes finished fourth 31 times -- the same number as medals won.

Currie admitted a soft spot for the track and field team, which came out of a bleak period to for Nick Willis and Valerie Vili to win gold.

"They just had a sense of purpose for a group who have had things pretty tough for them," he said.

Currie had a difficult second week, when an incident involving three cyclists hit the headlines around the world.

He rejected any suggestion that the team some members of the team were out of control. "That's scurrilous. It's absolutely bloody scurrilous really," he said.

"Yes there was an incident that wasn't smart, but as a team that wasn't the case. It was a great environment."

National sports funding boss Nick Hill said yesterday medal targets were here to stay, after the Commonwealth Games team fell well short of theirs.

He was happy with the performance of the glamour sports, athletics and swimming, along with triathlon, but not with shooting, bowls and cycling.

Hill released a pre-Games target of 46 medals based on each sport's assessment of their chances, using current world rankings as a guide.

Shooting were given 12 medals to aim at, and they delivered four amid grumblings from within the team that the Sparc target had applied too much pressure.

Bowls were set a target of four medals but only won a bronze, while cycling were set six but delivered four.

Medal targets were common among all teams, Hill said, a view reinforced during discussions with his Australian and English counterparts in recent days.

He admitted the targets for the Beijing Olympics in 2008 would be a lot more stringently researched.

"You want people to participate and have a go, then it's about doing the best you can, then it's about being the best.

"Medal targets are about being the best, they benchmark you against the best in the world."

It was too early to be specific about future funding.

The level of other countries' funding was brought home to Hill by news of a $200 million boost for British athletes heading towards London 2012.

- NZPA