Paul Lewis: Mission unaccomplished so what went wrong?

These were the nearly games. The Melbourne Commonwealth Games nearly succeeded in convincing us they were successful. The opening ceremony nearly made sense. The Australians nearly dominated everything and the New Zealanders nearly won lots of bronze medals, nearly setting a world record for coming fourth.

The reverberations from a poor New Zealand showing are felt, in a sports-mad country, long after the Games are over. The breast-beating and the angst is of the long-term variety, yet the answer may be right in front of us and easily fixed.

Australia, after its bereft performance at the 1976 Montreal Olympics (New Zealand won one gold medal, one more than Australia, which says it all), set up its celebrated Institute of Sport and has been winning medals faster than they can mint them ever since. They identified a lack of funding and structure in the way they identified talent, nurtured it and let it loose on unsuspecting rivals.

For what it's worth, New Zealand's unexpectedly meagre haul at Melbourne may be due to three main factors:

1. A bad day at the office

2. Pressure

3. Attitude

Bad day

Before we get all bent out of shape, let's quickly look at the core of sport: Someone wins, someone loses. Sometimes you're a world-beater, sometimes the world gives you a hiding. Whoever said: If you approach each game as life or death, you're going to be dead a lot, was right.

But, to borrow another quote, this time from world champion skier Alberto Tomba: "I really lack the words to compliment myself today."

That's where the New Zealand team are right now. With some honourable exceptions (including gold medallists Valerie Vili, the sevens team, Moss Burmester and shooter Graeme Ede), there are many in the 249-strong team who will similarly lack those words. OK, so why was it a bad day at the office?

Sometimes it just is, as we all know. You can have a good build-up, prepare well and the tank will be full of petrol - but sometimes the car just will not start.

Pressure

The Athens Olympics was the first time Sparc made public pronouncements about the number of medals expected. They suggested eight would be a reasonable figure but were happy with the five won, given that gold and silver featured a lot.

However, for this Commonwealth Games, Sparc published a list of 46 medals they expected to win. The Herald on Sunday published this exclusively and it was taken up by media around the country.

If we are being a bit wise after the event, it is because the prevailing mood of the country was that this was not an unreasonable expectation. The problem is that this creates its own pressure.

Athletes focus solely on what they have to do to win an event, excluding all other factors. But when things started going wrong in Melbourne, we quickly started to hear of team members complaining privately about the pressure. This first started to surface at shooting, given the task of returning 12 medals. In the end, they won four - Ede's shotgun gold, a silver and bronze from rifle shooter Juliet Etherington and a silver from pistol shooter Greg Yelavich.

Mental skills trainer Dave Hadfield said that such performance anxiety can spread within a team if things aren't going well. It can act a bit like a virus.

There is no doubt that pressure is amplified by the practice of medal predictions. It might be better, in future, if Sparc keeps its expectations to itself. Or we could agree with NZ pistol shooting coach Ray Brummell - an Australian - asked about expectations and pressure: "But that's sport," he said, "that's the name of the game, isn't it?"

Some of the shooters have also quietly made the point that while New Zealand's sport support is good, they are still not full-time shooters, all needing to keep their day jobs. The stand-out competitors at the shooting - India - are full-time shooters, funded exclusively by the Indian government. Training all the time makes a big difference.

Attitude

However, perhaps the biggest failing is attitudinal. Here, it depends which side of the debate you fall on. One side has it that New Zealand needs to get harder professionally, driving to victory like the Australians, all psychologically driven from birth to back themselves and show their former colonial masters who is boss.

Conversely, there is a school of thought which says that, for many New Zealand athletes, just making the team is enough.

Certainly, there have been vague but persistent reports coming out of the village suggesting that the New Zealand athletes went into party mode. That is not unusual at Commonwealth Games - sport is supposed to be fun, after all - but the Herald on Sunday understands that chef de mission Dave Currie has been moving around the individual sports teams reading the riot act regarding behaviour, even before the celebrated cyclist incident this week.

Or there is a school of thought that New Zealand needs to approach the Commonwealth Games differently - less like the Olympics and more like a carnival of sport.

Hadfield admits he has a foot in both camps. "I know that for a lot of athletes, they let their guard down when they make the team. They try so hard to get selected, they push and push and then it is a great relief to be picked and they do not produce their best."

But Hadfield, who concedes his primary role is with rugby these days, also said: "I think there still needs to be some more discussion on the way we approach Commonwealth Games. Sure, they are important but they are not the Olympics.

"We are producing this consistent attitude now - winners are grinners and losers are wankers. We need to look at the whole ethos of the Commonwealth Games, maybe approach it as a celebration of the Commonwealth, rather than trying to make it the Olympics. If we do that, we might give our athletes a way in which they can build up and peak for world champs and Olympics."

In some sports, like athletics, the qualification standards were so hard that many athletes were left out. While there is an argument for professionalism at this level, there is also the case of England's Mara Yamauchi, who finished third in the women's 10,000m at Melbourne. She dropped her personal best by 45s. That meant that, if Yamauchi had been a New Zealander, she wouldn't have even qualified for our team.

Hadfield believes New Zealand sport needs to open the discussion again and debate the right way of doing things. "We need some innovative thinking," he said. "We have had it in top level rugby and we are leading the world right now."

There are some who feel that the moving of sport into Government hands removes sports and sportspeople from the need to come up with the innovative thinking, No 8 wire, smell-of-an-oily-rag, I-can-do-it mentality which drove our little country for so many years.

No one in their right mind would give Sparc anything but a good report for its efforts. But maybe we need to find a way to ensure that the system doesn't obscure the talent and give athletes too much of a comfort zone. Better funded doesn't necessarily mean better performed.

-HERALD ON SUNDAY