Weaker sports will be targeted in cash squeeze

Moss Burmester with his Melbourne gold. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Funding for high-performance athletes is in for a shakeup after Sport and Recreation NZ announced yesterday it would focus on sports which offered the best medal hopes.

That may mean reducing the number of sports which New Zealand funds to take on the rest of the world at international events, agency chief executive Nick Hill said last night.

His organisation warned after a post-mortem on New Zealand's lacklustre Commonwealth Games medals count that sports bodies unable to provide professional structures capable of supporting world-class athletes would be at risk of being bypassed.

Mr Hill said Sport and Recreation would protect its investments by assuming a role in managing "at-risk" high-performance programmes or withdrawing funds and supporting individual athletes and teams through the Academy of Sports.

"The aim of the system will be focused unashamedly on ensuring that athletes and teams win in events that matter to New Zealand," he said.

His comments came after an analysis of New Zealand's performance at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games in which New Zealand athletes won 31 medals compared with a forecast of 46 medals.

Sport and Recreation invested $13.46 million in the high-performance systems of 12 sporting organisation which competed in Melbourne, and $400,000 in five other sports represented there.

Six failed to meet targets, notably shooting, bowls, cycling and hockey.

Though the overall tally was 31 per cent lower than the 45 medals collected at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester, the report noted that the number of top-four finishes in Melbourne increased by 8 per cent to 64.

The gap in performance between New Zealand and countries such as Australia and Britain with structured high-performance sports systems and "enormous depth" in many of their teams, had widened, the report said.

"Closing that gap represents a significant challenge."

Mr Hill said it was too early to say which sports were at risk of losing funding. That would have to wait until a review of New Zealand's high performance system, which would offer a strategic direction for funding support in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

BikeNZ chief executive Rodger Thompson, accepted that New Zealand deserved a fair return on the more than $2 million invested annually in his organisation.

"We have to be smart and focused," he said, but cited the organisation's centre at Limoux in France as an example of what could be done to produce valuable training returns.