Brook Robertson at the Rowing High Performance Centre at Lake Karapiro. Photograph by Christine Cornege.
Brook Robertson at the Rowing High Performance Centre at Lake Karapiro. Photograph by Christine Cornege.
In the final part of his four-part series on Raising Champions, Dylan Cleaver visits Cambridge where sport is king.
At a rough estimate Brook Robertson hasn't seen his mates for three to four years.
He's got a bunch of new friends, including his colleagues in the rowing eight, but his mate-mates, the ones he grew up with in Nelson, are disappearing in the rearview mirror.
Robertson, 23, is one of hundreds of athletes who have made Cambridge, nestled on the banks of the Waikato River, their home. In a kind of reverse diaspora, athletes are sucked into the town's vortex with the promise of Olympic and world championship glory.
The town itself is like a giant sports science experiment, a Sportopolis, acting as an incubator for the country's most ambitious and committed athletes.
Part of it is an accident of geography. Cambridge is a few kilometres downstream from the hydro-electric dam that rudely interrupts the serene progress of the mighty Waikato River and turns it into Lake Karapiro, New Zealand's premier rowing lake and home to the sport's elite high-performance centre.
Part of it is planned. Last year the $30 million AvantiDrome opened, making Cambridge the hub for New Zealand cycling. Triathlon New Zealand also runs its high-performance programme out of the AvantiDrome.
The result: Cambridge has become the sort of place where it pays to suck your guts in when you walk the streets, the sort of place where you drink protein shakes even when you're hanging out for an L&P and the sort of place where you're not really driving unless you're driving a sponsored Hilux.
Robertson has no cause to suck in any flab, likes a good shake but could do with the car.
The men's eight have not yet achieved enough at elite level to qualify its rowers for government money in the form of Performance Enhancement Grants.
He instead relies on a Rowing New Zealand stipend, which, he says with a grin that looks a lot like a grimace, is "enough to live on".
Life would be a lot more comfortable back in Nelson, with family, or even at the regional rowing base in Blenheim, but he has no choice. If he wants to make it to the top step of an Olympic or world championship, and he desperately does, he can be nowhere else, even if it means he cannot even afford a decent bike to help with his training.
This is not a lament, but the life he has chosen.
"You don't do it for the pay cheque. It's for the love of the sport. I just want to help get the eight back to the top of the world."
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Meanwhile, at the other end of town, in a world of cranks and sprockets, is another refugee to sporting ambition.
Racquel Sheath's story is similar to Robertson's, but has one crucial distinction: while the latter had to move to Cambridge to further his sporting career, Sheath chose to.
In March last year she left her home in Red Beach, Whangaparaoa, and moved to Cambridge, bringing with her dreams of cycling success and ... her family.
"When the track was being built, I knew this was the place I had to be," said the 21-year-old omnium rider. "I had the support of my family. They all came down with me." That's right - mum, dad, two brothers all upped sticks and moved to the Waikato full of hope and zero promises.
"It made my life a whole lot easier," says Sheath.
So, has it paid off? A smile breaks out on Sheath's face.
"It has, definitely."
Would it have worked if she hadn't dragged her family from their coastal idyll to the verdant heart of the Waikato?
Racquel Sheath, track cyclist at the Avantidrome in Cambridge. New Zealand Herald Photograph by Christine Cornege.
"It may have, but it would have been much more difficult. Training in Auckland was hellish," she says, referencing the almost daily drive from the Whangaparaoa Peninsula to the outmoded outdoor velodrome in Manukau, "here it is a breeze".
Which kind of depends on your definition of a "breeze". Sheath is talking in between a two-and-a-half hour training ride on the road and a three-hour track session where she will work on her kilo time trial, perhaps the most aerobically taxing of the six events that make up the omnium.
Back at the lake, Robertson was preparing for an erg session, a punishing dry-land rowing machine that spits out data for coaches to analyse.
There's no rest for the good or wicked in this town of happy masochists.
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Cambridge, town of trees, is undressing for the winter but the leaves are about the only things that are falling.
It is estimated that an average of 2.5 families a week are moving to the region, house prices are rising and it's almost impossible to find a decent rental property.
The town once best known for its antiques - and we're not just talking trinkets and clocks, even with the influx of young athletes the average age remains three years above the national average - has changed.
"It's a desirable place, a healthy town with all the new people coming in," says real estate agent Yvonne Scown. "That is filtering down to the cafes and restaurants."
There are stars, a la Hollywood Boulevard, embedded into Duke St celebrating the town's equine and hominine champions, but there's still a real-world quality about Cambridge, which started as a British camp during the Land Wars and evolved into a service centre for the farming and thoroughbred industries.
"House prices have steadily increased but not like Auckland," says Scown. "It hasn't gone stupid and in the long-term that's good because it doesn't lend itself to a crash.
"There's a nice feeling here now; plenty of positive vibes."
The athletes love it too. They're among like-minded people and never have to worry about where and when to train.
They love the facilities. The rowing and cycling centres are world-leading and have room to expand. Olympic silver medallist Sarah Walker has a house that backs on to a new, world cup-standard BMX track.
The triathletes have easy access to swim, bike and run. St Peter's has its own sports academy and looks, from the outside, less like a high school and more like a cross between the Institute of Sport and a country club.
Most importantly, and the thing that is possibly most undervalued, is the shared intellectual property. The athletes mingle, they share and swap ideas. On Wednesday night, for example, cyclists, rowers and triathletes gathered and Robertson's flat for the final of The Bachelor - it's safe to say there was not a lot of excess body fat fathered from the telly.
"There're some really great athletes around," says Sheath. "You see Mahe Drysdale around and think, 'Wow'. This is the place to be ... where champions are made."
