Eric Thompson: Eyes on the latest pocket rockets

Opinion

I've been contemplating New Zealand sporting achievements, what we have coming up and the place various sports have on a global stage.

I was pondering this in the wake of yet another young Kiwi motor racing driver featuring in Europe.

Young rally driver Stephen Barker recently put 17 other young hotshot gravel racers to the sword by winning this year's Fiesta SportTrophy International Shootout in the UK (see full story on the inside back page).

These sorts of motorsport results have been buried, if they were lucky, down page among other stuff that doesn't involve a ball, while things the rest of the world have no interest in, and we're crap at, get top billing.

Take cricket, for example - a game played by five countries that matter, and we're not one of them. I've turned page after page after page in newspapers with people blathering on about a game we consistently get dicked at, and when we draw it's regarded as a good result.

Let's move on to rugby league - a game played by even fewer countries. We win a world championship and the news is splashed everywhere.

That's like an American team winning the world series of baseball. Only two countries play in the series, America and Canada, just like there'll only ever be two countries in the league world cup.

Rugby's another anathema. This country's fixation with a game we haven't won a world title in since 1987, and are not likely to for another 30 years, is like England winning another world soccer cup. It's not going to happen.

One thing I will say about soccer, though, at least most of the world plays that game, unlike the eight countries which play rugby.

For a small country we have a rich history in motorsport, and to this day it's still undervalued by most media outlets. For reasons beyond me, we'd rather follow stuff that on a global scale means nothing. We'll never grow up as a sporting nation unless we stop navel-gazing and fawning over sports that are rooted in the British Empire.

They get more people during the three weeks of the Indianapolis 500 than will turn up during the entire Rugby World Cup. The bloke who said the RWC is the third largest sporting event in the world should have left the club bar hours earlier.

Motorsport has a global audience of billions and we are damn good at it. Take Hayden Paddon, for example. He recently finished third in the Production World Rally Championship - the first Kiwi to make it to the podium at the end of a world rally series.

I could fill pages and pages on world-beaters like Dixon, Hulme, Millen, Amon, McLaren and Radisich to just scratch the surface. We've even got an FIA vice-president in Morrie Chandler. As a country we've won the Triple Crown of motorsport; Hulme the Formula One title in 1967, McLaren and Amon won the 24 Hour Le Mans in 1966 and now Dixon with the Indy 500.

There's even a team in Formula One named after a bloody Kiwi.

Now that's sporting history - rather than being the first country to get stuffed by Bangladesh in a series. I haven't even started on how many world titles we've won in motorcycle racing - which also has global appeal.

In the meantime my television, radio and newspapers will be filled with Georgia playing Romania in the rugby, Papua New Guinea playing Tonga in the league, Singapore playing Botswana in the netball and Canada playing Bermuda in the cricket. And then us losing to Australia in all the respective finals, well, except for the cricket where we wouldn't even get out of pool play.

From now on, I'm going to follow a whole bunch of young Kiwi pocket rockets who are winning championships around the world, rather than playing sports in countries that were once part of a crumbling empire.