Kayaking: Love conquers all for Lisa

Lisa Carrington, New Zealand's newest world champion, says she loves her sport and her event.

It's not the throwaway use of the word "love" that many young people employ - you know, 'Oh, I just loooove ice cream'. No, she means she really loves canoeing.

It's not a common refrain from elite sportspeople. How many professional golfers head out to play a social, fun, game of golf to relax? Uh, that'd be zero.

How many pro cricketers have a net or a game of social cricket for the sheer joy of turning the arm over or hitting the ball? Yep, that's right - none. For many talented and lucky enough to earn their living from sport, the thing they did originally for fun often becomes a job.

Carrington, the 22-year-old highly impressive winner of the K1 200m event in Hungary, has no such hang-ups. The perky, attractive kayaker - who could become the golden face of a sport with a golden Olympic history in New Zealand - means it.

She loves what she does. She loves the training, the competition (internal and external); she loves being on the water; plying her trade in the outdoors while the rest of us are cooped up in offices or the Auckland traffic.

There were sacrifices. Those close to her and who worked with her in sport talk consistently of her mental strength and her focus and she has needed it in the past; even the recent past.

She came into canoeing through surf lifesaving - the same route travelled by New Zealand's gold medal heroes of the 80s, Ian Ferguson, Paul MacDonald, Alan Thompson and Grant Bramwell.She made the crossover, as most do, after doing well in surf lifesaving's competitive events and, in particular, the surf ski, which has an immediate and obvious link to kayaking.

Fresh out of high school, her friends had headed off in different directions - university, parties, boyfriends (and sometimes all three) - and she was training, training; paddling, paddling.

"I was in Gisborne [she was there with then coach Andras Szabo] and it was hard," she said. "My friends were going away to uni and they were all having a great time and there was me, stuck in Gisborne. When I look back at it, though, it really wasn't that great a sacrifice. I didn't really feel that way - that is what I do. It's what I enjoy. I love it. I focus on my training because I enjoy it - it's me; it's what I love."

It began when the Carrington family moved to the Bay of Plenty's beautiful Ohope Beach. The family felt young Lisa needed water skills to be safe and to enjoy what was close to the front door.

She followed brothers into surf lifesaving, enjoyed competing and, when she was about 16, took up the surf ski.

"Then, about 2006 I think it was, Dad [Pat Carrington] heard Ferg [Ian Ferguson] was holding a camp in Rotorua and he thought it might be a good thing for me to do. So we went up there and it was my first intro to Ferg."

"It's ironic," says mother Glynis of her daughter's start in canoeing and her world championship. "She didn't even want to go to that first camp."

Lisa's quiet, committed mien comes from being part of a family with a sporting heritage and a practical, calm but determined way of doing things. Pat has two Maori All Blacks as relatives and is distantly related to former All Black winger Ken. He and Glynis were both sprinters (land-based), are both schoolteachers; of calm and supportive dimensions.

The maternal Taylor side of the family, headed by grandparents Eric and Nancy Taylor, were well known dairy farmers in nearby Pukehina before they moved "to town".

The Taylors are salt-of-the-earth honest as the day, stand-on-me people - they once opened their home and hearts to a small boy who enjoyed greatly the never-to-be forgotten exposure to a family as solid and stable as the one he had left was troubled.

CARRINGTON TOOK her win impressively. The camera shows her sitting upright; trunk and head still, her arms rotating almost like helicopter blades. Making a kayak go fast - or a rowing shell - can be a matter of almost mystical proportions.

Athletes spend months, years, decades trying to find the elusive combination of technique, fitness, style, rhythm and combination (where more than one person is involved).

"I think it's fair to say that Ferg and I had a lot of influence on her technique," says MacDonald, who is now out of national kayaking coaching, "and [current coach] Gordon Walker has done a lot of work on her training programme and her endurance. For that race, you need speed - and Lisa has always had that - but even at 200m, it is all about endurance too.

"How she paddles is how you make the boat go fast. I saw the TV clip and she was sitting up tall and paddling beautifully - that boat was just quivering [with the speed]."

Maybe the most astounding thing about Carrington's world championship gold medal is that it was achieved while the sport in New Zealand nearly ripped itself apart. The controversy that blew up involving coaches Ferguson and MacDonald, former world champion Ben Fouhy and others threatened the sport's funding from Sparc and its very survival as a sport.

Bitter management-coaches differences ended with Ferguson and MacDonald - our two most prolific Olympians - being axed. Ferguson was reinstated or partly so; MacDonald left after taking Canoe Racing New Zealand to court with an employment action eventually settled out of court.

In the middle of all this were the athletes; hardly an atmosphere conducive to making strides internationally when the people who run the sport are at each other's throats.

"I didn't worry about all that," said Carrington. "I thought it was best if I just focused and was really determined to achieve what I wanted to achieve. It was a matter of being true to myself and not letting other things dictate what I do.

"I guess there are things that you can't control, like selections and selectors who decide what events you will compete in - but you can decide your own fate by training as hard as you can, by learning from your mistakes."

Carrington is already being spoken of as a New Zealand medallist - and a gold medallist at that - for London so will now have to experience a new level of pressure: expectation. Her K1 200m event is made for her and her speed.

"We maybe don't celebrate our world champions here as much as we celebrate our Olympic gold medallists," says MacDonald. "It's the pinnacle and Lisa has all that to go through now - but she really does have her feet on the ground."