KEY POINTS:
Mahe Drysdale stands at the peak of New Zealand sport as winner of the supreme Halberg award - just a decade after taking up rowing via a university sports-cum-drinking adventure - yet he will hope that the best is yet to come.
The flame is burning brightly in
the man who has taken the oars of greatness from the retired Olympic and double world champion Rob Waddell, whose deeds inspired Drysdale to embrace the sport in a serious way.
Drysdale saw the possibilities from the moment he met Waddell, an "ordinary bloke" of a similar build who was achieving great things a world away from the sort of sculling that is most commonly associated with university days.
Drysdale is well on the way to fulfilling his ultimate dream. The 2008 Olympic Games are just about coming into view, although Drysdale will more likely be concentrating on training waters that are awash with the agony that is the elite rower's lot.
He defended his world single sculls title in world record time after a thrilling duel with German Marcel Hacker, having burst into the limelight in Japan a year earlier on a gold medal-rich day for New Zealand rowing. The vanquished at Eton last August included Olympic champion Olaf Tufte.
The other favoured contenders for the top Halberg award were the almost unbeatable 2006 All Blacks and the world's No 2-ranked woman shot putter, Valerie Vili, the World Cup and Commonwealth Games winner. Drysdale had a definite edge, though, as a repeat world champion. He was also named the Herald's Sports Person of the Year in December.
Like Drysdale, the major missions for Vili and the All Blacks still lie ahead.
The 28-year-old Drysdale has a long frame which provides the ideal mounts and muscle for an engine that has a tip-top ability to convert and utilise oxygen.
What has now been tested and proven is his ability to win on the big occasion, to handle the differing pressures and tactics. Japan was no flash in the pan.
Moreover, the win at Eton has in Drysdale's case dispelled the notion that single scullers who emerge from crews, as Drysdale did, sometimes fade after any initial burst of success.
It also confirms that the relationship between Drysdale and his enigmatic coach, Dick Tonks - an endearingly downbeat man with an outstanding coaching record, who in his own competitive days preferred training to racing, and who is happiest hunkering down by the water in a woolly jumper well clear of dinner suits and any limelight - is made of stern stuff.
In other words, everything appears to be in place, that there is every reason for an optimism which says that Drysdale will turn up in China as a triple world champion, and the favourite for Olympic gold.
These thoughts may swim to the front of his mind at times, but only if he has the energy.
No one has put the draining training regime of a top rower more vividly than Steve Redgrave, the legendary British Olympian.
"I go round feeling knackered all the time," said Redgrave, a relentlessly determined man who hardly ever spoke with one of his Olympic pairs gold medal comrades and didn't bother to tell another he was making a comeback.
"I have no energy and I'm fighting the margins of being ill and not being ill. I go to dinners and fall asleep," Redgrave continued.
"If you feel fit and strong then there's something wrong. You're not training hard enough."
After training this way for 49 weeks a year over 19 years, Redgrave's really was the voice of an experience that we can only cringe at.
Drysdale talks of his own training regime in similar words, although not as many. He is continually "zonked" to the point that he may not even feel like eating. His hands may be battered. But he goes on.
His late grandfather, the renowned businessman Sir Robert Owens, helped instil a "pig-headedness and confidence" in him.
But there is an image of Mahe Drysdale that involves relaxation.
People often expect a man named Mahe to be of Maori or Polynesian heritage and are surprised to find "a tall white boy", as he puts it.
Mahe is the largest island in the African Seychelles and a place his parents, Alan and Robin, fell in love with shortly after the future world champion was conceived.
If there is a hammock swinging lazily somewhere ready for Mahe Drysdale, it has a long wait.
Tonks, an Olympic silver medallist in 1972, has said: "You've got to do the miles. With a horse, you hold it back otherwise it will run itself to death. You've got to push humans because they've got a natural barrier. I've learned it's a mental one."
For a young man within a long reach of the ultimate glory, the supreme Halberg award is a chance for Drysdale to fill the heart with the country's best wishes before he fills the lungs again and resumes on this torturous way.
