All Blacks skipper Ardie Savea, Olympic stars Finn Butcher, Dame Lisa Carrington and Lydia Ko. Photos / Photosport
Sports Insider returns from a mid-winter break to discover runaway Olympic celebrations starkly sitting alongside growing All Blacks grumbles... so what’s eating Aotearoa and why?
A mana wave, a sea of yellow seats, a ginga ninga Spiderman and a smiling assassin – all abiding memories for Sports Insider from a hectic week which wrapped our most successful Olympics.
But also a week where the All Blacks and New Zealand Rugby spectacularly drove headlong into a concrete reality wall.
What are we to make of this bellwether fortnight of Olympian deeds?
It could be whispered quietly but it needs to be said out loud, so Sports Insider is calling it now... 2024 will go down as a sea change year in the attitude of many New Zealanders towards elite sport.
In years to come, 2024 will be viewed as a time when Aotearoa’s falling out of love with rugby accelerated.
At the same time, it will be marked as the year when an appreciation for our Olympians – in particular our mesmerising wāhine – developed from admiration to genuine fondness and pride.
Hopefully, it will also mark the beginning of an overdue recalibration of which sports get Government money and how much.
Finally, the opportunity looms for niche but captivating sports to finally climb (deliberate metaphor chosen here) out of the bleak funding hole inflicted upon them by the almighty high-performance overlords.
But back to the somewhat opaque intro.
I was interested in how the Olympics was viewed by those aged under 30. So I asked those I knew in my immediate circle. What sports caught their eye, which athletes had captivated them, what images sprung to mind when they thought of Paris?
For one grandson, it was Finn Butcher’s confident mana wave at the start of a brutal but compelling kayak cross campaign that yielded an unexpected gold and a new Kiwi folk hero.
For another, it was the springy-haired teenage Auckland rock climber Julian David and his “blink-and-you-miss-it” conquest of a world champion from Iran in an early round of the speed climbing. He wasn’t alone in finding the event surprisingly compelling.
An adult daughter, usually uninterested in sport and especially loathsome of rugby’s antediluvian tendencies, couldn’t stop marvelling over the Black Ferns Sevens’ triumph, the power of the sisterhood and the dazzling smile of Stacey Waaka.
Knowing her journey, the old sportswriter in me found Lydia Ko’s gold medal inspiring. It also feels privileged to be living in an era witnessing Dame Lisa Carrington’s ongoing greatness.
As for the reference to the “sea of yellow”, Carrington’s feats were unfolding the same night as swathes of empty seats at Wellington’s Cake Tin provided an uncomfortable reminder of the dire straits in which our national game finds itself.
The same grandsons who repeatedly watched social media clips of “the Butcher” and David’s Spiderman feats didn’t even know the All Blacks were playing last Saturday night.
And if they did, I don’t think they would have cared.
This is the mountain New Zealand Rugby (NZR) faces as it and the All Blacks are further jolted into reality before an increasingly indifferent Kiwi sporting public.
The All Blacks are no longer an all-conquering juggernaut. We know it, and the rugby world knows it.
The apologists are predictably excusing the poor fan turnout against Argentina as driven by a clash with the Olympics. During a cost-of-living crisis, Wellingtonians, the theory goes, are saving their bikkies for the Bledisloe Cup encounter.
I sense something deeper than that. The tide and times are changing.
Those of us who have been around for a while have come to understand we were blessed to witness a special All Blacks era from 2008 until 2016 off the backs of two once-in-a-generation players in Richie McCaw and Dan Carter.
The chances are that era of total dominance will never be repeated.
This year’s mixed performances have exposed some uncomfortable truths for those Kiwis whose sense of self-identity is overly invested in the men in black.
One is the myth of a “super coach” sprinkling magic dust and transforming players into unbeatable black-clad heroes.
That is not a bad thing.
The belief in Yoda-like powers of All Blacks coaches has not been in rugby’s best interests for some time now.
Since 2017, it has stifled individualism and adventure (in fact there’s an argument a coterie of international rugby coaches has done more in recent years to ruin rugby as a game than World Rugby itself).
Scott Robertson may prove to be different to his predecessors and is probably our best choice right now. But he is working with less-talented players than a decade ago.
We only have one or two truly world-class players, and a host of mediocre ones, among our current crop of All Blacks. Chances are we will increasingly bounce around anywhere from No 3 to No 7 on the world rankings in future seasons.
We are still good enough as a rugby nation to occasionally scale Mt Everest, but the days of us sitting smugly astride the mountain peering down at the inferior also-rans are gone forever.
We no longer intimidate. The once-signature trait of running rampant in the last 10 minutes of every half is long gone.
The problem is New Zealand Rugby’s entire business model is predicated on the All Blacks living up to the image sold to the world – you know, the one where we are the greatest team in the history of sport?
When you are no longer delivering on that lofty claim (and home losses to Argentina are definitely not in the script), your commercial star looks a little less shiny with every defeat and your story a little harder to sell.
So where does all of this leave us in terms of rugby’s standing in our national psyche at a time when our sporting wāhine in particular – and the vibrant personalities of Butcher, David and Ellesse Andrews – are challenging our stereotypes?
Everywhere you looked in Paris there were Kiwi athletes brimming with verve and vim – Eliza McCartney and her pole-vault partners Imogen Ayris and Olivia McTaggart; Dame Lisa’s beaming smile, Hayden Wilde’s astonishing grit and sportsmanship.
It all contrasts so starkly with the manufactured and wooden stuff we see coming out of the All Blacks camp via its sanitised NZR+ digital warehouse.
The saviour for NZR is their wāhine but they don’t realise it.
Already the ever-smiling Waaka and another of the Black Ferns gold-medal heroines from Paris, Tyla King, are in Australia, supplementing their income by playing in the NRL women’s premiership.
Only New Zealand Rugby would allow its most charismatic athletes to play in another code and risk losing them forever simply because it has lacked the will to properly invest in the women’s game (despite a World Cup XVs triumph on home soil just two years ago).
Since that time, the Silver Lake investment has been largely squandered, wasted on misguided media ventures like NZR+ and bailing out provincial unions who overspent on the (male) National Provincial Championship.
Now Silver Lake’s interest dividends are a yoke around NZR’s neck, there will be no cash to spend on a meaningful women’s programme. It’s a travesty.
It should also lead to an open and transparent discussion on government funding of rugby in this country (although good luck on getting anything resembling transparency when it comes to rugby).
The taxpayer has been consistently propping up NZR’s sevens programmes via high performance grants despite the fact NZR is the richest sports organisation in this country. Why it seemingly can’t afford to pay the wages of sevens players and needs our help is almost scandalous.
In this case of the women’s team, there’s an argument it’s well-spent taxpayer funds (although it doesn’t mean we should accept it).
The men’s squad is a different matter. One silver across three Olympic campaigns hardly sells the myth of “All Blacks” worldwide rugby dominance.
I remember the women’s Black Sticks hockey programme being severely slashed after one poor Olympics campaign while the men’s remained intact. Will the same now apply to the men’s rugby sevens programme?
Let’s wait and see.
We are also in a “wait-and-see” holding pattern around the future funding of sports like speed climbing, kayak cross, skateboarding and surfing – the sports the under-30s in my life all followed.
In the past – and traditionally within weeks of their heroics – most of us forget all about the Finn Butchers and Julian Davids.
I sense a change this time. Kids want to know where they can go and watch David. Others are asking where you learn how to do kayak cross.
The sea change is not coming... it’s here.
Monitoring social media over the poor Cake Tin turnout for the All Blacks-Argentina clash last weekend, it is clear that the prices of admission and food are additional factors.
NZR officials seem indifferent to the cost of attending All Blacks tests. One poster claimed it’s in excess of $600 for a family of six once transport and food is factored in.
Then there’s the soul-less nature of the Cake Tin.
The folly of incorporating a cricket oval at a venue where the vast majority of sports events held there require a rectangular field has never been more exposed.
We should all remember that it was New Zealand Cricket (NZC) who forced that upon Wellingtonians with the promise of a steady diet of international cricket being directed towards the harbourside venue.
That turned out to be a hollow pledge and is why NZC’s ringing endorsement of Eden Park as our new national stadium within the Great Auckland Waterfront Stadium Debate should be seen for the self-serving nonsense it is.
In April next year, it will be 30 years since Rupert Murdoch turned Australian sport on its ear with his attempted Super League takeover of rugby league.
The Super League war was inspired by Murdoch’s determination to dominate the pay TV landscape in his native country via his joint venture Foxtel Play.
Now, almost three decades on, Murdoch is quitting Australian sport. His 65% ownership of Foxtel (national telco Telstra owns the other third) is up for sale.
That includes Fox Sports, Foxtel’s main offering to its 4.5 million subscribers, which is among the assets on the block.
When somebody like Murdoch walks away from the TV sports rights business in the country of his birth where he has long indulged nostalgic favourites (his national broadsheet The Australian has lost money for decades), something is up.
Yes, there are family politics around (yep) succession, but there’s more to this.
The advent of rival streamers like Netflix internationally and Stan domestically is eating away at Foxtel’s margins. The business is no longer the star performer it has been.
So Murdoch is bailing.
A free-to-air network is being touted as a logical buyer.
The Channel Nine network, once owned by Murdoch’s bitter rival Kerry Packer, is the favourite.
If Nine is a buyer, it will be fascinating to see if it retains the rights to Sanzaar rugby, which currently screens on its Stan platform.
If rumours that women’s State of Origin NRL matches regularly out-rate Wallaby tests are true, Rugby Australia could be in for a rude awakening come renewal time.
Nine already has free-to-air rights for the NRL and NRLW competitions, as well as the Origin series.
The saga will have a knock-on effect on this side of the Tasman as New Zealand Rugby will find when it sits down with Sky TV to negotiate its new deal, as adeptly outlined here by Paul McBeth on BusinessDesk.
Our Wāhine Olympians: Eight of our 10 gold medals in France. Fourteen of our record 20 medals won by our women. Our sporting wāhine deserve to stand alone this week.
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