Terry Maddaford: Panellists have unenviable task

COMMENT

A few years ago, Dave Currie booted me off the selection panel for the Halberg Awards. I should now be thankful for that.

Currie, who is chef de mission for our Athens Olympic team and also oversees the Halberg Awards, will watch with trepidation when his panellists sit down to draw up their 2004 picks.

Always an onerous task, this year's selections promise to be the most difficult in years.

While New Zealanders have basked in the Greek golden glow, the chosen few must put sentiment aside to find their sportsman, sportswoman, team and coach of the year.

In successive Olympic years their task has been simple.

Four years ago Rob Waddell, as New Zealand's only gold medallist in Sydney, won. Four years earlier Danyon Loader's two swimming golds in Atlanta branded him a certainty.

Barbara Kendall, New Zealand's only gold medal winner in Barcelona in 1992, was upstaged, a little surprisingly, by Annelise Coberger, who won silver in the Albertville Winter Olympics - the first medal won by a Southern Hemisphere competitor at a Winter Olympics.

Fast forward to Athens.

At first glance, Sarah Ulmer is a shoo-in for top woman, Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell will again press their claim for the top team and Hamish Carter will take the nod as sportsman ahead of silver medallists Bevan Docherty and Ben Fouhy, who have world championship titles to back their claims.

Simple enough to sort out the three category winners even if others, including the victorious Black Sox who scored a remarkable three-peat in retaining their World Softball Championship crown, might have had a shout.


The panel must - from Ulmer, the Evers-Swindells, Carter and any late runners - then name their supreme winner.

All have their claims.

Ulmer completed a world championship/Olympic double, continually smashing the world record.

The Evers-Swindell twins, unbeaten in the past three years, have been overlooked since their success in taking the team and overall honours in 2001, bowing to the Tall Blacks and Silver Ferns, who took the team and overall awards in 2002 and 2003.

Ironically, our rowing twins took the team/supreme award double in a year in which they won world championship double sculls silver.

Carter, in probably his last big hoorah, will be the sentimental favourite. His nation-stopping triathlon victory over a handful of current and former world champions and Olympic victors set talkback lines alight.

The panel must weigh all this up in finding their winner. They will, as ever, get plenty of outside help but the announcement at the dinner sometime early next year has, even this far out, a real sense of anticipation about it.