Stacey Waaka celebrates winning the 2017 Women's Rugby World Cup. Photo / Photosport
The SailGP saga is another example of New Zealand’s over-the-top paralysis when it comes to major sports events; how long can the NRL ignore South Island league fervour?; meet our top five highest paid Kiwi sportswomen; sacked via video; and Stacey Waaka’s unique cross-code deal.
Two World Cup victories, an Olympic sevens gold medal - and possibly another one to come in Paris this year. Stacey Waaka is a bona-fide Kiwi sports superstar.
Yes, the likes of Portia Woodman-Wickliffe, Ruby Tui, Michaela Blyde and Sarah Hirini are also impressive rugby performers. Jorja Miller may go on to become our greatest-ever women’s player.
But Waaka (or previously Stacey Fluhler, her married name), her skill (remember that pass off the ground to set up a crucial Black Ferns try in the 2022 World Cup final?) and that infectious smile and sunny personality makes her a standout.
So it’s probably not surprising that Waaka is emerging as a pioneer.
After the Paris Olympics, she will join the Brisbane Broncos to play a shortened season in Australia’s burgeoning National Rugby League Women’s Premiership (NRLW).
She’s not the first Black Fern to jump codes across to the increasingly popular NRLW. Former Ferns teammate Gayle Broughton is already at the Broncos, Olympics teammate Tyla King (nee Nathan-Wong) played a full season for St George last year and Sonny Bill Williams’ kid sister Niall Williams-Guthrie turned out for the Gold Coast Titans last year.
But what’s interesting about Waaka’s deal is she goes with New Zealand Rugby’s (NZR) blessing and will return to Aotearoa next year on a full NZR contract.
“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about joining the Broncos family this season, because I know the success they’ve had in the past, but I’m also so thrilled about this new and exciting opportunity,” Waaka, who has never played league, has said.
“I know I’ll get the best support from this club during the year to help with the switch once I join the Broncos post-Olympics.
“I’ve watched this team with a lot of interest from afar, especially with my good mate Gayle [Broughton] in the squad. She, alongside other former rugby teammates, have all inspired me to take up this new sport but I’m really looking forward to new friendships/connections, more personal growth on and off the pitch...”
The flexibility NZR is showing in allowing Waaka’s cross-code venture is pragmatic - but also high-risk.
Waaka’s superstar status is not reflected in her pay. She will undoubtedly be alongside Hirini, Woodman-Wickliffe and Miller on the highest tier a New Zealand female can earn playing rugby here - a little over $130,000 a year.
The average wage for a women’s NRL player is a slice over $40,000, which allows Waaka to supplement her rugby wage.
It’s a smart play on the one hand. But on the other, what if Waaka enjoys her league stint and wants more?
Importantly, the Warriors re-enter the NRLW next season.
The Mt Smart powerbrokers must be licking their lips right now. Plundering the Black Ferns for players who want to remain living in New Zealand is a no-brainer.
Many expect a Warriors women’s team to be immediately competitive. Which would put NZR under even more pressure to retain its leading female athletes.
Sports Insider’s unofficial poll has Waaka sliding into our top five highest paid women’s athletes off the back of her combined NZR/Broncos deal.
Not surprisingly, golfer Lydia Ko is out on her own in the same way Steve Adams dominates the men’s list.
New Zealand’s highest paid sportswomen:
Lydia Ko (golf) $1.5 million
Amelia Kerr (cricket) $500,000
Ali Riley (football) $350,000
Sophie Devine (cricket) $340,000
Stacey Waaka (rugby/rugby league) $170,000
Despite being winless in 2023, Ko still earned almost US$750,000 ($1.25m) in official prizemoney. Personal sponsorship would almost certainly push that further to well over $1.5m.
Ko is likely to eclipse that this year after opening the season by winning the Tournament of Champions in Orlando in January and pocketing a $367,000 cheque, which pushed her career earnings past the US$17m mark, only the fifth LPGA player to achieve that milestone.
The Mumbai Indians secured Kerr for $192,000 to play in this year’s inaugural Women’s Premier League (WPL) in India (which they won) and she is almost certainly at the upper end of White Ferns annual salaries of $164,000.
The 23-year-old allrounder also has gigs with the Brisbane Heat in the Aussie Big Bash and in England’s KSL T20 league, where the average retainers are approximately $60,000 to $80,000, nudging her to close to $500,000 a year.
Riley is not only the Football Ferns skipper but also captains glamour American National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) club Angel FC, whose part-owners include Serena Williams and Hollywood actress Natalie Portman.
The top players in the NWSL in the States earn $400,000 annually, which means our estimate for Riley may even be conservative.
Veteran White Ferns skipper Sophie Devine is right on Riley’s heels after the Royal Challengers Bangalore paid $96,000 for her WPL contract. Like teammate Kerr, she also plays in the Australian and English T20 leagues and will be on the top tier of White Fern salaries.
It’s a significant drop away to Waaka, the first oval ball code player to feature in our unofficial list but only because of her Broncos boost.
But what is more significant is the absence of any netballers.
If you want daughters to earn good money and still be able to live a good part of the year in New Zealand, the message is clear - stick them in cricket.
The elephant in the room?
The women’s wages still pale massively alongside our leading men. Here’s the Herald’s rundown of our top sports earners from last year. Ko was the only woman to make the Sports Rich List, sliding in at No 8.
There are invariably critics of women’s sport - particularly rugby - who claim the females don’t deserve an uplift in investment from national bodies until they can produce the same commercial appeal as the men.
It’s a comment I regularly come across on social media platforms.
Frankly, it’s rubbish.
Right now the biggest cash cow in Australian international sport is the Matildas.
On the back of their outstanding Fifa World Cup campaign last year, the Australian women’s football team have sold out 13 home games in a row with regular attendances over 50,000. The Australian men’s national football, cricket, league and union can only look on in envy.
Football Australia is rolling in dough off the back of the Sam Kerr-led females.
Yet it was only 10 years ago that the Matildas were forced to take strike action against the national body to get a fair go in both wages and treatment. The fish-heads listened and invested into the women’s game despite the predictable protestations of (male) redneck fans.
Now the Matildas are a phenomenon, easily (and officially) Australia’s most valuable national sporting team with a five-fold increase in worth and with Kerr earning more than $3.5m a year - far in excess of the leading Aussie male AFL and NRL male stars.
Sports Insider was in Melbourne last week during Grand Prix week, once again marvelling at the ability of Australia’s leading cities to draw major events, inspire locals and visitors alike and plunge millions of much-needed dollars into the economy.
Then I came back and learned all about what had gone down around the Kiwi round of SailGP in Lyttleton.
I have some sympathy for the arguments as to why Lyttleton in summer was not the ideal venue (and let’s not forget the round only ended up down there because the City of Sails came up with too many excuses for not hosting it - no irony there, of course).
But I have greater sympathy for Sir Russell Coutts and other event promoters who have had a gutsful of New Zealand finding every possible reason not to bring world-class sporting events to Aotearoa.
We are already up against it in securing decent international sports events to this country.
We have a crap broadcasting time zone, our market is tiny, we’re tucked away in the corner of the world and our population is thinly spread.
We used to be able to rise above that challenge - now we can’t because New Zealand has become so over-regulated.
We are shooting ourselves in the foot.
We will allow pollution-spewing diesel-powered cruise ships to relentlessly chug in and out of our harbours, and laud their economic contribution, while we shut down a wind-powered sailing race quicker than a Carlos Sainz lap around Melbourne’s Albert Park.
Coutts is being accused of sour grapes and picking up his toys and walking away.
But having built an impressive international series from scratch and having other international cities bending over backwards to host a round, his frustration is understandable.
This is hardly a new phenomenon. I was working at the then New Zealand Rugby Union in the 2000s when the best sevens tournament in the world was killed off by over-reaction from the Wellington City Council.
Yes, alcohol consumption at a stadium has to be managed but that was achievable. In the end, wokeness and red tape strangled the tournament, which shifted to Hamilton and then disappeared into oblivion.
The end result is the best rugby-playing nation in the world no longer has a tournament on the World Series and Wellington lost hundreds of millions of dollars in economic benefit.
The real loser in this ongoing saga of sabotaging major events is New Zealand - and the buzz in Melbourne last week simply reinforced that.
I hope the NRL had an official of status at the Warriors-Canberra match in Christchurch last week who relayed back what went down.
The crowd of 17,249 nearly lifted the roof off Rugby League Park in their vociferous support of an Auckland-based team. It was an ongoing reflection of the huge interest in the NRL in the South Island.
Newstalk ZB’s Christchurch-based reporter Nick Bewley said the volume and enthusiasm of the crowd even eclipsed the Crusaders at their peak.
And check out these crowd statistics, which include two trial games and restricted capacity venues...
Warriors crowds in Christchurch:
2016 v Panthers: 18,000
2018 v Manly: 17,357
2019 v Manly: 11,774
2023 trial v Melbourne: 12,000
2024 trial v Wests Tigers: 13,760
2024 v Canberra 17,249
If anything, it underlines why Christchurch should be the frontrunner ahead of Papua-New Guinea (seriously NRL?) and the likes of Perth to become the 18th franchise in the competition.
While on the NRL, a contender for the weirdest sports story of the year has unfolded at the South Sydney club, featuring veteran stalwart Josh Mansour.
It’s a long and complicated story, but essentially Mansour learned he wasn’t being retained by the Rabbitohs when the club aired a farewell video for players retiring that year - and his face was the first one up.
“We get to the end of the year, we’re in the video room and they said ‘we’re going to put in a little farewell video for the guys that are leaving and want to thank them for their time’,” Mansour recalled in a podcast.
“I was the first one there. I didn’t even know that I was leaving. I was the first one on the clip.”
Sports Insider is a handful of episodes into the second season of Full Swing, golf’s Netflix version of Drive To Survive.
I find many top golfers hard to like. Only tennis can top the likes of Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka as self-absorbed and tone-deaf athletes.
Johnson and Koepka of course led the charge of mercenaries to sign up with the Saudi-fuelled rebel LIV Tour, whose battle with the American PGA Tour dominates this second series, which heavily focuses on the forced merger between the two circuits.
Watching Johnson and Koepka dining out on picking the right side (make that shamelessly taking the tainted Saudi millions) while watching seemingly decent blokes like Rory McIlroy and Rickie Fowler being shafted by their PGA bosses makes for grim viewing.
But the series stands up as a compelling watch - even if it’s through gritted teeth.
Liam Lawson and Ferrari
The iconic Italian prancing horse gives Red Bull a black eye with a 1-2 finish at the Aussie GP, banking a bunch of manufacturer championship points and raising the prospect of Kiwi Liam Lawson surely getting a fulltime gig in the near future with one of the energy drink giant’s two teams (Aussie Daniel Ricciardo was almost an embarrassment in his home GP). All the buzz is that Lawson will get an overdue start very shortly.
Christchurch sports fans
Locals turned out in their droves to watch the Warriors down Canberra for their first win of the season, lifting the roof off the stadium and offering plenty of reasons for the NRL to meaningfully consider admitting a South Island franchise.
Then they backed up in Lyttleton by producing the biggest ticketed crowd ever for an international sailing event. Well done Mainlanders!
Sam Whitelock
It looks like the big fella will be back in black faster than Scott Robertson can pull off his latest breakdancing moves. A sensible decision. The next smartest move would be for Razor to tap Richie Mo’unga on the shoulder.
Hagley Oval has a new head groundsman ahead of the first test of the summer.