SportsAugust 22, 2021

Watch every episode of Scratched: Aotearoa’s Lost Sporting Legends

Web series

Here’s all 13 episodes so far from our award winning video series celebrating New Zealand sporting heroes who never got their due, but whose legacies deserve to be in lights.

Lee Ralph, the skateboarder who vanished

In the late 1980s, New Zealand skateboarder Lee Ralph had the world at his feet. But right when he seemed poised to join the sport’s elite, he was kicked out of the US – and out of the limelight for good.

Jane Tehira, the triple international

New Zealand has had a handful of double internationals, athletes who’ve represented the country in two different sports. In the 1950s, Jane Tehira represented New Zealand in three – basketball, softball and hockey.

Precious McKenzie’s last gold medal

From being barred from weightlifting competitions in apartheid-era South Africa to being embraced by his adopted home country New Zealand, Precious McKenzie’s is a story of determination – and of the importance of knowing your worth.

Angela Walker’s forgotten gymnastics gold

The star of the 1990 Commonwealth Games was a young New Zealand gymnast – but Nikki Jenkins wasn’t our only gymnastic champion that year. This is the story of Angela Walker, New Zealand’s forgotten gold medalist.

Tuariki Delamere’s somersault long jump

In the 1970s, a young New Zealand athlete introduced the world to a radical new long jump technique. In another timeline, Tuariki Delamere’s name could be as synonymous with the long jump as Dick Fosbury is with the high jump. But while the Fosbury Flop has long since been universally adopted, the potential of the Delamere Flip remains one of sport’s great what-ifs.

Meda McKenzie vs the Cook Strait

One morning in 1978, 15-year-old Meda McKenzie got into the water off the coast of Wellington and started swimming. Just over 12 hours later, she arrived in the South Island. Years later, spurred on by a male swimmer who said it couldn’t be done, she crossed the Cook Strait again – then immediately turned around and swam the whole way back.

Ruia Morrison: An unlikely tennis journey from Rotorua to Wimbledon

By age 20, Ruia Morrison was a national singles champion and, thanks to the support of the wider Māori community, on a plane to Wimbledon for the 1957 grand slam tournament. But despite being considered one of the best in the world at the time, and a successful career spanning two decades, Morrison has remained largely unknown in her home country. Still living in Rotorua and a matriarch of Māori tennis, Ruia Morrison is well and truly a lost sporting legend of Aotearoa.

Anne Audain: The story of New Zealand’s most successful road runner

Anne Audain has won more races than she’s lost. In fact, of the 112 road races that Audain ran in America, she won 75. And in the process, earned Nike and Pepsi endorsements, and hundreds of thousands of dollars as a professional middle distance runner.

Brett Fairweather: Meet the creator of Jump Jam

Every New Zealander under the age of 30 knows at least one Jump Jam song. ‘Witch Doctor’, ‘Coconut’, ‘Kotahitanga’ – they’re instantly recognisable, with the recognition most often accompanied by an involuntary dance move. Less readily recognised is the creator and choreographer of those dance moves, former aerobics champion Brett Fairweather.

Chunli Li: Undefeated in New Zealand table tennis at 57

Chunli Li moved to New Zealand in 1987 to retire from table tennis, aged 25. Instead, she was asked to keep playing and represented New Zealand at four Olympic Games and at the 2002 Commonwealth Games won an unprecedented four medals, aged 40.

Barbara Cox: The matriarch of New Zealand football

New Zealand’s first women’s football team wasn’t formed until 1975. Barbara Cox was the captain, and led the team’s fundraising efforts which included selling kisses at the local bar for 20 cents. New Zealand has come a long way in its treatment of female athletes since then – but only thanks to those like Barbara Cox, who refused to put up with double standards long ago.

Joeli Vidiri: The greatest All Black that never was

In 1996, Joeli Vidiri was set to be the star of New Zealand rugby alongside his good friend Jonah Lomu. But deteriorating kidneys led to his early retirement from the sport, aged just 27.

Scratched: Aotearoa’s Lost Sporting Legends is made with the support of NZ On Air.

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John Walker at the 1976 Montreal Olympics (Photo by Tony Duffy/Getty Images)

SportsAugust 7, 2021

Our Olympic shame

Madeleine Chapman

Editor

John Walker at the 1976 Montreal Olympics (Photo by Tony Duffy/Getty Images)

One of New Zealand’s greatest Olympic moments is also its most shameful.

John Walker’s arms are raised in triumph at the finish line. It’s 1976 and he’s just won the 1500m at the Olympics, something two New Zealanders have done before him; Jack Lovelock in 1936 and Peter Snell in 1964. Lovelock and Snell will be remembered for their wins, but Walker, and his photo finish, will go down as one of New Zealand’s proudest sporting moments.

Back home, New Zealanders celebrate as if they themselves have won Olympic gold. And in a way, they have. Because as Walker runs his winning race, his closest rival, world record holder Filbert Bayi is at his home in Tanzania, just one of over 300 athletes from 25 African countries that are boycotting the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

The sole reason for the boycott? New Zealand.

More specifically, the All Blacks.

New Zealander John Walker crosses the finish line to win the 1500m men’s final during the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, Canada. (Photo: Agence France Presse/Agence France Presse/Getty Images)

Prior to 2011, rugby fans debated whether New Zealand had really won a World Cup. The All Blacks had won the inaugural tournament in 1987 but the win was always accompanied by an asterisk noting that South Africa didn’t compete that year. The understanding being that any global wins when countries are excluded, particularly for such political and moral reasons as apartheid, cannot be assessed alongside other events. It’s ironic, then, that New Zealand’s great Olympic triumph came as a near-direct result of our seeming inability to not play rugby against South Africa.

South Africa hadn’t competed in the Olympics since 1960, after being uninvited by the IOC due to its Apartheid policy. When they looked to reenter in 1968, 32 countries, largely African, threatened to boycott if South Africa were allowed to compete. In 1970, they were formally expelled from the IOC and there was a pretty strong consensus from all other countries that no one would make sporting contact with apartheid South Africa.

All other countries except New Zealand, apparently.

The All Blacks had toured South Africa in 1960 (with an all-white team, no less) but it was their 1976 tour, in the same month that South African police were shooting protesting black students in Soweto, that cemented New Zealand’s shameful place in sporting history.

As the All Blacks departed for South Africa, then prime minister Robert Muldoon appeared on television to give them his well wishes and personal blessing, and therefore the New Zealand government’s backing. New Zealand became one of very few countries in the world to support a connection with the apartheid nation.

There were protests in New Zealand (led by HART: Halt All Racist Tours) and opposition from over 20 African countries, but rugby is rugby, and the All Blacks continued with their tour. While they played their matches, insisting that it was just rugby and nothing political, the Organisation of African Union (OAU) met and decided that Africa would have to withdraw from the upcoming Olympic Games in Montreal due to the protests and the tour. The All Blacks still had two months left in their tour when the Olympics began, and their ongoing presence in South Africa exacerbated racial and political tensions in Montreal. The 28 African nations called on the IOC to ban New Zealand from competing given they had athletes in South Africa at the time, but the IOC refused.

Former IOC executive committee member Dr Sam Ramsamy, speaking in 2020, remembered negotiating with chairman of the NZOC Lance Cross days before the opening ceremony. “We said ‘look here, this is an ideal opportunity for you to withdraw [from South Africa]. We’ll get all the African countries back…This is an ideal excuse for you to leave South Africa simply because you can say that many of your athletes were caught in the riots and for that particular reason you need to come back.” Cross refused to take the message back to the New Zealand government and New Zealand Rugby, so the boycott remained in place and 25 countries departed the Olympic village, some mere hours before the opening ceremony.

In announcing Kenya’s inclusion in the boycott at the time, foreign minister James Osogo said by not banning New Zealand, the IOC would give “comfort and respectability to the South African racist regime and encourage it to continue to defy world opinion”.

The Games went ahead, though some events had to be rescheduled or cancelled due to the missing athletes. New Zealand ran a successful campaign, and even today the athletes from 1976 are applauded for performing with distinction “despite the undoubted additional pressure”. When the closing ceremony took place, it featured far fewer athletes than planned. On that same day, as 25 African countries completed their moral stand, the All Blacks played Transvaal in Johannesburg. They won 12 – 10, and played another 14 games before departing as scheduled on September 18.

John Walker won an Olympic 1500m gold. He was the favourite going in, perhaps even had the entire continent of Africa been present on the track, but he ran a race dictated by the morally unsound decisions and actions of New Zealand Rugby and the New Zealand government. Some have since argued that Filbert Bayi was sick with malaria at the time and wouldn’t have competed anyway, but that’s beside the point. The result is irrelevant.

Walker’s gold wasn’t the only medal gained courtesy of the boycott. Fellow runner Dick Quax won silver in the 5000m, a remarkable achievement. But Miruts Yifter of Ethiopia didn’t compete. Yifter won bronze in the 10,000m in Munich, 1972, skipped the 1976 Games because of the boycott, then won gold in the 5000m and the 10,000m at the Moscow Olympics four years later.

Walker, Quax, and every New Zealand athlete at the 1976 Olympics performed with distinction and deserved their accolades. But to ignore the context in which New Zealand won their oft-referenced medals is to show wilful ignorance of the impact the All Blacks tour had on global race relations and disharmony. The New Zealand Olympics website features an article headlined “New Zealand’s proud history in the 1500m”. There is no mention of the boycott.

Thanks to the likes of Valerie Adams, Emma Twigg and Lisa Carrington, New Zealand has plenty of options when it comes to proud Olympic moments. We no longer have to hold up John Walker’s 1976 gold as a moment of national pride, nor should we. In fact, use it to teach students just how much politics and sports do mix. At the very least, put an asterisk next to it.