‘We just nailed it’ – quartet win K4 gold
Lisa Carrington is likely to leave Paris with an amount of Olympic medals to her name which no New Zealand athlete will ever surpass.
Yet any suggestion that she might not get as excited as she once did about her successes was dismissed as crystal-clearly as the waters of the Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium on Thursday.
The 35-year-old in the bow slapped the black kayak and the water surrounding her shortly after crossing the line in a rare showing of absolute joy and excitement as the New Zealand women’s K4 500 combination of Carrington, Alicia Hoskin, Olivia Brett and Tara Vaughan fought back to edge Germany by 0.42 seconds.
With the win, Carrington landed her seventh Olympic medal – and sixth gold. It was the first women’s K4 500 Olympic medal won by New Zealand – the country’s men’s crew captured K4 1000 gold in Los Angeles in 1984.
The 35-year-old came to Paris with five Olympic gold medals and a bronze, making her New Zealand’s most prolific medal-winner. She won three gold medals in Tokyo in 2021 – in the women’s K1 200, K1 500 and K2 500 (with Caitlin Regal) – to propel her to the top of the medal charts in New Zealand’s Olympic Games history.
“To win this is an incredible race,” Carrington
said after a post-race warm-down paddle with the crew, before tucking into a filled baguette.
“We have to have four girls doing the same thing at the same time. And so I think, yeah, it’s special.
“It’s hard work. I think we just nailed it with how we perform the work we’ve put in. It doesn’t just happen, we work for it. “So I’m really proud of the team.”
Of Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki and Ngāti Porou descent, Carrington was born in Tauranga and moved with her family to Ōhope Beach when she was 8.
She went to Waiotahe Valley School in Opotiki with her two older brothers, Shaun and Brett, who all came under the watchful eyes of Mum Glynis, a teacher there, and Dad Pat, who was the principal.
Carrington was a keen netballer – “I wanted to be a Silver Fern” – before Pat suggested she try canoeing to improve on the promise she’d shown as a surf-lifesaver.
She won her first Olympic medal in London in 2012 with victory in the K1 200, and defended that title in Rio four years later while gaining bronze in the K1 500.