Carrington carries all before her
Six gold medals and sustained excellence over four campaigns has Lisa Carrington leading the pantheon of Kiwi Olympic greats.
Peter Snell fans may disagree, but Dame Lisa Carrington’s sixth gold medal surely cements her status as New Zealand’s greatest Olympian irrespective of the outcome of her looming showdown with compatriot Aimee Fisher.
Snell was a phenomenal athlete, winning three middle distance gold medals – including the blue riband 1500m – at two Olympic Games in the 1960s.
Older New Zealanders – who grew up transfixed by the track derring-do of Snell, Murray Halberg, John Walker, Rod Dixon and Dick Quax – may still insist that Snell remains the apogee of New Zealand Olympic achievement given athletics’ status as a true global sport and the premium Olympic code.
That opinion still has some merit, but Snell blazed across the firmament for four golden years – he retired in 1965 before turning 27 – while Carrington’s star has shone for 15 years, from her first World Cup gold medal in 2010.
The 35-year-old now has seven Olympic medals – six gold and a K4 500m bronze in Tokyo in 2020.
Her K4 500 gold in Paris this week, with Alicia Hoskin, Olivia Brett and Tara Vaughan, takes her two medals clear of the next most-decorated Kiwi Olympian, her canoe sport predecessor Ian Ferguson with five – four gold and a silver – in 1984 and 1988.
Carrington already has a place among a pantheon of international Olympic greats even though she has been denied a chance to join American discus thrower Al Oerter, long jumper Carl Lewis, Japanese freestyle wrestler Kaori Icho and American swimming superstars Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky on the list of four-time winners of the same event.
The K1 200m, which Carrington won imperiously at London in 2012, Rio in 2016 and Tokyo 2020, has been dropped from the Paris schedule.
But she still has two more shots at gold, in the K1 500 against Fisher and Hungary’s Tamara Csipes, and in the K2 500 with Hoskin. Win both and Carrington will be one gold behind Ledecky and former Soviet Union gymnast Larisa Latynina (1956 to 1964), who head the list of women with most Olympic gold medals with nine. It’s heady company to keep for a wāhine who began paddling as a kid at Ōhope Beach.
Carrington is a three-time Halberg Awards supreme winner and a six-time sportswoman of the year and in 2021 was voted the top Māori sportsperson of the past 25 years.
Government House has been lamentably laggardly in conferring ultimate honours on New Zealand sportspeople during their careers.
Snell was knighted 44 years after he retired and Yvette Williams was made a Dame posthumously in 2019, 65 years after becoming New Zealand’s first female track and field Olympic champion in 1954.
Carrington’s sustained success has been such that the gong assignors made her a Dame in the 2022 New Year Honours list mere months after her three-gold performances at the Tokyo Olympics.
The greatest canoe racer of all time is also clearly a team player. Carrington showed as much delight at sharing the top plinth of the podium with first-time gold medallists Hoskin, Brett and Vaughan as she has in winning any of her individual events.
Carrington’s ultimate legacy may not be revealed for a further generation.
How many young girls across Aotearoa will be inspired to take up paddling after watching Carrington’s enduring success?
The role-model effect should not be under-estimated. Ellesse Andrews underscored that with her nod to Sarah Ulmer after joining the Athens 2004 pursuit superstar as the only New Zealand women to have won Olympic track cycling medals.
Andrews reportedly had Ulmer’s picture on her bedroom wall as a kid in Christchurch.
But her ultimate role models must be her parents, former New Zealand mountainbiking representative Angela Mote-Andrews and father Jon Andrews, the two-time Commonwealth Games track cycling bronze medallist who rode at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992.
Jon Andrews is in Paris as a New Zealand track coach – not that he watched his daughter cross the finish line to clinch the keirin gold medal but he was on hand to give her a hug as she hopped off her bike.
You could not get a better image of the Paris Games for New Zealanders. As Ellesse told Sky TV, “it’s not often you have a parent down by the track, they’re usually in the stands’’.
More of the reason why the Olympics has a magic all of its own.