ROWING NEW ZEALAND / ANNUAL REPORT 2020
HIGH PERFORMANCE REPORT 2020 2 JUDITH HAMILTON, General Manager - Performance 2020 SELECTORS: Elite Barrie Mabbott (convenor) Gary Hay (women sweep and sculling, men sculling) Tony O’Connor (men sweep) Under 23 Luke van Velthooven (convenor) Janey Charlton Junior Janey Charlton (convenor) Alex Meates Alison Storey North Island U18 Nick Barton, Sean Durkin, Robin Clarke South Island U18 Josh Schmidt, Natalie Matheson, Tim Babbage
020 will be remembered for the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic and consequent response plus the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics and other international regattas. Both events had a major impact on people’s daily lives in New Zealand and worldwide. Our domestic regatta season concluded with the Rocket Foods New Zealand Rowing Championships for club-based rowers and the respective North Island and South Island Secondary Schools Championships for schoolage rowers. Due to Covid-19 restrictions in March 2020, the Aon Maadi Cup was cancelled. Our elite World Cup team and our U23 team were selected in early March. Other teams were not able to be selected due to restrictions. On 24 March Tokyo 2020 and the IOC announced the Tokyo Olympics would be postponed until 2021, one day after our NZ government announced, beginning on 25 March, that NZ would move to Alert Level 4, putting the country into a nationwide lockdown. During the lockdown period there was no onwater training, so training became home-based with remote coaching. Zoom meetings and other technologies were introduced to keep all connected. Athletes and coaches of our elite team based at the High Performance Centre on Lake Karapiro were able to resume training on 18 May, albeit under strict protocols, which included contact tracing, social distancing and hygiene sanitation. —3—
Singles were used, with staggered training times to minimise the number of people in the building at any one time. The administration team continued to work from home. Once we moved to alert level 1, training was able to be resumed in all boat types and administration staff returned to work from the office. There was a conscious decision to end the 2020 season on 13 June to allow for an optimal preparation period ahead of the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics, and for athletes and coaches to take their normal four-week break post a pinnacle event. Our official 2021 season began on 13 July 2020. As the World Rowing U23 Championships was also cancelled, we brought our U23 team into Karapiro for four weeks for a camp experience training alongside our elite team in a high-performance environment. This took place immediately prior to the second development camp as outlined below. DEVELOPMENT CAMPS Two age-group development camps were held this year. The January camp, from 2–8 January 2020, targeted potential U23 eligible athletes and had a total of 38 athletes in attendance, of whom 17 are currently studying at US universities. The camp coincided with the US athletes being on Christmas break and gave the selectors and coaches an advanced look at both NZ and USbased athletes within the same camp. The second camp ran from 26 September
