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Golden moments cause to celebrate

Robert van Royen robert.vanroyen@stuff.co.nz

Nigel Avery maintains he wasn’t counting medals early last week, but you have to think the New Zealand team’s chef de mission is now.

After all, Tom Walsh’s shot put triumph yesterday marked the 17th gold medal won at the Birmingham Commonwealth Games, equalling New Zealand’s Games record.

There’s still time for it to be beaten before the 22nd Games wraps up in the curry capital of the UK tomorrow night, too.

That would push the total past the 17 gold medals won at Auckland in 1990, when 224 athletes combined for a 58-medal haul – 17 gold, 14 silver and 27 bronze.

This year’s crop of 232 won’t topple the record 58 won on home soil, but they’ll sure give the 46-medal haul, won on the Gold Coast four years ago, a nudge.

At the time of going to print, New Zealand’s tally in Birmingham stood at 41 – 17 gold, 11 silver and 13 bronze.

It will almost certainly grow before the Games close, likely as soon as this morning, when reigning Commonwealth Games champion Julia Ratcliffe shapes as a gold medal contender in the women’s hammer at Alexander Stadium, the venue Walsh and high jumper Hamish Kerr won gold in front of 32,000 fans.

Regardless what unfolds before the Games close, 12 years after New Zealand won just six gold medals in Delhi, the success – set up by a splurge of medals at the London velodrome on the first four days – will have gone down well with Kiwi administrators.

It’s resulted in a near constant stream of winning athletes being celebrated at New Zealand House, located at the Edgbaston Golf Club in Birmingham.

That’s despite the flow of medals slowing considerably – partially due to a front loaded schedule – after the helter-skelter start, sparked by triathlete Hayden Wilde (silver) and continued by the hugely successful track cyclists.

Indeed, with a shade under a week to go at the Games, New Zealand were already more than halfway to surpassing their tally on the Gold Coast – the country’s second most successful Games – when they won 15 gold, 16 silver and 15 bronze.

Tipped to do the heavy lifting,

as they did four years ago, when they accounted for more than a third of New Zealand’s medals, Kiwi track, road and mountain bike athletes have done it again.

Highlighted by Ellesse Andrews and Aaron Gate becoming the fourth and fifth Kiwis to win three gold medals at a Commonwealth Games, 13 medals were won on the

Lee Valley Velopark track – eight of them gold.

Add the Sam Gaze and Ben Oliver one-two in the mountain bike, and Georgia Williams’ bronze on the road (time trial), and 16 medals have been snared on two wheels with the men’s and women’s road races yet to be contested.

New Zealand’s haul also got a

hefty boost in the pool, powered by Lewis Clareburt – the first Kiwi male swimmer to win Commonwealth Games gold since Moss Burmester in 2006.

His two gold and a bronze helped New Zealand finish fourth on the swimming medal table with five gold, two silver and two bronze.

But there was underachieving elsewhere, most notably at Coventry Stadium, where the world champion Black Ferns and All Blacks Sevens failed to defend their 2018 titles.

After both failed in the clutch in agonising semifinal defeats, they finished with bronze medals instead.

Remarkably, the 17-12 defeat to Fiji in their semifinal was just the five-times champion All Blacks

Sevens’ second defeat in Games history – the other being against South Africa in the Glasgow decider.

Joelle King (squash bronze in women’s singles), pole vaulter Olivia McTaggart (fourth) and Oceania record holder Lauren Bruce, who bombed out of qualifying after not recording a legitimate throw in the women’s hammer, are others who failed to meet their own expectations.

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2022-08-07T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-07T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/282630331417457

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