Rugby Without Running

With well over a decade since the nation won it's last Olympic track and field medal, it is increasingly in rugby that more and more of the nation's top running talent now excels.

Jonah Lomu, the most famous rugby player the world has ever seen, set a personal best 100m time of 10.8sec whilst still a teenager, and current All Blacks' Doug Howlett and Joe Rokocoko clock in at 10.7sec and 10.66sec respectively.

Which is why if one were to suggest that a New Zealand rugby team has just been crowned world champion without running even a single step, you'd be forgiven for replying in the local parlance, "someone has a few sheep loose in the top paddock."

Roaming farmyard animals or not, New Zealand's wheelchair bound rugby team won gold at the Athens Paralympics overnight, where an act of running is not just illegal, but downright impossible. Ranked only sixth in a sport where their homeland assumes world champion status as a birthright, the wheelchair rugby team overcome not just their opponents but personal tales of tragedy and adversity to claim a first placing, a feat which their able-bodied cousins have failed to replicate for almost two decades.

The 'Wheel Blacks' won the gold medal match 31-19 after being behind for most of the game, relegating the highly favoured world champion Canadians to 2nd place in front of a packed stadium.

Coach Grant Sharman was effusive in his praise for what he termed the "Wheel Black family", and said that the key to his teams' victory was the faith that each player had in the other.

And for player Jai Waite, it was a personal transformation of tragedy into triumph in the city where four years earlier he broke his neck in a swimming accident.