Snow blind

OPINION: After a series of delays the first members of our Winter Olympics team were announced yesterday, writes Nathan Burdon in this week's Straight Up.

You are unlikely to see the same sort of fanfare around the naming of this team as you would a team for the Summer Games, but that doesn't make them any less important.

Just ask Queenstown's Tim Cafe or Mitchey Greig, who will be hoping to do their country proud in Canada next month. Or Outram-raised, Wanaka-based Adam Hall in the Winter Paralympics.

Snow sports suffer from a couple of challenges when it comes to getting themselves out there.

For the most part they compete on the other side of the world, at times when most of us are asleep.

When they are competing in New Zealand, they do so up mountains or in other far-flung places, which make it difficult for the media and their increasingly limited resources to cover.

For those reasons they are often dancing in the dark, and do we care?

Pursuits like skiing are often considered more recreational than competitive.

New Zealand's culture is more about doing than watching when it comes to things on snow.

You might buy a season pass for the Remarks every year, but you probably don't give a stuff who won last week's round of the World Cup in the downhill.

Or do you?

The same argument could be made for sports such as swimming, squash and golf, but you see a lot more of them in the media than you do anything on snow.

Covering the Winter Games last year I was blown away by the commitment of the athletes I interviewed.

They toil away largely unnoticed on only a fraction of the budgets that many of our professional teams sports take for granted.

Perhaps a Games team numbering more than a dozen can provide some success in Vancouver next month and help to fuel a bit more excitement from the general sporting public.

» Nathan Burdon has been the Southland Times sports editor since 2003 and has won numerous journalism awards, including provincial sports writer of the year.

- © Fairfax NZ News

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