New Zealand's golden hour at Eton

By: Brendan Telfer | Saturday, August 04, 2012

All hail the chiefs, you know the ones that spend more time at Lake Karapiro ... than Rugby Park in Hamilton.

Hopefully accolades and superlatives are raining down on Bond, Murray and Drysdale back home because here two golds in 40 minutes is a bit like a 2.3 earthquake in Christchurch, it doesn’t make much news unless you're British.

Yes, quite rightly this golden hour at Eton has evoked memories of that September day in Rome 1960 when Snell and Halberg went gold, gold within 60 minutes.

The demolition job of Murray and Bond today had a touch of the Snell muscular approach from the 1960 800metres final and Drysdale's heroics mirrored the determination of Halberg and the adversities he had to overcome prior to his magic moment in Rome.

So these two hours sit along side each other in our hall of fame.

Don't even begin to speculate which was the greater hour. Let’s just honour both and remember both - forever.

If you ever needed proof of how profoundly insignificant little ol' Godzone is on the international sporting landscape today's a good day to take stock.

New Zealand simply hasn't registered on the Olympic Richter scale here not even our double banger golds today have attracted any interest on the BBC, newspapers hopefully might find space for a little recognition of outstanding Kiwi excellence, but I wouldn't bet on it.

We do appear on the medal table but that's about all. And surprise, surprise we're seeing a lot of medal tables in print and on television now that Team GB has started winning a few medals.

The gushing cheerleaders who masquerade as BBC sports presenters have been talking about it all day now that Britain has moved to fifth place on the ladder. The one good thing about their elevation means they have at last overtaken North Korea on the table.

For the entire first week the North Koreans, where most folk can barely afford to eat, have been ahead of the Brits. The daily media documentation of one British medal failure after another for the first five days did have its humorous side.

The Guardian newspaper decided it was a waste of time running a full medal table each day and took to running a bronze medal table only, ignoring golds and silver.

This apparently made for far better reading as Britain was right up there somewhere near the top.

Mightn't be a bad idea for the Aussie media to take a leaf out of the Guardian's book.

A few hours ago when I last saw a medal table the Aussies unlike New Zealand hasn't made it yet it into the top ten.

One gold medal from one week of Olympic competition - ah that's why to date here in London we haven't heard the great Aussie mating call from Sydney 2000: Aussie-Aussie-Aussie, oi-oi-oi.