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There became something of a campaign in Kiwi boxing for Rohit Singh to fight someone real, someone he hadn’t handpicked, to see what would happen.
Craig Thomson made a series of offers of ranked Kiwi fighters. All, he says, were declined: “He wouldn’t fight anyone remotely close to having a pulse,” Thomson says.
Read MoreIn the pantheon of jobs I’ve endured in the pursuit of less unhappiness, reporting on All Blacks weddings for a newspaper was vastly more soul-destroying than screwing in the same screw 1000 times a day on a computer assembly line. It left me feeling considerably less clean than my days as a cable layer – a job that involved actually being covered in dog manure most days.
I hated it with every fibre of my being.
Read MoreAs a lightweight in a sport of giants, it was Strack’s technical proficiency that saw her excel. She was an enthusiastic student of the sport, and prided herself in her mastery of rowing’s biomechanics.
“I knew how to get a boat moving really fast,” she says.
That was until she forgot. Or at least, her body forgot.
Read MoreOld age and treachery will beat youth and skill, he reckoned, though the skill, along with the cunning, were at his end of the table.
Read MoreWhile Dixon now holds a near-historic driver's resume, has a wife, two kids and a true athlete's build, you don't have to squint that hard to see that kid with a pillow strapped to his backside driving a Nissan Sentra in Pukekohe all those years ago. The grin is still as boyish as it was back when he was driving karts and saloon cars.
On the raceway, you know where those 20-odd years have gone though. Ice pumps through Dixon's veins. His mind becomes a complete, constantly moving rational calculus of fuel spent and optimal speeds. On track, the Kiwi picks up exactly what he needs – and disregards the rest.
It’s a freezing mid-week day. There’s an aftermatch function: men only. There’s nowhere for us to go. I approach the door. I say, I have some wives of the All Black team with me, and we would like to come in. Through the comforting cloud of cigarette smoke I can see the players drinking beer, and the officials drinking sterner stuff. The man from the rugby union is resolute. If he lets us in, the floodgates will open. You’ll want fancy stuff to drink, he says. But, he says, moist-eyed with magnanimity, if you’d like to help out in the kitchen with the other ladies, you’re more than welcome.
We go to the pub.
Photo: Barry Durrant
Read MoreBut beyond the assemblies and solemn undertakings, kids seethed and tensions grew. On social media, bravado and bullshit flew. It had become more than a game. As one Wellington College pupil wrote, “This means war.”
War began punctually at 9.30am with the under-14 boys 3000m.
“Heremaia has “f**k the police” tattooed on his six pack abs and “f**k the world on his lower back. A felt pen has been used to cover the potentially offensive tats, but it smears off in his sweat. Higgins says, “pound for pound”, he’s the best fighter in the country, even though he has his win over Lee Oti controversially overturned. It’s unlikely that’s the first disappointment in Heremaia’s life.”
Read MoreWeatherly's sudden arrival on the women's downhill scene in January came as a surprise to some in mountain biking - until the end of last year she'd been known as Anton and raced men.
She'd quietly let a few of the other women know she was making the switch and they seemed supportive. But when she won an event in Rotorua by more than 30 seconds, it set off a firestorm of online discussion and calls for her to be excluded.
Read MoreFai didn’t need to run those dunes that Sunday, he’d be doing them soon enough anyway, but for 60 minutes he did. It wasn’t to impress his coaches. He did it for no other reason than he thought it would make him a fitter player, a better player.
Leaving the dunes for the beach, Fai would have been exhausted. His legs would have felt like concrete columns and his heart rate and core temperature would have been greatly elevated. The shimmering water would have looked like salvation.
Read MoreRoss Tay-lor. Three clipped syllables. So very Anglo. So very middle New Zealand, but that's not who Taylor is. That person is a figment.
It was always meant to be Luteru Taylor. A proud name. The product of the union between his Samoan mother, Ann, who emigrated to New Zealand in her teens, and Kiwi father and former representative cricketer Neil.
Read MoreGo on, admit it. Deep down, in the places you don't care to reach into, you don't really like Grant Dalton OBE. You're not sure exactly why, but the animus lurks.
It might be the not-made-for-TV smile that can slide into a smirk. It might be the rich-man-pleads-for-money act. It might just be that some people aren't built to attract sympathy - just as Christopher Walken could never have played Forrest Gump, Dalton can't play the part of Sir Peter Blake.
The first of the three gorges is known to paddlers as Awesome. What begins as a meandering stream from Trout Pool Falls quickly becomes a lot more committing as the river tightens and the flow of around 27-40 cumecs (cubic metres per second) is forced through a passage just 2m wide in places.
It is not for the faint of heart, nor the faint of mind.
Louise was neither.
Read MoreThe next morning, Moss held a razor to his wife’s face, twice, asking, "Shall I shave you?"
Mary shrugged him off. "Don’t be silly," she said.
Her nonchalance masked a colossal unease.
Trubridge is on his back, with the aid of floatation devices, above the second-deepest saltwater blue hole in the world, which sits in an otherwise shallow bay off Long Island in the Bahamas. He is tethered to the line where, 102 metres, or 334 feet six inches below, tags sit upon a metal plate. Returning one to the surface will prove his feat was more than a figment of our imagination.
Read MoreIt's strangely hypnotic and, yes, even a little hallucinatory staring at the sky until your trapezoids start protesting. As the clock ticks past six, then six-and-a-half hours, any sense of anticipation is replaced by a desperation. You want that seagull, that blackbird, that pair of bloody rock doves to be a pigeon. A nice blue bar or a red checker floating in against the breeze would put an end to this insanity but as the clock nears the seven-hour mark, nothing, the silence broken only by the sound of a tab ripping on another can.
Read MoreLike other young riders, Miller had easy access to the drug, time to kill, and money to send up in smoke. "I could buy food and fill my car and pay rent for a week – and still be left with $500," he says. "It started off once in a blue moon, led on to once every now and then. Then once a week. Then four times a week. I'd spend four days up at a time."
Read MoreIt began a little after dawn on Good Friday. Elsewhere in New Zealand, the rabbit has its star hour, its image reproduced over and over in chocolate and brightly coloured tinfoil. Here in Pioneer Park, Alexandra, there’s a ute decorated with cardboard rabbits punctured with bullet holes.
Read MoreThe crowd, just metres from Thomas, are starting to lose it. Their delirium has spread to the New Zealand team who, just a few moments earlier, were heard issuing sober tactical tips to their mates. Now it’s as basic as it gets: “Go lvor! Go lvor! C’mon! C’mon lvor. C’mon mate. Bring it in. C’mon!”
But Thomas is listening to just one man, his main man, who’s so close he looks in mortal danger. “Reach lvor,” cries Terry “Mook” Hohneck, urging his tiring friend to bend his knees as he swings and aim for the base of the log. “Reach lvor. Reeeeach!”
Read MoreMany modern sporting celebrities are freakish physical specimens: Michael Phelps with his rowboat oars, Lance Armstrong with his horse's heart. Richards' biological advantage comes in the form of the distinctive mental circuitry which has made him the great enigma of the Scrabble world.
"You go to international tournaments and everyone's sitting around at the end of the day telling Nigel-stories," says Warner. "Of course, he's never there, so the legend grows."
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