New Zealand K4 500m women’s crew break 40-year gold medal drought

By Michael Burgess in Paris

The New Zealand women’s K4 team have conquered their peak.

After a spectacular race on Thursday, they claimed a magnificent gold medal, outlasting the German crew who had taken the lead with 150m to go.

But the final 100m saw the black boat surge ahead and in the end claimed gold with a time of 1:32.20, the Germans taking silver and Hungary bronze.

This is a remarkable achievement by the crew of Dame Lisa Carrington, Alicia Hoskin, Olivia Brett and Tara Vaughan and is New Zealand’s first K4 medal in 40 years - let alone gold.

The K4 class is the most competitive of all the sprint disciplines and the one that the heavyweight kayaking nations value more than any other.

It’s the hardest to achieve a podium finish, shown by history, so for them to not only medal but take gold in such emphatic fashion is a history of its own.

Carrington admitted after the race that this result wasn’t even on her radar three years ago, after her last Olympics campaign was wrapped up.

“It’s incredibly special, I just can’t believe it. You wouldn’t have thought when we finished Tokyo that us four would be here winning a gold medal. It’s just testament to the team, each one of these girls and the people behind it, because they’ve worked just as hard or harder than us,” Carrington told NZME.

New Zealand’s only other medal in the big boat – across either gender came back in 1984 – when Ian Ferguson, Paul MacDonald, Alan Thompson and Grant Bramwell struck gold in Los Angeles.

This combination have added another proud chapter. The crew have only been together for just over two years, racing internationally for the first time at a World Cup event in May 2022. Brett (23) and Vaughan (20) were rookies back then – and still have comparatively limited experience – but have developed impressively.

And the success has been the epitome of teamwork, as they have taken a brick-by-brick approach to continuous improvement, knowing that they don’t have the depth of other nations.

“We’ve worked incredibly hard on our teamwork, our technique, our strategy and it was really nice to see that come together today,” Alicia Hoskin told NZME.

“It’s incredible to witness a whole lot of growth from all of us and... we’ve really just fallen in love with paddling the K4 and I think that that’s really helped us be able to execute what we did today,” Carrington added.

“To win this race we had to have four girls doing the same thing at the same time. So it’s special, it’s hard work... it doesn’t just happen, we worked for it.”

Their potential was shown at the 2023 world championships in Duisberg, when they claimed a spectacular gold medal, which was New Zealand’s first at that level, something that even eluded the legends of the 1980s.

They had hoped for a repeat here, but that was always going to be a difficult task. They arrived at the regatta with a target on their back, while the other nations were always going to improve in the intervening period.

For them to back that world championship performance up shows that the Olympic spirit is still alive and well.

- Written by the NZ Herald and republished here with permission.