Retired tennis pro Marcus Daniell and canoe sprint athlete Max Brown are supporting children born with clubfoot through the charity Miracle Feet.
For the Queenstown Marathon they’ll wear weighted vests — for every dollar given, the donor chooses whether to add a gram of weight or show them mercy by letting them remove a gram.
Raglan-based Daniell, who along with doubles partner Michael Venus won bronze at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, says, thankfully, about a third of donors to date have asked for a gram to be removed.
The soon-to-turn 36-year-old is hardly a stranger to giving.
From 2014, when he switched from singles to doubles and started earning prize money, he’s supported charities — from 1% of his winnings to 50% when winding up his career last year.
In 2020 he founded High Impact Athletes, which connects athletes with the world’s most effective charities.
"It’s been a hell of a journey, we’ve had to really scale up this year with one of these big global partnerships we’ve landed — we’re on track to be raising millions of dollars for charity each year."
Daniell says he researches which charities do the most good and is frustrated when some which aren’t efficient survive, whereas in the business world they’d go bankrupt.
"Miracle Feet was a charity that was recommended by one of our research partners in this sort of charity evaluation space.
"And I just thought we’re providing a cure for kids who can’t run because they just got unlucky in the birth lottery, so running in service of enabling other kids to run is a pretty cool story.
"The other part of it is Max and I have both had so much privilege and fun and joy out of sport so the thought of providing kids with that sort of joy, it feels really good."
Daniell, who’s not even run a half marathon — "I sort of actively avoided long-distance running during my career for fear of injury" — says getting his body used to training was hard at the start.
More recently he’s also had an issue with the knee he didn’t have two surgeries on, so he feels he’ll be "quite unprepared" next week, though he’s still hoping to beat 4 hours 30 minutes.
Daniell says he loves Queenstown and was here early this year for the wedding of four-time ex-hockey Olympian Hugo Inglis, whose parents live in Arrowtown.
He’s also a mate of local ex-doubles pro Ben McLachlan, who represented Japan.
"I wish he would have stayed within NZ because he’s just such a talented and successful guy, but it was absolutely the right decision for him."
