The Halberg awards are over for another year with plenty of applause and some head scratching. The Silver Ferns were deserved winners of the big prize among others. The Otago Daily Times sports department asks some questions about the awards.
So Israel Adesanya won the sportsman of the year award. Apparently MMA is big overseas. But these were the New Zealand sports awards. How many Kiwis have watched him fight? Less than 1% of the population?
Good on Alice Robinson for winning the emerging award but how does a skier beat a world junior champion swimmer? Not many ski, everyone swims and all the major players swim and swim well.
Team sports dominate in New Zealand. The top 10 sports for participation in the country are all team sports.
The Silver Ferns won the big prize on Thursday night but wins in the supreme category for teams are few and far between. Is that fair?
Did an obscure boundary count lead to the Black Caps and Kane Williamson missing out on winning anything?
The panel are not moral judges but isn’t MMA a brutal and violent sport that has no tradition and very closely resembles organised violence?
Anyone else getting a bit bored with Lisa Carrington winning the sportswoman award? What more could Courtney Duncan and Zoi Sadowski Synnott have
done?
The Silver Ferns won the World Cup by beating an over-the-hill Jamaican side, an Australian team shorn of its stars and and an England team which froze on the big stage. And how significant a sport is netball on a world scale?
Who are all these people trying to call down Israel Adesanya? New Zealand has a tall-poppy culture, he says. If this is how he feels he has been treated, then do not bother applying to be All Black coach. Or the guys running Super Rugby. Now that is when real criticism arrives.
Just who are the people who vote for the winners? They are more autonomous than the Remuneration Authority which sets pay for MPs. Do you need qualifications to get on the voting panel? Many former athletes are on it. Athletes come in all shapes and sizes but one thing they have in common — they know nothing about other sports.
Is it supposed to be contentious? If it wasn’t there would be nothing to talk about. That is a good thing. Long may the awards continue as the money raised goes to a good cause.