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Karapiro sets perfect scene for long-awaited reunion
Club rivalry still burning for Montreal Olympians
Reunions can be tricky.
Rowing reunions, especially.
The sport creates a lot of competitive energy that doesn't always get fully burned off, no matter how many years have passed.
But at Lake Karapiro last weekend, something quite unique happened.
The New Zealand Olympic squad of 1976 were back together for the first time since they competed on the Notre Dame Island course in Montreal, Canada.
They were at Karapiro to watch Winter Series for the current Elite, U23 and other rep athletes.
Maybe it was the racing that did it. Maybe it was just being at Karapiro, when 50 years ago they were trying to beat each other up at the rowing nationals in one of the best club competitions in the world.
For a few short hours, it actually felt like 1976 all over again.
Former Montreal Olympic athletes analysing the form of the Winter Series crews. It's the first time they've been together since 1976.
March 7-8, 1976
It will surprise many, but in 1976, no South Island crew had ever won the Men's Championship Eight, let alone an Avon boat.
Two weeks before nationals they'd won convincingly at the Wellington champs on Lake Horowhenua.
It was quite a crew: Dave Lindstrom, Ivan Sutherland, Trevor Coker, Athol Earl, Gordon Scott, Ross Lindstrom, George Keys, Charlie Flanagan and cox David Simmons.
Scott was American, a bear of a man, even bigger than 'Joe' Earl. He'd come off working on an oil rig in Alaska.
When the Avon boys got to champs, they decided to play up on the chat in the boat park about the wild American in their midst.
"We were staying in this Tamahere motel and Lew Wilson and some of his Waikato cronies wanted to come over and meet him," says Dave. "You can imagine Gordon, with his six foot six whatever he was, big scruffy beard with food all in it, you know. So we put a chain on him behind the kitchen and left him there. Next thing, Lew pokes his head in there with a couple of other Waikato guys and Gordon growls at them pulling against this chain. You should have seen the look on their faces. That was psychologically the defeat of that Waikato crew."
Dave, Ross and George were cousins. George was just 16 and still rowing at St Bede's College. Ross took him out to Hamilton on the night before the final and when they arrived back at the motel around 9.30pm, things were sorted swiftly at the front door step in the Lindstrom way of doing things.
The next day, Avon made history for South Island rowing, beating Waikato and Whakatane to claim the title.
After the race, Athol remembers their coach Fred Strachan, being ecstatic: "I thought you would've won by more."
But he, like the rest of the crew wasn't to know that something very unusual had happened during the race.
"What we didn't know until afterwards," says Athol, "was that about 400 metres out from the start, Trevor realised one side of his body wasn't working. He had the nous to think, 'Well, they don't stop races for health issues,' so he just swinging to keep in time basically. And then about 500 metres from home, his body started working again."
Athol and Trevor had been best mates ever since he arrived at Avon in 1971. They were part of the Munich gold-medal eight.
In '76, they would be back in the Kiwi eight for Montreal.
And the moment Trevor Coker's body stopped working out on Lake Karapiro would become part of that boat's story as well.
The 1976 Avon crew of cox David Simmons, Dave Lindstrom, Ivan Sutherland, Trevor Coker, Athol Earl, Gordon Scott, Ross Lindstrom, George Keys and Charlie Flanagan on the way to becoming the first South Island winners of the Men's Championship Eight.
May 2, 2026
Of the 18-strong squad that went to Montreal, 13 have been able to make the trip to Karapiro for the re-union. Wilson's duck shooting. Grant McAuley, from the coxless four, is gravely ill back in Waitara, and for the most part it seems, people are dealing with that in their own way…quietly, privately.
Out on the barge following the Elite crews down the course, it doesn't take long for old club rivalries to emerge.
Back then, Avon also had an exceptional coxed four. In fact, David Lindstrom, Earl, Coker, Sutherland and cox Simmons completed a three-peat that year. From the conversation out on the barge, they never got tired of repainting the Boss Rooster red, and 50 years on, they've never got tired of reminding their old rivals about it either.
The Petone boys were grouped down the back of the barge. That March of '76, long before the days of the famous fluro singlets, they were also lighting up the championships.
Back then they had no coach, they rowed off their wits and had a reputation for unpredictability. You might call them free-thinkers.
But they'd uncorked something special out on the Petone foreshore.
At Karapiro that year, Viv Haar and Ian Boserio won the Coxless Pair, Des Lock and Tim Logan took out the Coxed Pair, and together they won the inaugural Coxless Four title. They had a good nudge in the Coxed Four as well, finishing second, two-thirds of a length behind Avon. It had been 23 years since the club had won a Red Coat event. In '76 Haar, Lock, Logan and Boserio won three between them.
Unsurprisingly, all were selected for trials at Whanganui two weeks later.
Waikato would also get a decent contingent at trials: Rodger, Wilson, Danny Keane, Robbie Robinson, Howard Windleborne, Greg Ball.
The form of the top three club eights had Strachan, now wearing his Convenor of Selectors hat, positively ebullient.
"Any one of them – with no changes – could have qualified for an eight-oared final in a world championship or Olympic Games," The Convenor told the Christchurch Press after the championships.
And to add to the talent pool, legendary stroke Tony Hurt had made himself available for selection again after a break. Wellington's Alec McLean was there, as well as McAuley and Bob Murphy from Whakatane and Peter Dignan from Auckland University Rowing Club. All had been part of the international programme in the preceding years.
The big surprise came in the return of cox Simon Dickie after a four-year absence from the sport.
The Avon coxed four of David Lindstrom, cox David Simmons, Athol Earl, Ivan Sutherland and Trevor Coker won the Boss Rooster three on the trot between 1974-76. A slightly rejigged lineup won it again in ‘77.
Competition for spots
The eight was clearly New Zealand's pre-eminent boat in the lead up to the '76 Olympics, the '72 crew had made sure of that and in the next few years, New Zealand boats had finished third at the World Championships in 1974 and '75.
It's agreed by those who rowed it, the '74 crew of Hurt, McLean, Rodger, Earl, Wilson, Keane, Coker, Ross Blomfield and Simmons had something special.
"That Lucerne boat was a bloody good boat," says Earl. "It probably wasn't the best boat I've ever been in, but it was fast... It just created speed."
In 75, with Hurt taking a break, McAuley came in to stroke. McLean was back in seven, then Rodger, Earl, Wilson, Ross Collinge, Coker, Dignan and Simmons.
But the quest to successfully defend the Olympic title in '76 meant the selectors were always looking for ways to improve things and The Convenor told the Press on the eve of trials, only Rodger, Earl and Coker could be seen as anything like probable for their seat in the boat.
Simmons had coxed both crews to those bronze medals. In 76, he lost the seat to Dickie. Then, as now, he accepted it with good grace.
"Look, rowing's a team sport and the selectors were charged with putting together the best package of personalities of rowers and looking after the coaching staff and integrating that. So yeah, a bit disappointing after the two previous cycles, not to get the job. Simon obviously had pedigree, he had form, he had two Olympic gold medals."
He did suggest to The Convenor that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to send the Boss Rooster champions to the Games as the coxed four.
You can imagine how that went down.
More changes followed: On the eve of departure, Wilson was back in the eight for Logan, who went to the Coxed Four to rejoin his Petone mates Haar and Boserio.
Team manager Kerry Ashby wrote in his review the change "took place far too late" regretting the "ramifications on the 4+".
Money, or the lack of it, hung over the build-up. Excluding airfares, there was just $56,000 available in the budget.
The two fours ended up in heavy second-hand boats.
And as Ashby discovered to his utter frustration, the batch of new carbon-fibre oars from England had arrived at JFK in New York and been "placed in a storage bay in a huge Pan Am cargo shed with their handles protruding, where they had been sheared off like carrots by a passing 4-storey motorised stacker".
Ashby also elaborated on what has since been well-reported over the intervening years: "Some, more than others, in the 8 suffered the emotional effects of the dissolving of a pretty big chunk of the basic personal rapport between Rusty and the crew."
It was not an easy time for the irascible coach Rusty Robertson but 50 years on his athletes remember him with great fondness and deep respect.
And there were more worrying health concerns for Coker.
Earl remembers a training row at Syracuse before the Games began when Coker passed out and fell into Ivan Sutherland's lap.
"Leading up to Montreal, the doctors thought he was dehydrated, or just generally low, they didn't know what was wrong with him."
Not that he didn't ever give anything less than his absolute best in the boat. His impact on those around him was immense.
"He was an exceptionally good influence on the rest of us," says Earl. "He always thought of other people and put other people first. He made us row better. I did a lot of rowing with him and I know he helped enhance me. I don't know how else to put it, he was just the best bastard I've ever known in my life."
It wasn't until the National Championships in 1979 at Lake Waihola that Trevor got a proper diagnosis. What was thought to be a cyst in his brain was revealed as an inoperable tumour. Trevor Coker died in 1981.
The coxed four of cox David Simmons, Viv Haar, Danny Keane, Tim Logan and Ian Boserio on the course at Montreal.
May 2, 2026
Two quads, one from Tauranga Boys' College and one from Aramoho-Whanganui have just finished their time trials in bids to compete at Henley this year. Aramoho coach Axel Dickinson is beaming. The former Petone athlete doesn't get the chance to catch up with four club legends very often.
A New Zealand age-group eight swings past. The Elite crews are next. Tim Logan admits to getting goosebumps.
In 1976, that was him out there, at nationals and then in the coxed four that finished sixth at Montreal.
Simmons is equally excited.
"It's the first time in 50 years I've been on the water...so yeah I had goosebumps out there, especially when the eight came along, I just loved the noise and the cohesion and the excitement."
The ethos in the 70s under Rusty was get out early and lead from the front.
The coxless four aimed to do that in Montreal but didn't nail the start. They finished within 0.71s of a bronze medal.
The eight led well into the race. But it was rushed.
"If you look at the video of the race, we led to about the 1250m mark and we faded from that point on," says Hurt. "That was purely the amount of training we'd done hadn't been sorted to the point where we could carry that to the end."
He has a poster of the crew at home.
"Even now, I walk past it and think, 'Bugger, we should have won that race.'"
"We just got tighter and tighter as we went, we just couldn't respond," says Earl. "At the time I was pissed off...But on reflection I'm really proud of that bronze medal."
Olympic gold and silver medallist Tom Murray has acted as a tour guide through Rowing NZ HQ for the reunion.
He goes through the telemetry technology, the racks full of carbon Filippis and Laszlos in the boatshed, the carbon oars, the gym facilities, the detailed nutrition analysis.
Fifty years ago, club rowers from Avon, Waikato, Whakatane, Petone, Wellington, West End and all the rest set the high bar at nationals good enough to be among the best at the Olympics.
Athol thanked Tom on behalf of the squad and quietly reminded him one day it'll be 50 years since he raced in rowing's biggest arena.
Rowing's always changing but making boats go fast, faster than the crew beside you is always somewhere at the heart of it.
The Men's Eight with the bronze medals at Montreal. L-R: Tony Hurt, Alec McLean, David Rodger, Athol Earl, Lew Wilson, Peter Dignan, Trevor Coker, Ivan Sutherland and Simon Dickie.
May 12, 2026
A week on from the reunion, the squad is rallying again after news that Grant McAuley has died from cancer.
His finest moment in a boat may well be the 1979 New Zealand Eight he stroked tearing through the last 500m to win silver at the World Championships in Bled.
He made boats go fast.
For the '76ers, the news about their mate, and other absent friends – Coker, Dignan, Dickie - only re-iterates that life does too.
The NZ Men's Eight, winners of the silver medal at the World Championships in 1979: Cox Alan Cotter, Grant McAuley, Tony Brook, Tim Logan, Greg Johnston, Conrad Robertson, Peter Jansen, Mark James, Robbie Robinson.
GRANT MCAULEY FAR RIGHT MIDDLE ROW who passed away last weekend, and the 1979 Elite squad heading to the World Championships in Bled. McAuley stroked the eight, which won a silver medal.
Andy Hay
Andy Hay is a freelance producer, writer and Maadi Cup-winning coach. He was cox of the world champion New Zealand eight of 1982 and '83. He is NZ Olympian #446.
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- Karapiro sets perfect...
Karapiro sets perfect scene for long-awaited reunion
Club rivalry still burning for Montreal Olympians
Reunions can be tricky.
Rowing reunions, especially.
The sport creates a lot of competitive energy that doesn't always get fully burned off, no matter how many years have passed.
But at Lake Karapiro last weekend, something quite unique happened.
The New Zealand Olympic squad of 1976 were back together for the first time since they competed on the Notre Dame Island course in Montreal, Canada.
They were at Karapiro to watch Winter Series for the current Elite, U23 and other rep athletes.
Maybe it was the racing that did it. Maybe it was just being at Karapiro, when 50 years ago they were trying to beat each other up at the rowing nationals in one of the best club competitions in the world.
For a few short hours, it actually felt like 1976 all over again.
Former Montreal Olympic athletes analysing the form of the Winter Series crews. It's the first time they've been together since 1976.
March 7-8, 1976
It will surprise many, but in 1976, no South Island crew had ever won the Men's Championship Eight, let alone an Avon boat.
Two weeks before nationals they'd won convincingly at the Wellington champs on Lake Horowhenua.
It was quite a crew: Dave Lindstrom, Ivan Sutherland, Trevor Coker, Athol Earl, Gordon Scott, Ross Lindstrom, George Keys, Charlie Flanagan and cox David Simmons.
Scott was American, a bear of a man, even bigger than 'Joe' Earl. He'd come off working on an oil rig in Alaska.
When the Avon boys got to champs, they decided to play up on the chat in the boat park about the wild American in their midst.
"We were staying in this Tamahere motel and Lew Wilson and some of his Waikato cronies wanted to come over and meet him," says Dave. "You can imagine Gordon, with his six foot six whatever he was, big scruffy beard with food all in it, you know. So we put a chain on him behind the kitchen and left him there. Next thing, Lew pokes his head in there with a couple of other Waikato guys and Gordon growls at them pulling against this chain. You should have seen the look on their faces. That was psychologically the defeat of that Waikato crew."
Dave, Ross and George were cousins. George was just 16 and still rowing at St Bede's College. Ross took him out to Hamilton on the night before the final and when they arrived back at the motel around 9.30pm, things were sorted swiftly at the front door step in the Lindstrom way of doing things.
The next day, Avon made history for South Island rowing, beating Waikato and Whakatane to claim the title.
After the race, Athol remembers their coach Fred Strachan, being ecstatic: "I thought you would've won by more."
But he, like the rest of the crew wasn't to know that something very unusual had happened during the race.
"What we didn't know until afterwards," says Athol, "was that about 400 metres out from the start, Trevor realised one side of his body wasn't working. He had the nous to think, 'Well, they don't stop races for health issues,' so he just swinging to keep in time basically. And then about 500 metres from home, his body started working again."
Athol and Trevor had been best mates ever since he arrived at Avon in 1971. They were part of the Munich gold-medal eight.
In '76, they would be back in the Kiwi eight for Montreal.
And the moment Trevor Coker's body stopped working out on Lake Karapiro would become part of that boat's story as well.
The 1976 Avon crew of cox David Simmons, Dave Lindstrom, Ivan Sutherland, Trevor Coker, Athol Earl, Gordon Scott, Ross Lindstrom, George Keys and Charlie Flanagan on the way to becoming the first South Island winners of the Men's Championship Eight.
May 2, 2026
Of the 18-strong squad that went to Montreal, 13 have been able to make the trip to Karapiro for the re-union. Wilson's duck shooting. Grant McAuley, from the coxless four, is gravely ill back in Waitara, and for the most part it seems, people are dealing with that in their own way…quietly, privately.
Out on the barge following the Elite crews down the course, it doesn't take long for old club rivalries to emerge.
Back then, Avon also had an exceptional coxed four. In fact, David Lindstrom, Earl, Coker, Sutherland and cox Simmons completed a three-peat that year. From the conversation out on the barge, they never got tired of repainting the Boss Rooster red, and 50 years on, they've never got tired of reminding their old rivals about it either.
The Petone boys were grouped down the back of the barge. That March of '76, long before the days of the famous fluro singlets, they were also lighting up the championships.
Back then they had no coach, they rowed off their wits and had a reputation for unpredictability. You might call them free-thinkers.
But they'd uncorked something special out on the Petone foreshore.
At Karapiro that year, Viv Haar and Ian Boserio won the Coxless Pair, Des Lock and Tim Logan took out the Coxed Pair, and together they won the inaugural Coxless Four title. They had a good nudge in the Coxed Four as well, finishing second, two-thirds of a length behind Avon. It had been 23 years since the club had won a Red Coat event. In '76 Haar, Lock, Logan and Boserio won three between them.
Unsurprisingly, all were selected for trials at Whanganui two weeks later.
Waikato would also get a decent contingent at trials: Rodger, Wilson, Danny Keane, Robbie Robinson, Howard Windleborne, Greg Ball.
The form of the top three club eights had Strachan, now wearing his Convenor of Selectors hat, positively ebullient.
"Any one of them – with no changes – could have qualified for an eight-oared final in a world championship or Olympic Games," The Convenor told the Christchurch Press after the championships.
And to add to the talent pool, legendary stroke Tony Hurt had made himself available for selection again after a break. Wellington's Alec McLean was there, as well as McAuley and Bob Murphy from Whakatane and Peter Dignan from Auckland University Rowing Club. All had been part of the international programme in the preceding years.
The big surprise came in the return of cox Simon Dickie after a four-year absence from the sport.
The Avon coxed four of David Lindstrom, cox David Simmons, Athol Earl, Ivan Sutherland and Trevor Coker won the Boss Rooster three on the trot between 1974-76. A slightly rejigged lineup won it again in ‘77.
Competition for spots
The eight was clearly New Zealand's pre-eminent boat in the lead up to the '76 Olympics, the '72 crew had made sure of that and in the next few years, New Zealand boats had finished third at the World Championships in 1974 and '75.
It's agreed by those who rowed it, the '74 crew of Hurt, McLean, Rodger, Earl, Wilson, Keane, Coker, Ross Blomfield and Simmons had something special.
"That Lucerne boat was a bloody good boat," says Earl. "It probably wasn't the best boat I've ever been in, but it was fast... It just created speed."
In 75, with Hurt taking a break, McAuley came in to stroke. McLean was back in seven, then Rodger, Earl, Wilson, Ross Collinge, Coker, Dignan and Simmons.
But the quest to successfully defend the Olympic title in '76 meant the selectors were always looking for ways to improve things and The Convenor told the Press on the eve of trials, only Rodger, Earl and Coker could be seen as anything like probable for their seat in the boat.
Simmons had coxed both crews to those bronze medals. In 76, he lost the seat to Dickie. Then, as now, he accepted it with good grace.
"Look, rowing's a team sport and the selectors were charged with putting together the best package of personalities of rowers and looking after the coaching staff and integrating that. So yeah, a bit disappointing after the two previous cycles, not to get the job. Simon obviously had pedigree, he had form, he had two Olympic gold medals."
He did suggest to The Convenor that it wouldn't be such a bad idea to send the Boss Rooster champions to the Games as the coxed four.
You can imagine how that went down.
More changes followed: On the eve of departure, Wilson was back in the eight for Logan, who went to the Coxed Four to rejoin his Petone mates Haar and Boserio.
Team manager Kerry Ashby wrote in his review the change "took place far too late" regretting the "ramifications on the 4+".
Money, or the lack of it, hung over the build-up. Excluding airfares, there was just $56,000 available in the budget.
The two fours ended up in heavy second-hand boats.
And as Ashby discovered to his utter frustration, the batch of new carbon-fibre oars from England had arrived at JFK in New York and been "placed in a storage bay in a huge Pan Am cargo shed with their handles protruding, where they had been sheared off like carrots by a passing 4-storey motorised stacker".
Ashby also elaborated on what has since been well-reported over the intervening years: "Some, more than others, in the 8 suffered the emotional effects of the dissolving of a pretty big chunk of the basic personal rapport between Rusty and the crew."
It was not an easy time for the irascible coach Rusty Robertson but 50 years on his athletes remember him with great fondness and deep respect.
And there were more worrying health concerns for Coker.
Earl remembers a training row at Syracuse before the Games began when Coker passed out and fell into Ivan Sutherland's lap.
"Leading up to Montreal, the doctors thought he was dehydrated, or just generally low, they didn't know what was wrong with him."
Not that he didn't ever give anything less than his absolute best in the boat. His impact on those around him was immense.
"He was an exceptionally good influence on the rest of us," says Earl. "He always thought of other people and put other people first. He made us row better. I did a lot of rowing with him and I know he helped enhance me. I don't know how else to put it, he was just the best bastard I've ever known in my life."
It wasn't until the National Championships in 1979 at Lake Waihola that Trevor got a proper diagnosis. What was thought to be a cyst in his brain was revealed as an inoperable tumour. Trevor Coker died in 1981.
The coxed four of cox David Simmons, Viv Haar, Danny Keane, Tim Logan and Ian Boserio on the course at Montreal.
May 2, 2026
Two quads, one from Tauranga Boys' College and one from Aramoho-Whanganui have just finished their time trials in bids to compete at Henley this year. Aramoho coach Axel Dickinson is beaming. The former Petone athlete doesn't get the chance to catch up with four club legends very often.
A New Zealand age-group eight swings past. The Elite crews are next. Tim Logan admits to getting goosebumps.
In 1976, that was him out there, at nationals and then in the coxed four that finished sixth at Montreal.
Simmons is equally excited.
"It's the first time in 50 years I've been on the water...so yeah I had goosebumps out there, especially when the eight came along, I just loved the noise and the cohesion and the excitement."
The ethos in the 70s under Rusty was get out early and lead from the front.
The coxless four aimed to do that in Montreal but didn't nail the start. They finished within 0.71s of a bronze medal.
The eight led well into the race. But it was rushed.
"If you look at the video of the race, we led to about the 1250m mark and we faded from that point on," says Hurt. "That was purely the amount of training we'd done hadn't been sorted to the point where we could carry that to the end."
He has a poster of the crew at home.
"Even now, I walk past it and think, 'Bugger, we should have won that race.'"
"We just got tighter and tighter as we went, we just couldn't respond," says Earl. "At the time I was pissed off...But on reflection I'm really proud of that bronze medal."
Olympic gold and silver medallist Tom Murray has acted as a tour guide through Rowing NZ HQ for the reunion.
He goes through the telemetry technology, the racks full of carbon Filippis and Laszlos in the boatshed, the carbon oars, the gym facilities, the detailed nutrition analysis.
Fifty years ago, club rowers from Avon, Waikato, Whakatane, Petone, Wellington, West End and all the rest set the high bar at nationals good enough to be among the best at the Olympics.
Athol thanked Tom on behalf of the squad and quietly reminded him one day it'll be 50 years since he raced in rowing's biggest arena.
Rowing's always changing but making boats go fast, faster than the crew beside you is always somewhere at the heart of it.
The Men's Eight with the bronze medals at Montreal. L-R: Tony Hurt, Alec McLean, David Rodger, Athol Earl, Lew Wilson, Peter Dignan, Trevor Coker, Ivan Sutherland and Simon Dickie.
May 12, 2026
A week on from the reunion, the squad is rallying again after news that Grant McAuley has died from cancer.
His finest moment in a boat may well be the 1979 New Zealand Eight he stroked tearing through the last 500m to win silver at the World Championships in Bled.
He made boats go fast.
For the '76ers, the news about their mate, and other absent friends – Coker, Dignan, Dickie - only re-iterates that life does too.
The NZ Men's Eight, winners of the silver medal at the World Championships in 1979: Cox Alan Cotter, Grant McAuley, Tony Brook, Tim Logan, Greg Johnston, Conrad Robertson, Peter Jansen, Mark James, Robbie Robinson.
GRANT MCAULEY FAR RIGHT MIDDLE ROW who passed away last weekend, and the 1979 Elite squad heading to the World Championships in Bled. McAuley stroked the eight, which won a silver medal.
Andy Hay
Andy Hay is a freelance producer, writer and Maadi Cup-winning coach. He was cox of the world champion New Zealand eight of 1982 and '83. He is NZ Olympian #446.
