In the first of our On Your Marks series, taking Commonwealth Games athletes back to high school, Suzanne McFadden walks the Rangi Ruru School grounds with weightlifter Emma McIntyre, who began on a very different sporting path.
Emma McIntyre remembers the moment her sporting career took flight.
She’d just started at Rangi Ruru Girls' School in Christchurch, and her parents had come to watch her run in the Year 7 and 8 athletics day.
They were surprised by what they saw.
“Mum and Dad were like, ‘She’s actually quite fast. Shall we see if she wants to do athletics?’” McIntyre, now 31, laughs.
It’s unlikely that at that moment they thought: One day our daughter will return to England, the country where she was born, and compete for New Zealand at the Commonwealth Games.
In weightlifting.
There’s been quite a seismic shift in McIntyre’s sporting endeavours - from the promising young hurdler to national champion weightlifter. Some of that change was determined by the Christchurch earthquakes.
But being comfortable to switch codes stems back to her years at Rangi Ruru.
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It takes McIntyre a little while to get her bearings when she returns to her old school in the heart of Merivale. Imposing modern buildings have sprouted up since the 2011 earthquake, and a $9 million sports centre is taking shape where the language block once stood.
But the grand 100-year-old homestead, Te Koraha, where the four Gibson sisters established Rangi Ruru in 1923, still stands at the centre of the school.
McIntyre, born in the London town of Kingston Upon Thames and moving to Christchurch when she was 10, sits in Te Koraha’s boardroom - with its rich wooden panelling and stained glass windows - and pores over photos of herself as a teenage athlete.
There she is, flying over a hurdle, and sprinting down the home straight of the old QEII Park track, sadly damaged beyond repair in February 2011.
“That was my favourite event, the 100m hurdles,” McIntyre says. “Everything I did was short - sprints and long jump. We had a good school relay team, we won bronze at nationals one year.”
At the 2007 national schools champs at Whanganui’s Cooks Gardens, McIntyre was competing against Black Ferns Sevens speedster Portia Woodman in the seniors sprints. In the juniors, Julia Ratcliffe and Nicole Bradley battled it out in the throws, and Portia Bing was running and leaping. They’re all off to the Birmingham Commonwealth Games.
“So many of the top lifters have come from gymnastics or athletics backgrounds; they’ve always done dynamic movement,” McIntyre, a 64kg class lifter, says. “Very few females have gone straight into lifting.”
Athletics wasn’t all McIntyre tried her hand at. “Hockey, soccer and touch for a season - just trying to find something I really enjoyed,” she says.
“I think the main difference between Rangi Ruru and other schools were the opportunities, in sport and in subjects. I had so much choice and they allowed you to explore whatever you wanted to do, in a safe and supportive environment.
“It’s important you don’t get pushed into something you don’t want to do. You’re not going to challenge yourself if you’re not doing something you enjoy.”
Equestrian was her Wednesday school sport; Rangi Ruru is the only girls’ school in the South Island with a dedicated equestrian programme.
“That was a big reason I came to this school, I loved horse riding,” McIntyre says. “But I didn’t get my own horse until I was 18 when my parents couldn’t say no to me anymore. I still have friends I go riding with.”
Despite an extensive list of sports on offer at Rangi Ruru, weightlifting wasn’t one of them. “I don’t remember lifting a weight or using the gym,” McIntyre laughs.
She continued athletics after she left school in 2008. “But I stopped a year or so after the earthquakes because there was no track in Christchurch and hurdles are very difficult to do on grass,” she says.
So McIntyre took up the new sporting craze of CrossFiit instead, and quickly became competitive. She’d still be doing it now if she hadn’t been drawn to weightlifting - by a bunch of lifters she’d never met before.
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The teachers at Rangi Ruru while McIntyre was there, between 2002 and 2008, remember her as a "lovely, quiet, diligent girl", who was "very sporty". And fast.
Mandy Anderson, the director of sport at Rangi Ruru, started at the school in McIntyre’s final year.
“What’s so fascinating about Emma is that she was a track athlete here at school, but she’s found a different pathway. Who’s to say where sport will take you in life?” Anderson says.
Rangi Ruru has always had a reputation, particularly in the south, of being a strong sporting school.
For the last two seasons, Rangi Ruru has been crowned the top school at the national schools rowing regatta, otherwise known as the Maadi Cup. Six of their rowers will compete at the world U19 championships in Italy next month. “It’s a reflection of a programme that’s built over time,” Anderson says.
“We’ve had really strong success across different sports as well and we’re increasingly noticing the diversity of sports our young women are achieving in.”
Like Year 12 student Ruby Hewitt, who won the NZ U18 women’s ski title at the junior freeride nationals last year, and is now ranked eighth on the junior world tour. And Year 7 student Hollie Tribble, who was part of the New Zealand Might 11s BMX team who won the Oceania championships in Brisbane in April.
Gaby Smith, in Year 11, has just won bronze at the para world swim series in the US and competes next week at the world championships in Portugal.
Abbey Moody, who you’ll read about later, is a double international in her final year at Rangi - throwing the javelin for New Zealand on Friday at the Oceania athletics champs in Queensland, and then heading to Serbia next month to compete at the world youth women’s water polo championships.
But Anderson stresses success in sport at Rangi Ruru isn’t defined by gold medals or national honours. “While we celebrate success, we want women and girls to love moving,” she says.
“We have a responsibility to help young women find whatever their sporting passion - or their movement passion - may be. Success has got to be about creating what we call ‘Rangi sport for life’. Young women leaving here and saying: ‘I love being active’.
“We have a group of girls who weren’t doing sport but for the last two years have worked tirelessly in dragon boating. They’ve built this phenomenal comradeship through working together.”
The school is promoting Sport New Zealand’s #itsmymove campaign this year to get more girls active.
While the school, with a roll of just under 700 girls, can’t provide every code, it endeavours to support athletes in different sports.
“We do what we can to foster that and support them along their journey. It’s about connecting them to other elements of our programme, like wellness monitoring and access to mental skills,” Anderson says.
Rangi Ruru has the SOAR programme, giving 17 students wraparound support, and helping them build behavioural traits - like work ethic, respect, initiative and generosity - that all contribute to their sports performance, but will ultimately make them better people.
“It sits outside traditional scholarships. We see general excellence scholarships as a way of recognising it’s not just about you as a sportsperson, it’s about you as a person,” says Anderson. “Developing that component is really important for us as a school.”
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As with everything she puts her mind to, McIntyre took her time in the classroom seriously. She went on to study psychology at the University of Canterbury, and now works full time for the Department of Corrections, in administration for the psychology team.
“Working for psychologists is fantastic, especially when you’re an athlete - they really care about your health and wellbeing,” she says.
McIntyre fits in her daily training around work - either training at home, in a gym in the garage she and her partner built during lockdown, or at Christchurch City Weightlifting.
The sport of weightlifting had never crossed her mind until 2016, when a group of serious weightlifters joined her CrossFit gym. They saw her lifting and suggested she enter an Olympic weightlifting competition. She qualified for nationals at her first event.
“Obviously, I had to give that a serious go then, and I realised it was impossible to be good at both,” she says. “Weightlifting has got me a lot further.”
McIntyre is a pretty self-sufficient athlete - her coach, Callan Helms, lives in Dunedin. She almost moved down there, but she feels the cold.
“It’s all done over technology - I send him videos of my technique and he replies,” she says. “It isn’t ideal. But we’re still on the right path.”
She was told if she kept at it, she could go to the Commonwealth Games. “And I was like pfft, I didn’t believe it,” she says. “But at the end of 2019, when I hit weightlifting’s international grade, I thought maybe it is a possibility.”
She had to be ranked in the top six in the Commonwealth to earn selection, and at her last chance - the New Zealand International in February - she nailed it, winning gold with an 87kg snatch and 104kg clean and jerk.
The Commonwealth Games will be just her third international competition, thanks to Covid.
After winning bronze at the Australian Open in 2020, she qualified for last year’s world championships in Uzbekistan. She tried five times unsuccessfully to get an MIQ spot back in New Zealand, so she couldn’t go.
In Birmingham, she’ll be competing against the Olympic 64kg gold medallist, Canada’s Maude Charron.
“It’s very exciting. I think it possibly hasn’t sunk in all the way, particularly with the Covid situation,” she says. “I’m lucky the team going has a number of experienced people to learn from.”
Lifters like one of her role models, Megan Signal in the 71kg class. “At my first nationals, she was lifting huge weights in my weight class, and I wondered if I could lift like her one day,” McIntyre says.
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Two of Rangi Ruru’s senior students, Abbey Moody and Nora Quigley, have come to meet McIntyre.
Both are aspiring athletes - Moody in javelin and waterpolo, while Quigley is the hockey first XI’s goalie and a hammer thrower. They are boarders and flatmates, who’ve come from other parts of the country to go to school here.
“Coming to Rangi Ruru has helped me find balance,” says Quigley, who moved from Timaru this year, and is also an activist and environmentalist who does work with the Ministry of Social Development.
“The difference here is all the athletes and coaches are incredibly intentional in terms of drive as well as the culture they want to create within teams.
“They all have a set goal, but they also want to have fun while doing it. In my hockey bag, we have a friendship ball, and at the start of training we pass it around and it reminds us we’re first and foremost friends, then we’re team mates and then athletes after that.”
Moody wants to go to a United States college next year on an athletics scholarship. She came to the school from Marlborough to play water polo. “It’s so great, we’ve built as a team to win the bronze medal at nationals last year - it was history-making for a South Island team up against the dominant North Island teams,” she says.
“The whole atmosphere here is so supportive - they encourage you to go out and give it your best shot.”
McIntyre tells the two young women how, through competing for New Zealand, she’s learned having fun and enjoying the experience is paramount.
“If everyone is relaxed and enjoying themselves, there’s a much higher chance of winning medals. So our focus has been less on outcome and more about the process,” she says.
Quigley asks her a question: “What are you most looking forward to in Birmingham? Anything that’s the cherry on top?”
“Finishing competing and being able to relax,” McIntyre says. “When you don’t have to be focused on yourself anymore.”
