Javelin’s up-and-comer sets sights on Commonwealth Games

Alex Wood is the dark horse among New Zealand javelin competitors, this weekend’s Track and Field Championships would suggest.

The dreadlocked Waikato athlete took home bronze after only six months of full-time training, with a throw of 68.86m.

Ben Langton-Burnell won gold and Stuart Farquhar came out of retirement to take silver at the national event, held at Porritt Stadium in Hamilton.   

At the end of last year Wood, an ex-Hamilton Boys’ High student, left his full-time job as an electrician apprentice to pursue his athletic career.

“It was now or never,” Wood, 21, said. “If I was going to do it I had to do it now.”

Wood said  his quiet nature meant his radical move came as a surprise even to his close friends.

“They never knew that I took it really seriously…I keep to myself a lot,” Wood said.

Two weeks ago, Wood hit his goal and personal best of 70m, which beat his previous record by 7m.

The world record is 97m and Wood must crack 80m to qualify for the Commonwealth Games next year.  He knows that this means he has a lot of work to do.

“But that doesn’t intimidate me. I kind of want to hit the hundred to be honest. It’s a few years away but I’ve gone up six metres a year,” Wood said.

He struggles with size, with a smaller build than Langton-Burnell and Farquhar, and hopes to bulk up in the gym.

“Size isn’t my strength,” he says. “But speed kind of is.”

 Wood needs three simple things to get in the zone.

“Just caffeine and dubstep. And sugar.”

His coach Debbie Strange, who is also the coach of Langton-Burnell and Farquhar, is pleased with Wood’s result and expects him to improve quickly with the new level of training.

“I’m expecting he’s going to really accelerate,” Strange said.

“He knows what he wants and he knows how to execute it,” she said.

In two weeks both Langton-Burnell and Wood will head to the 2017 Australian Athletics Championships, where Wood hopes to throw over 70m.

The long-term goal is to qualify for the Commonwealth Games in the Gold Coast next year followed by the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

Strange said that Farquhar, who has the experience of three Commonwealth Games and the Olympics in Rio, has been a mentor for Wood.  

“It’s cool to talk to somebody that’s done it all,” Wood said.

Wood now studies engineering at the Waikato Institute of Technology, assisted by a Prime Minister’s Scholarship.

He is also a part of the High-Performance Sport New Zealand’s Performance Potential Squad, which works to prime athletes for the international stage.