Our golden girl Lisa ‘I'M EXCITED ABOUT WHAT'S NEXT'

The inspiration behind her incredible Olympic achievement

- Sebastian van der Zwan

After paddling her way to a third gold medal on the water in Tokyo, kayaker Lisa Carrington confessed it felt “crazy” to think she was New Zealand’s most successful Olympic athlete ever.

“There’s a lot of talk when people say, ‘You could do this, you could be that,’ but for me, it’s just making sure that I did what I could do – not focusing too much on the what-ifs, but just going out there and doing my best.”

It was a typically humble answer from the 32-year-old pocket rocket from O- hope in the Bay of Plenty, who first set her sights on becoming an Olympic athlete when she was just seven, watching Kiwi swimmer Danyon Loader win gold in Atlanta in 1996. Lisa recalls, “My dad said, ‘You should go to the Olympics.’ All I knew was that Olympians were amazing people who I looked up to.”

Her mum Glynis tells Woman’s Day, “Lisa is just a country girl who grew up on the beach and has a real affinity for water. She was a very, very shy little one, but she had real inner strength that wasn’t apparent to most people and, as parents, we had the job of building her self-confidence.”

Incredibly, Lisa – who is of Te-Aitanga-a-Mahaki and Nga-ti Porou descent – hadn’t even been near a kayak until she was 16, while looking for a winter sport to maintain her fitness for surf lifesaving, another activity she excelled in. After joining a camp run by Olympic kayaker Ian Ferguson, she was hooked and never looked back.