Dave Norris

Dave Norris ONZM has won sixty New Zealand championship medals, twenty-eight of them senior gold medals, eighteen of those victories in the triple jump. He set eleven open and six junior national records, four of which stood for more than fifty years. He won silver and bronze Commonwealth Games medals. He has also been an outstanding coach (including guiding twenty-one national representatives), and has given a lifetime of high level service in administration, event promotion, and team management. This was recognised in his appointment as President (2013-2014) and Life Member of Athletics New Zealand, and by an IAAF (now World Athletics) Award for Distinguished International Contribution (1988).

Versatile in his talents and generous with his time, yet Dave Norris is so good-humoured and modest that few who recognise him within athletics would also know that he represented New Zealand at basketball for four years in thirty-one international games, won the award as best forward at the basketball national championship, and later served on the Breakers Development Trust; or that as a secondary schools teacher, he rose to be Deputy Principal of Rangitoto College and Principal of Glenfield College; or that he followed that with leadership roles in tertiary education, alongside shaping a new kind of career in sports promotions, management, and sponsorship; or that for many years he has been seen and heard on stage with the North Shore Operatic Society and with several community theatre groups, as well as directing school productions. In 2024, just before his 85th birthday, he will perform in the pantomime Aladdin. He has not disclosed in which role.   

Norris’s status as a legend of New Zealand athletics rests mainly on his unequalled dominance of the triple jump, and the remarkable elite level consistency of his performances over more than twenty years. He first won the senior national title in 1957 with 14.67m, and his last in 1977 with 15.10m. He had an unbroken sequence of fifteen victories, and when new generations eventually began to displace him, he still came back and won three more times. He broke the national record six times, and his last record, 15.94m, survived from 1965 to 1978. He also set a British all-comers record in winning the AAA Championship in London in 1958.

Norris’s talent showed young, as he set world age best performances (before junior records were recognised), under 16 to under 20, 1955-59, as well as winning his first New Zealand medals. This was even more remarkable because he had spent more than a year at age six in plaster for malformed leg bone sockets. The family had to move from Hukerenui, north of Whangarei, so that he could receive specialist care in Auckland. 

He represented New Zealand in the triple jump in one Olympics (Rome 1960) and five Commonwealth Games (1958-74), winning bronze in Cardiff in 1958, and silver in Perth in 1962. He also represented the British Commonwealth vs Great Britain in 1958, in London, and vs USA in 1966, in Los Angeles, and competed for New Zealand in the Pacific Conference Games in 1969, in Tokyo. Recurrence of the bone-joint problem at the time of the Rome Olympics forced Norris to change emphasis from the high-impact triple jump, to the long jump.

“I continued to compete in the triple but with only cursory specific training, and any improvement came as a by-product of the long jump work,” he said.

His last international appearance was the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, where a fully respectable performance of 15.41m gave him sixth place in a field of seventeen, with three of the top four places taken for the first time by Ghanaians. Norris’s long winning career saw the sport transformed in other ways, from grass tracks to cinders to all-weather, and from jumping shoes of clunky leather with long fixed spikes that had to be cleaned of soil after each jump and inter-island travel by train and ferry. 

Norris’s contribution to the triple jump event continued in his coaching career, which extended from 1962 to 2017. He coached national representatives including Kevin Todd, Lisa Ball, Nigel and Shelley Avery, Carlene Dillimore, Kerry Hill and John Delamere, with his last international athlete being Portia Bing (for the long jump component of the heptathlon). He also coached sprints, long jump and 800m, wrote several coaching manuals, and was twice coach to Commonwealth Games teams.   

Norris’s prodigious work in the sport’s administration, too extensive to list, is characterised by a rare streak of innovative creativity mixed with an even more rare energy to see ideas into reality. He was co-organizer of New Zealand’s first indoors athletics meeting.  He edited the first specialist magazine, New Zealand Athlete, from 1966 to 1994. He worked as a field events commentator at major games for TVNZ, and was an early chairman of the New Zealand Athletics Coaches Association.

Most creatively, Norris with Sir Graeme Avery formed a dynamic duo that transformed the sport on the North Shore, and nationally. They founded the North Shore now North Harbour Bays club, and the pioneering National Athletics League, with Norris as secretary for seventeen years. They established the Robin Tait International meet, with Norris at that helm for nineteen years. They led the visionary development of the Millennium, now AUT Millennium, Stadium and Institute of Sport. 

Semi-retired from his career in education and its management, Norris became director of New Zealand’s first event promotion and athlete management company, this time partnered with Gray Shattky. A three-year, $300,000 sponsorship from Mobil for Athletics NZ was one accomplishment.

In March 2024, at Wellington, Norris attended the annual Athletics New Zealand Championships for the sixty-ninth consecutive time. This is probably another record. Until 2020, at age 80, he always filled significant and strenuous roles, as champion, contender, coach, team manager, national selector, official, or TV commentator (often several of those at once). Even in this recent appearance at 84, when not engrossed as a spectator at the jumping pit, he was recruited for service as celebrity presenter at the award ceremonies. If any of those young athletes have hopes of making a major contribution to New Zealand athletics, they might note that the friendly old man who gave them their medals will be a very hard act to follow.

Written by Roger Robinson

Biographical details from Dave Norris and other sources