Issue date
Later this month the yachting community will come together to celebrate the year’s successes, achievements and contribution to our sport at the 2015 Volvo Yachting Excellence Awards.
Every year Yachting New Zealand receives a wad of nominations in the Service Award category, the calibre of which never ceases to amaze. Restricted to an annual ‘budget’ of just ten Service Awards it can be a tough job for the judging panel to narrow it down.
The short story is that around New Zealand there are dozens of individuals who quietly contribute hours and hours of service to the sport which we’re all passionate about.
In the lead up to the 2015 Volvo Yachting Excellence Awards, on in Auckland on 27 November, we bring you a feature on each of the ten 2015 Service Award winners. Today we focus on Martin Tasker.
Martin Tasker – for broadcasting services to yachting
Martin Tasker is one of New Zealand’s best known yachting broadcasters, and is amongst a handful of individuals to have an immense influence on our sport’s ability to realise value from the investment provided to it.
He has dedicated much of his career to keeping yachting in the public eye. Since the early nineties when he moved to New Zealand and started working with TVNZ, Martin has carried a torch for coverage of sailing events, and sailors. He has travelled extensively, struggled with new technology and slim budgets, and taken the best - and sometimes the worst - of our sport into living rooms all over the country, and the world, inspiring future adventurers, Olympians and America’s Cup sailors with his ability to ‘spin a yarn’. His stories more often than not capture the adversity that sailors over come to achieve their goals - whether it’s an Olympic gold medal, the America’s Cup, or a first Coastal Classic.
As a staunch believer in New Zealand yachting and all that it represents, Martin sees it as a sport where Kiwis continually punch above their weight and achieve against all odds - particularly in spite of budgets and disparate playing fields.
Martin's first interview with Peter Burling (age 10 years)
British born journalist Martin Tasker has worked in newspapers, radio and television in England, Hong Kong and America, covering a huge number of news and feature stories. He left the BBC in 1993 and moved to New Zealand with his wife Claudia and two daughters. He started work at TVNZ the day after he arrived in New Zealand and has remained there ever since.
His achievements include:
Covering all major yacht racing in New Zealand including the America’s Cups since 1995 and gaining an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the sport in the process.
Telling the stories of small yacht clubs and novice sailors, disabled and blind sailing events, all the major round the world races and regattas, profiles of the big players and up and coming stars.
Pioneering many of the approaches to yachting news coverage that we now take for granted. Martin has endured many all-night stints in foreign ports, battling with faulty equipment and infrastructure so that New Zealand could get immediate coverage from events like Act 1 of the 32nd America’s Cup in Marseilles in 2004.
Martin has gone from the grass roots of yachting reporting where there was limited scope, to the sophisticated coverage of today - and along the way has shot, edited and presented his own material from local sailing hot spots to remote corners of the world.
Received a number of awards for his work, including Sports News Broadcaster of the Year in 2006, and had some tremendous coups - like his one on one interview with Tiger Woods - along the way.
Martin truly cares about the sailors that he reports on. He was there when Blair and Tuke were just starting out, and he’ll likely be there well into their futures. His ability to draw out the best in people, young and old, and his commitment to fair and honest reporting, with an ability to tell a good story with the subject, not the reporter, at the center. He truly cares about Kiwi sailors on the world stage.
