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Melbourne: Driving along the tree-lined streets of the small New Zealand town of Cambridge and past multi-million-dollar stud farms, it is hard to imagine a less likely setting for a revolution in sports administration.
Rowing New Zealand (RNZ), however, from their spartan headquarters on the banks of Lake Karapiro, a man-made lake on the Waikato River, have produced one of the strongest rowing squads in the world on an annual budget of some four million New Zealand dollars ($3.08 million).
At last year's world rowing championships in Munich, New Zealand won three gold medals and two silvers while the "next generation" at the under-23 world championships in Glasgow won three golds and a silver.
Of the Beijing Olympics squad selected so far, 11 of the 15 have won senior world titles in the last three years, while Rob Wadell, who was named in the men's double scull, won gold in the single scull at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Women's single sculler Emma Twigg also won at the world under-23 championships in 2007.
"Medals are important," said RNZ's high performance manager Andrew Matheson, summarising the philosophy of his organisation and explaining the reason for their shift in focus away from the blue-riband men's eight crew.
Increased government funding depended on winning several medals, not a single high-profile one, and given the small population of 4.2 million, and even smaller pool of top athletes, RNZ had chosen to split up their elite squad, he explained.
They started by centralising the high-performance centre at Lake Karapiro, the site of the 1978 world championships and host for the 2010 event, and eventually brought the entire senior, under-23 and junior squads to Cambridge.
The move, Matheson said, enabled them to concentrate sports science and medicine and coaching resources and set up internal competition where boats race against other crews under a handicap system based on world-record times.
"From a rowing perspective, I'd say we're different from anyone else," said Matheson.
"There would be very few countries who have centralised the process with the under-23s and the juniors and most would not have the whole of their elite group in one area."
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