The boy from Bunnythorpe, the best New Zealand Olympian you’ve never heard of – Stuff

Ernest ''Buz'' Sutherland was one of the best all-round athletes New Zealand has ever produced.

A farmer's son from Bunnythorpe born in Palmerston North in 1894, as a child he tried to pole vault 8 feet (2.4 metres) with a homemade pole and broke his arm.

He became the most versatile athlete in the British Empire and won 13 national championships in six events.

And yet he never got to represent New Zealand at the Empire Games because the first Games weren't held until 1930.

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World War I also got in his way where he survived being shot, gassed and buried alive.

Word first got around about his talent in 1909 when he won the Palmerston North High School under-16 high jump with a leap of ''5 feet'' (1.5 metres), at that time unheard of in Australasia.

He employed the scissors technique where the jumper stayed upright, taking off and landing on rock hard ground, no sawdust pit to land in.

Sutherland also played for the cricket 1st XI.

At the 1915 national championships in Wellington, he became the triple-jump champion and was clearly a decathlete. But not until 1948 was the decathlon contested at New Zealand championships.

He enlisted in the New Zealand Rifle Brigade and his first war injury came when he injured a shoulder in a Divisional rugby match.

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Bunnythorpe's Buz Sutherland, in white, with the New Zealand team at an Australasian championships meeting.

On Christmas Day 1915, Sutherland's battalion saw action in Egypt against the Senussi, a Muslim clan from North Africa allied to the Turks, when six New Zealanders died.

A month later the brigade again attacked the Senussi and this time Rifleman Sutherland was shot in the thigh.

After recovering, he spent the next two-and-a-half years in and out of the hellscape trenches in France and Belgium where gas attacks took their toll. When a German shell exploded nearby and he was buried under a mound of dirt, he was hospitalised again.

At home, his father William died in 1917 after falling from his horse into the Mangaone Stream.

While Sutherland survived the battles at the Somme, Messines and Passchendaele, more than 3150 men of the NZ Rifle Brigade didn't.

As if that wasn't enough for the army, Sutherland was sent to Germany in the Army of Occupation and didn't get home until 1919 when he resumed his athletics.

At the 1920 national championships he won the triple jump, long jump and high jump and was second in the pole vault before more national titles came in 1921, the year he competed for New Zealand in Adelaide.

There he befriended South African middle-distance runner, Dave Leathern, and having struggled to find work in New Zealand, Sutherland agreed to try South Africa in 1922.

En route he stopped off in Sydney where he set an Australasian javelin record of 53 metres.

After settling on the Leathern family farm at Ladysmith in Natal, he wasn't impressed with the arid conditions so he went to work for Natal Railway before joining the police in Durban.

Sutherland had a habit of entering half of the events at athletics meets and broke the South African high-jump record with a 1.88 metres leap.

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Olympian Buz Sutherland displays his hurdling technique which he used to good effect in the decathlon. Photo: PNBHS

Despite having represented New Zealand, he was selected to compete for South Africa in the decathlon at the 1924 Paris Olympics having lived in South Africa for only two years. Nothing came of the anomaly.

Aged 30, the boy from Bunnythorpe was the second oldest of 36 decathletes heading into the final event in Paris, the 1500 metres. He was sitting fourth, but after a 1500m of pure torture, he settled for fifth place, the best result by an Empire athlete.

Sutherland returned to South Africa where he was engaged to marry the sister of another Olympian, but he never felt settled there and they never married. In 1925, he left to be a coach in Britain, in Liverpool and Glasgow.

After a year there, he settled back in New Zealand, joined the police in Wellington in 1927 and when he resumed his athletics career he won his last title, the pole vault, 14 years after his first before retiring from athletics in 1930 at the age of 36.

By 1935, Constable Sutherland was back in Manawatu where he was regularly seen on the beat, only for tragedy to strike a year later when cycling to the Palmerston North Police Station.

Feeling ill, he decided to ride home, but at the intersection of Pirie and Featherston Streets, he careered head-first over the handlebars of his bike and ''dislocated'' his neck. A shoulder strap of his bag became entangled between his knee and handlebars.

To quote Feilding researcher Nick Rutherford, ''the mild-mannered Olympian, war veteran and constable was dead at the tragically young age of 42, leaving wife Marjorie and three children''.

Sutherland was recognised with a funeral procession through Palmerston North.

Peter Lampp is a sports commentator and former sports editor in Palmerston North.

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The boy from Bunnythorpe, the best New Zealand Olympian you've never heard of - Stuff