Long drive golfer George Wardell ended 2024 on the ultimate high, winning the Xtreme Drivers League North Island Championship and picking up his second New Zealand Championship.
Wardell, who boasts an impressive in-competition best drive of 373m and an all time best of 421m, took out the North Island championship with a round-winning drive of 296.7m and the New Zealand championship with a round-winning drive of 329m last month.
The win qualifies him to represent New Zealand at the Long Drive World Championships in Colorado in the United States later this year.
Wardell is now based in Cambridge and after a stint as a strength and conditioning (SC) coach for the Chiefs Super Rugby team now works as a SC coach for Olympic athletes at Lake Karapiro and the Grassroots Trust Velodrome.
He said he had always had a passion for golf.
"The reality of that is it’s quite hard and the skills that you require and the support you need is really tough so I ended up going into the workforce."
"After studying at Otago and Waikato, I began working for High Performance Sport NZ training Olympic athletes.
"We were trialling around some new training methods, and you can't really experiment on Olympic athletes but I figured, why not experiment on myself and see if this stuff works?"
He began looking into rotational speed and power and decided to apply it to his golfing ability.
Within eight weeks he noticed significant improvements in his swing speed.
"I swung it around about 114 miles an hour when I was playing golf regularly and then after eight weeks of training I was swinging at 130 and now I'm swinging at about 154.
"That's kind of how I fell into the sport, it was through trial and error and playing around with concepts that work.
"It's very fortunate, the combination of skill, genetics and knowledge has kind of accelerated my pathway up a lot."
He began entering long drive competitions and was instantly hooked.
"The first two events were exhilarating and nerve-racking.
"I was really lucky to have a couple of guys, like Greg Moody, take me under their wing.
"From there, I ended up teaming up with a coach over in Australia, Greg Parker, and he really helped accelerate my speed to the point where I won my first national title and went all over the world in 2023."
He said the last 18 months had been about honing his skills.
"It requires a lot of time, energy and finances to make those trips to compete in big events, so you want to make sure that you're as ready as possible to do it.
"The dominoes are starting to fall for me, especially the last two or three months where I’ve picked up a couple of wins and another national title.
"I’m starting to really get the ball rolling.
"I felt like I'd been knocking on the door the last 12 months, I knew that I had the speed, I had the skill but I just couldn't quite get across the line."
Wardell said that he had a lot of second and thirds.
"It was kind of agonising where it's like, ‘man, it's right there’.
"You can touch it, but you can't quite grab it."
Wardell said a mindset change is what made the difference to claim his latest titles.
"I decided that I just needed to be more aggressive.
"No-one was going to give it to me and I had to take it.
"I've gone out there with the mindset of trying to win and making sure that no-one else can get in my way if I perform to my abilities."
Wardell said he managed to get on a bit of a roll and carry that momentum on.
"It was a fantastic hunt, it's got me back in the winner's circle.
"I'd almost forgotten how good winning is."
Earlier in the year, Wardell also became the first New Zealander to break the lucrative 220mph ball speed barrier, a feat only achieved by about 50 people in the world.
"Breaking through that was quite a milestone because it'd been on the goal list for some time.
"I think I can get to 230 this year.
"There's only eight guys in the world that can do that, so my aim is to try and reach into that top 10.
"I've just got to get fast enough to have the horsepower to compete with the big boys."
Wardell’s main goal for 2025 however was to win an international title.
"Whether that's in Australia, Japan, Thailand, America, I don't mind where it is — but I've got to get overseas and compete in those and give myself an opportunity to get that win.
"Winning domestically has been great and it's meant a lot of opportunities to get overseas for 2025, so now it's getting myself over there and getting that first international win and propelling myself up in the sport.
"That opens even more doors and more opportunities so that's the real intention for 2025, continue to push that horsepower and get a win internationally."
