On a chilly winters evening earlier this week a group of amazing people turned up to the Ferry Ale House in Ferrymead to put themselves up to the ultimate quiz challenge, fighting to become the 2016 Canoe Polo Quiz Masters. This was all in aid of raising funds to help me get to Italy to compete at the Canoe Polo World Championships. A fantastic evening was had by all, with lots of brain matter getting a kick start with the challenging questions. The evening finished off with an raffle and an exciting auction featuring a signed Richie McCaw Crusaders jersey which was generously framed by Picture Framing Ltd and a nights stay at Hotel Montreal.

With everyones helped I managed to raise $3126 which is incredible! A massive thank you to everyone who came along and also to the many raffle prize donations. These ares the goodies we had on offer:

• 20kg bag of dog food donated by Top Notch Kennels
• 2 Hours of crane truck services from Elevate Crane Truck Services
• 2 seasonings goodie bags from Billies
• 1 night stay at the Delhaven Motel, Amberley
• Photography portrait session with Kate Christie Photography
• Say Yes To Adventure Vol 1-5 Magazines + a 1 year subscription
• $30 The Old Vicarage, Halswell voucher
• Rasdex Cycle Booties
• Family photography session with Ilan Wittenburg Photography
• $60 Bourbon Rose Florist voucher
• 2x $50 Fox and Ferret, Riccarton vouchers
• Signed Master Chef Brett McGregor recipe book
• Complimentary personal training session with Pumped Personal Training

Last night TV3 featured a story about Canoe Polo and our upcoming trip to the Canoe Polo World Championships. Have a look here:

Here are some photos from our trip so far…

Hello everyone,

Had an amazingly moving experience at the Menin Gate Last Post ceremony last night. The entire NZ squad (40 of us) were asked to come forward to stand and watch the ceremony. During it the Last Post was sounded, a bag piper played and wreaths were laid. A lovely choir group sung some songs before our NZ squad sung our national anthem. It was incredible, especially considering it is the 100 year anniversary this year. Goosebump central.

Menin Gate Last Post Trumpets from Olivia Spencer-Bower on Vimeo.

Here’s a video (please excuse the fact it’s recorded upside down) of us singing! NZ PRIDE!

2014-09-18 20.17.04 from Olivia Spencer-Bower on Vimeo.

This morning we did a quick water session before being allowed to chill out and have the afternoon to ourselves. Tomorrow we play in the Poppies Pre-World Tournament.

Looking forward to that.

Thanks for all the amazing support.

Liv x

The weekend just been we were in a small town called Acigne in France playing at a competition called the Breizh Cup. The competition was made up of Canada Women and Canada U21 Women, some french club teams and our NZ U21 girls. It was a great weekend for our team to play together and work on a few things. We came away with some great insights and lessons. We scored into the double digits on almost all our games and only conceded 3 goals the whole weekend. And we WON the tournament!

The other exciting thing to happen over the weekend was the Australian Institute of Professional Photography awards. Just before I left NZ I was frantically getting my entries ready and got them to Sydney a day before the cut off date. It was my first time entering the awards and I decided to enter four images into the Illustrative category. I was a little off with my time differences and had planned a couple of weeks back to make sure I could get internet on Saturday night so I could watch the awards. Turns out I was 24hours late and the awards had been Friday night! Whoops. Anyway, a lovely friend of mine had kept an eye out for my images and had emailed me the results. I was super chuffed to hear I had won a Gold, 2x Silvers and a High Professional Standard award. This meant I had earned 4.5 merit points and was only .5 of a point off becoming an Associate with the Australian Institute of Professional Photography (AIPP). So super stoked with that first time effort.

Here are two of the images that won! Some of you will notice that the one that won Gold was also the image I’ve been using for my fundraising! It’s still available for purchase on my website if anyone wants to purchase a double Gold award winning print!

Following the Breizh Cup we headed to a familiar place called Ieper. I’ve visited Ieper on all of my five world champs tours, so it’s always special coming back here.

Ypres is an amazing little town in Belgium that hosts a number of excellent Canoe Polo competitions. This is a special town for New Zealanders as it’s the site of the Battle of Passchendaele, in which the British, Canadian, ANZAC, and French forces recaptured the Passchendaele Ridge east of the city at a terrible cost of lives. After months of fighting, this battle resulted in nearly half a million casualties to all sides, and only a few miles of ground won by Allied forces. During the course of the war the town was all but obliterated by the artillery fire. The New Zealand Teams always visit Menin Gate to pay respect to the New Zealand soldiers who valiantly fought and of whom many lost their lives.

We are staying just a 2 minute walk from the centre of town with the Senior Men, U21 Men and U21 Women. So it’s a full house here! Had a rest day yesterday and today we jumped on the water for a 2hour session. The afternoon has been filled with movie watching and chilling out.

Tomorrow we have more training and hopefully, fingers crossed, a sports massage! We will also be visiting the last post at Menin Gate at 8pm with the entire NZ Squad. It’s always a special occasion heading to this. They do the last post everyday at 8pm in this town which is super awesome.

Hello!

Apologies for the lack of updates, it’s been proving harder than one would think to get wifi. So here’s a catch up on what we’ve done so far.

Wednesday 3 September:
We arrived into Schipol airport in Amsterdam after about 40 hours of traveling. We arrived to a lovely sunny day! The coaches and managers headed off to get the vans while we chilled with all the bags and boats. After the vans arrived we loaded up and headed to Gronigen for the ECA Cup.

Thursday 4th & Friday 5th sept:
We used these two days to do some light training and get used to the 11hour time change. We hired some bikes at our accommodation and had a blast whizzing around feeling like Dutch people! We even cycled into the small town of Assen and had a wee afternoon checking out the shops.

Saturday 6th & Sunday 7th September:
ECA Cup in Gronigen. The weekend was spent focusing on the ECA cup. We started off with a win against the Netherlands U21. Next up, and still a bit groggy with jet lag we played the Germans, who are the current world champs. We started a little slow and got down, but pulled it back in the second half, but not quite enough with the Germans getting one over us. Our last game of the day was against Poland which we won comfortably.

Day 2 we were up against the Italians in the semi final. Unfortunately we didn’t quite play to our potential and ended up having to play the Dutch for third. The game against the Dutch was much better and we worked well as a team to nail the win and take home third place.

Monday 8th sept
Today we packed up and made the big 8hour trip to Paris. It was a long trip and we were super stoked to finally arrive in Paris. I got to drive for the last couple of hours which was fun driving on the other side of the road!

That evening we popped into Paris for some dinner and a wee nosy around.

Tuesday 9th sept
Today was Paris day! We started with a gym session before heading into Paris to explore for the day. We visited the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Champs Elyses, and then to top it off we went to the Moulin Rouge. While it was an awesome experience it unfortunately didn’t quite meet all our expectations. But definitely a bucket list item ticked off.

Wednesday 10th sept:
We packed up and headed to Tinteniac in France to our next home at Les Pleupliers camping ground. We are staying in semi permanent mobile homes. They’re cosy with four of us in them!

Thursday 11th & Friday 12th sept:
We have spent the last two days training and this afternoon relaxing and doing some team baking. Our snack box for games tomorrow is going to be epic!!

So tomorrow is the Breizh Cup being held at the Acigne Club. First up is the Canadian U21s at 10.10am. Looking forward to another competition!

Thanks for all the support!

Liv x

It’s been a frantic few days of packing, but the moment is finally here! After a lovely birthday/farewell breakfast this morning with my family the 7 Christchurch representatives headed to Auckland to join the whole squad. After a few issues with the uniform bag going missing and a close call with our weight we’re now sitting on the plane about to depart to Melbourne. At Melbourne we will pick up our other three team members and then full steam ahead to Amsterdam via Dubai! After 40 hours or so well finally we able to relax in Groningen! Can’t wait!

Liv x