Sportswomen

The Football Ferns’ 1–0 victory over Norway at Eden Park, Auckland was the first win by a senior New Zealand team at a World Cup finals tournament.

New Zealand beat Canada 2–1 at the Estadio Charrúa in Montevideo in the third-place playoff at the FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup.

In the 2010s New Zealand’s women’s hockey team was consistently among the best in the world, but until 2018 it had not won a major tournament

Valerie Adams won gold in the shot put at the London Olympic Games. It was awarded a week after the competition, when the intial winner was disqualified for testing positive for an anabolic steroid.

Just how close the New Zealand and Australian netball teams were became clear as the match, the longest official game of netball ever played, stretched over 84 pulsating minutes. 

At the 2008 Beijing Paralympics, 15-year-old Sophie Pascoe won her first medal, a silver in the women's 100m butterfly S10. She went on to win gold medals in 100m backstroke S10, 100m breaststroke SB9 and 200m individual medley SM10. 

In 1984, Susan Devoy became the first New Zealander to win the women’s title at the prestigious British Open squash tournament, the ‘Wimbledon of Squash’.

In their first outing on the international stage, the New Zealand women’s football team won the invitational Asian Cup tournament in Hong Kong, beating Thailand 3–1 in the final. 

American Lynne Cox swam from the North Island to the South in 12 hours 7 minutes. The fourth person to do so, she battled heavy seas and strong winds.

Yvette Williams (later Corlett) won the long jump to become New Zealand’s first female Olympic medallist.

Violet Waldron was New Zealand’s first female Olympian, and part of New Zealand’s first Olympic team of four. She competed in freestyle swimming in the 1920 Antwerp Summer Olympics.