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From Sir Edmund Hillary to Jonah Lomu — the New Zealanders who changed their sports, their fields and their world.
New Zealand has produced an extraordinary number of world-class achievers — scientists, athletes, adventurers, artists and leaders who have left their mark on the world. These are the people every New Zealander knows, and that the rest of the world should know too.
SportColin Meads is widely regarded as the greatest All Black of all time. Known as "Pinetree" for his imposing physique, the King Country farmer played 55 Tests for New Zealand between 1957 and 1971 and was the dominant forward of his era. He was voted New Zealand Player of the Century in 1999.
Tough, uncompromising and utterly committed, Meads embodied everything New Zealanders admire in their rugby players. He is the measure against which all subsequent All Blacks have been judged.
Jonah Lomu was the first genuine global superstar of rugby union. At 1.96m and 120kg, he combined the size of a prop with the speed of a winger — a combination that simply hadn't existed before in the professional game. His performance at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, where he ran through and over England almost single-handedly, is one of sport's most iconic moments.
Lomu played 63 Tests for the All Blacks and scored 37 tries — a record at the time. He died in 2015 at just 40 years old, and tributes flooded in from around the sporting world.
Arthur Lydiard is the most influential running coach in history. Born in Auckland in 1917, he devised a system of training based on high-mileage aerobic conditioning that transformed distance running worldwide. His methods produced Olympic champions and are still the foundation of modern endurance training.
Lydiard essentially invented jogging as a recreational activity, taking his ideas from the track to ordinary people seeking fitness. He was inducted into the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame in 1990 and received the Order of New Zealand Medal for his extraordinary contribution to sport.
Bruce McLaren was a pioneering racing driver and engineer from Auckland who founded one of the most successful Formula 1 teams in history. He began racing in New Zealand as a teenager, won his first Grand Prix at just 22, and became the youngest driver to win a Formula 1 race at the time.
McLaren Cars — founded in 1963 — went on to win numerous Formula 1 World Championships and continues to be one of the sport's elite teams. Bruce McLaren died testing one of his own cars at Goodwood in 1970, aged just 32. His legacy lives on in every McLaren that takes to the track.
Possum Bourne was New Zealand's greatest rally driver and one of the most popular sporting figures the country has produced. He won five Asia-Pacific Rally Championships and was a major force in the World Rally Championship throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
His cheerful personality, distinctive driving style and fierce competitiveness made him beloved by fans worldwide. He died in 2003 from injuries sustained in a road accident in Australia. A memorial to him stands at the Pikes Peak hill climb in Colorado, where he was a multiple class winner.
Sir Bob Charles is New Zealand's greatest golfer and the finest left-handed golfer in the history of the game. In 1963 he became the first — and, for decades, the only — left-handed player to win a Major, taking the Open Championship at Royal Lytham & St Annes.
Charles was renowned for his extraordinary putting — widely considered the best putter of his generation. He continued competing on the Senior Tour into his 70s, winning titles decades after most players had retired.
Sir Edmund Hillary is New Zealand's greatest hero. On 29 May 1953, alongside Tenzing Norgay, he became the first person to stand on the summit of Mount Everest. The news reached London on the morning of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation, and the two events became permanently linked in the national memory.
After Everest, Hillary devoted much of his life to the Sherpa people of Nepal, building schools and hospitals in the Khumbu region. He was appointed to the New Zealand five dollar note and remains, by any measure, the most admired New Zealander of the 20th century.
Ernest Rutherford is one of the greatest scientists in history — the father of nuclear physics. Born in Nelson in 1871, he discovered that atoms have a nucleus and went on to split the atom for the first time in 1917. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 and became the first New Zealander to be honoured in this way.
Rutherford's discoveries fundamentally changed humanity's understanding of matter and opened the door to nuclear energy and modern particle physics. He appears on the New Zealand $100 note — fitting recognition for one of the greatest scientific minds the world has produced.
Richard Pearse was a New Zealand farmer and inventor who may have achieved powered flight before the Wright Brothers. On 31 March 1903 — nine months before Kitty Hawk — Pearse reportedly flew a powered monoplane of his own design for several hundred metres near Temuka in South Canterbury before crashing into a hedge.
Working in remarkable isolation with no formal engineering training, Pearse designed and built his aircraft largely from bamboo, wire and canvas. His engine and aircraft incorporated features decades ahead of their time, and he is now recognised as one of aviation's great pioneers.
John Britten was a New Zealand engineer and inventor who, working from his backyard in Christchurch with a small team, designed and built one of the greatest motorcycles ever made. The Britten V1000 won every race it entered and set multiple world records in the early 1990s.
Britten's achievement was extraordinary — he used no conventional manufacturing, designing everything from scratch and using innovative materials and techniques years before the mainstream industry. Time magazine named the Britten one of the best designs of the 20th century. He died of melanoma in 1995 at just 45.
Sir Peter Jackson is New Zealand's most celebrated filmmaker and one of the most successful directors in cinema history. Born in Pukerua Bay in 1961, he began making amateur films as a teenager and went on to direct the Lord of the Rings trilogy — one of the greatest achievements in the history of cinema.
The trilogy won 17 Academy Awards and earned over $2.9 billion worldwide, transforming New Zealand into a major international film production hub. Jackson's Weta Workshop and Weta Digital became world leaders in film technology, and his work created thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of tourism revenue for New Zealand.
Sam Neill is one of New Zealand's most internationally recognised actors. Born in Northern Ireland and raised in New Zealand, he has had a career spanning five decades across film, television and theatre. He is perhaps best known internationally for playing Dr Alan Grant in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park.
Neill has appeared in over 100 films and television series and is a passionate advocate for New Zealand wine — he runs Two Paddocks vineyard in Central Otago. He was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the film industry.
Kate Sheppard is New Zealand's greatest political reformer. As the leader of the suffrage movement, she was the driving force behind New Zealand becoming the first self-governing country in the world to grant women the right to vote, on 19 September 1893.
Sheppard organised a nationwide petition campaign that gathered nearly 32,000 signatures — almost a quarter of the adult female population at the time. Her work changed the course of New Zealand history and set an example that inspired suffrage movements around the world. She appears on the New Zealand $10 note.