Community Champions: Bill Godsall.

He’s Central Otago’s grandfather of sport, eight times Otago Marathon champion – a best time of 2hrs 24min, notching multiple Southern Traverse and veteran Coast to Coast wins – a 14-time Coast to Coast competitor.

At 68, Bill Godsall is still as fit as a buck rat but hung up his endurance race bib last year (2023), just a few years after retiring from a successful 22-year career as Sport Central Otago coordinator. 

This was his happy place, “creating a lifestyle of sport for young people”, working closely with local schools, Olympic champions and medal winners once among his young proteges.

Creating and organising great sporting events has long been his thing, from establishing the Central Otago Sports Awards to ensure junior achievers felt special, to organising zone and regional championships for local primary schools.

“It’s my passion,” he says.

While Bill officially retired earlier this year from a 30-year association with the Cromwell Promotions Group’s Cromwell Series organising events like The Bannockburn Classic, Round Lake Dunstan Challenge and Lake Dunstan Triathlon, he’s still heavily involved in endurance racing.

He’s organised many high profile, local multisport, cycling and running events, including the successful Challenge Wanaka Multi Race, which he co-founded five years ago. 

He’s handed the reins for the Round Lake Dunstan to the Central Otago Cycle Club now, passing on all that he’s learned, but he’s still helping with traffic management.

Bill back in his heyday. PHOTO: SUPPLIED

Bill’s organised the NZ Road Cycle Championships twice, local silver medal Olympian Nicole Shields helping him to inspire kids as a youngster herself while at Clyde Primary School. 

Bill also assessed local Olympic gold medallist kayaker Finn Butcher as a multisport Coast to Coast kayaker.

Kayaking is still a big part of Bill’s life, but his greatest kicks now come from hunting and fishing with his grandkids and encouraging a new generation in their love of sport, including orienteering, rugby and basketball. 

There’s one thing Grandad Bill won’t be passing on to them though, his own sporting aspirations. 

“That passion has got to come from the kids themselves,” Bill says. 

He’s seen plenty of sideline parents at their worst throughout his years working with schools and kids.

“People forget how young children are when they’re playing sport. In primary school it’s important to temper and encourage that and make it fun, let them do their own thing.”

Bill takes a well earned break

By high school those sporting achievements become so much more important, especially to parents and schools. 

“That can affect kids and turn them off sport. I’ve seen parents get grumpy when their kids don’t achieve but we need to support them when they don’t do well too,” Bill says.

Wanaka Primary principal Wendy Bamford invited him to speak at the Upper Clutha Primary School Athletics Champs. 

“She said, ‘Regardless of whether you win or lose, the sun will still come up tomorrow’ and that’s so true.” 

Too much pressure can result in kids resenting sport, he says.

There was never any pressure in his own sporting childhood. Bill was a late bloomer at multisport, growing up one of nine Godsall children in the tiny rural North Otago township of Lake Waitaki where Bill’s dad worked at the power station. 

“We did everything with the other village kids and got to know each other well.” 

Bill clocks yet another win after doing the hard yards.

So well that he married his childhood sweetheart from two doors down, Irene ‘Spud’ Murphy, the pair head boy and girl together at Kurow District High.

Bill admits he was a ‘practical’ boy, preferring woodwork over academia, and “went to school for the sport”, a practical joker too. 

The headmaster had a hobby farm and brought eggs to school every morning. 

“He’d always pat his pockets looking for his keys, so I sneaked an egg into his jacket pocket which broke when he patted his pocket during a school assembly,” Bill grins. 

“Everybody else thought it was funny but not him. I got the cane.”

Bill’s always had a fascination with car racing, a once long-held desire to be a Formula One driver never quite fulfilled, but he did race motorbikes for a while. 

“It was nice to be able to go fast legally,” he grins. However, his own speed was about to “spin his wheels” as he discovered running and endurance racing.

Bill and his grandson /fishing buddy Harry after they strike a great catch.

While working in Twizel on the power project, Bill raced his first triathlon in the 1970s, surprising himself and placing second. 

A not so fit smoker friend then bet Bill and his mate that he would beat them in the Timaru Half Marathon, which he didn’t, but Bill placed 13th out of a field of 250. 

“I thought, ‘I might be quite good at this.” 

By his late 20s he was hooked, marathons and many wins to follow.

He’d worked on farms around Mid-Canterbury and the Waitaki Valley before becoming a contract inspector for the Ministry of Works on the Twizel canals and power station. 

Bill doing his thing back in the day in the Southern Traverse.

Bill was then project manager for an Australian company on the Clyde Dam project, managing drilling programmes and working for them around the country.

He was working in Cambridge and keen to get back to Central Otago - his endurance racers’ heaven, so when the Sports Central Otago co-ordinator role was advertised by the local councils he applied.

“I was working in Cambridge and got an interview, so I finished making the dam I was working on safe at 2am and caught the plane to Queenstown from Hamilton first thing,” he says. 

“I was on my way to the airport and realised I had no good clothes with me so a young lady in a store in Wellington Airport dressed me and I got the job.”

Bill and his grandson Harry.

He will never really retire and the body’s not wearing out, despite running 100 miles a week, training three times a day, before work, at lunchtime and after work during the peak of his running career. 

“We’re always trying to win and get bigger and better as athletes, but we don’t stop and say, ‘Wow! I did well,” he says. 

“Throughout my running career I just kept pushing myself. I didn’t stop to feel proud of what I’d achieved so far.”

Now is time for that, Bill.

PHOTOS: SUPPLIED

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