Rhodes Scholar Tomlinson reflects on Academy Southland

Competing at the 2009 junior world track cycling championships helped set Hamish Tomlinson on a path to becoming a Rhodes Scholar and Oxford graduate. 

These days Tomlinson’s riding centres around his London commute, but go back a decade and the Invercargill-raised high achiever was a member of Academy Southland and one of the most promising track cyclists in the country. 

He was part of the New Zealand squad which competed at the 2009 junior worlds in Moscow, edged off the podium by the home team in the men’s team pursuit bronze medal ride-off. 

“At that stage, cycling was everything in my life, it’s pretty much all I cared about,” Tomlinson said last week in his first visit home in three years. 

There’s no question Tomlinson was always destined to make his mark on the world in some way, but he doesn’t hesitate when paying credit to his time in the Academy – a two-year programme designed to prepare Southland’s best young athletes for competition on the national and international stage – for playing a significant role in his development. 

Photo: Hamish Tomlinson, left, and Cam Karwowski back on the SIT Velodrome last week. The pair were both members of Academy Southland and part of the 2009 New Zealand track cycling junior worlds team. Pic: Eugene Bonthuys

“In 2010 I went to university and I was in the second year of the (Academy Southland) programme. They kept supporting me even though I was living in Christchurch studying engineering,” he said. 

“That’s when I started shifting my focus to academics and Jason (McKenzie, programme manager) supported me through that transition as well.” 

And what a transition it’s been. 

The mental skills which form a key component of the Academy programme were equally relevant to academic achievement. 

That opportunity to compete on the international stage and seeing what other Southland athletes were able to do, gave Tomlinson the freedom to dream. 

“I talk about this a lot. Here in Invercargill we have cultivated this unique culture of excellence, a culture of not being scared to give it a crack,” he said. 

“Ever since I was at junior worlds I was like, ‘I’m from Invercargill, but that doesn’t matter’. Eddie Dawkins is from Invercargill, but he went and took on the world.” 

Tomlinson’s engineering studies earned him a Rhodes Scholarship, an international postgraduate award for students to study at the University of Oxford. 

He’d been inspired by seeing Rhodes Scholar Christine French’s photo hanging in the foyer at James Hargest College during his high school days. 

Having completed his PhD in engineering at Oxford, Tomlinson now works in London for an artificial intelligence company on projects which he can’t elaborate too much about, but which could one day change the face of medicine. 

“It’s a little Secret Squirrel,” he admits. 

“The vision of what my team is trying to do is precision medicine where we try to redefine what the boundaries of what we consider diseases are and try and come up with more novel, distinct sub-types of diseases which might be more successful to create medicines for. I think it’s quite an exciting vision, but it’s pretty early days for that sort of technology.” 

Tomlinson spends his days reading academic papers, writing computer software and having meetings to come up with new ideas. 

“I cycle commute to London, I get my Lycra on and fly past people on much more expensive bikes than I have. It’s your stereotypical technology company; there’s a ball pit in one corner and snack bar, then a bunch of computer screens with a lot of nerds like myself.” 

In a company with about 300 employees, there are about 80 nationalities represented. He’s the only New Zealander in his team – in fact there aren’t even any British people in the team. 

“I’m trying to educate them about the New Zealand way of doing things,” he jokes. 

Invercargill is still home for Tomlinson. He gets tired of explaining just how long it takes to fly back to New Zealand, but it’s also where he proposed to his now-wife two days after introducing her to the velodrome which formed such an important part of his upbringing. 

Tomlinson took success on the track and used it to imagine what else was impossible in life. It’s the sort of Southland story we need to tell more often.