A former Olympian critically injured by a man who ran him down at a Waikato road works site is ready to focus on his rehabilitation now that the driver has been sent to prison.<\/p>\n
Dave Rodger, an Olympic rower, was a senior traffic management supervisor with Fulton Hogan on 11 January this year when Matamata man Finn Higgins came speeding through the site, swerving between machines and knocking over road cones, after an argument at a nearby wheelie bin hire business.<\/p>\n
Several road workers restrained Higgins until he calmed down after he pulled over and “some level of an altercation” played out.<\/p>\n
He then got back in his car – which also had his two infant children inside – and turned around, and drove back through the site before deliberately running down Rodger, who was standing in what is dubbed in traffic management as “the dead zone”.<\/p>\n
The dead zone is the area, up to 30m, immediately after which traffic has been cordoned off.<\/p>\n
Higgins narrowly missed another worker and Rodger, a father-of-three, bore the full brunt of the impact and was thrown backward through the air about 10m.<\/p>\n
His injuries were so severe that Crown solicitor Jacinda Hamilton told Justice Gerard Van Bohemen in the High Court at Hamilton this morning, that police were ready to declare a homicide investigation.<\/p>\n
But through his persistence and the benefits of strength from fitness, the 69-year-old pulled through and was able to walk with the aid of crutches into the courtroom and tell Higgins what he’d endured the past nine months.<\/p>\n
rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A former Olympian critically injured by a man who ran him down at a Waikato road works site is ready to focus on his rehabilitation now that the driver has been sent to prison. Dave Rodger, an Olympic rower, was a senior traffic management supervisor with Fulton Hogan on 11 January this year when Matamata […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11938,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11937"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11937\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11939,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11937\/revisions\/11939"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}