Blitzing the bronco: Which New Zealand rugby players top the charts in summer of 2026

Saturday, 7 February 2026

ANALYSIS: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fittest of them all?

As the start of a new rugby season dawns, that is a question answered by the brutal bronco, where New Zealand’s Super Rugby Pacific players get pushed to their aerobic and anaerobic limits in the lung-burning, jelly-leg-inducing test that is all pain for the participants and all pleasure for the trainers.

For those unfamiliar, think a 1200 metre run, featuring 29 sharp turns. Shuttles of 20 metres, 40 metres and 60 metres, five times, as fast as you can, no rest.

Then get ready to clean up the mess.

“When you empty the tank in a bronco, if you push the boat out pretty hard, it’s tough, eh,” All Blacks head of performance, Nic Gill, admits to The Post.

“You’re going to be bent over, or you’ll lie flat, some people might have a little vomit. It does depend on how hard you push yourself.”

And there are guys certainly willing to go to their limits.

Each of the New Zealand franchises is required to run the test, with Gill then fed all the results, as he is with several other assessments on the country’s approximate 250 professional players, in order to gauge their strength, speed, acceleration, body composition, and injury-profile markers (such as how strong their hamstrings or necks might be, and how susceptible they then might be).

But it’s the bronco which carries much of the intrigue, probably given it can be easily replicated by any fan willing to jump off the couch, tie up the laces and head down to the park.

For the Super players, the first week, or even more brutally for some teams, the very first day, back from the Christmas/New Year fortnight off, marks a good spot in the calendar to run the test, given there is still six or so weeks till season’s start, and a bit of time to still work up their fitness levels if required.

Up until last year, All Blacks players would complete the bronco at their national January camp, but instead now also do it with their franchises when they enter the fay a week or two later than their other team-mates.

“It’s definitely one you dread to do,” admits Crusaders halfback, and bronco gun, Kyle Preston, who, in his maiden year of Super footy last season set a new Crusaders record for the test, then again topped the charts this year.

“It’s a funny vibe in the environment first day back when you know you’ve got the bronco first thing in the morning.

“There is a little bit of nerves, and the boys are a little bit quieter than usual, because they know they’ve got a bit of work to put in.

“You try your best to kind of not think of it too much until it’s happening, so you don’t stress too much about it.

“Once it’s done it’s a bit of a relief.”

Gill, who has worked with the All Blacks for close to two decades, started using the test as a running session around 10 years ago. Long gone are the beep test and yo-yo test. These days, the bronco, with its low-resource, low-equipment and quickfire-nature, is commonplace across the game worldwide.

“It’s reasonably specific to rugby in that it’s lots of deceleration/acceleration,” Gill explains.

“Periods of playing rugby can go from the average of 45 seconds to the All Blacks’ [2023] World Cup quarterfinal against Ireland, [where] the ball was in play for the longest period of play ever, I think, for seven and a half minutes.

“If your bronco’s not very good, it’s highly likely that out on the field you’re not going to be able to get through as much work as possibly you could if you were fitter.

“We do them in the All Blacks just during trainings, or after games, or before games, for players that we want to check in with where they’re at.

“It’s a checkpoint to see whether you need to do a bit more work and lose a bit of body fat, or change your diet, or do more running, or get on the bike, or do less lifting. It’s a bit of an indicator of where we need to go.”

Who’s got the goods?

Beauden Barrett’s rapid four minutes and 12 seconds with the Blues in mid-2020, when the competition was starting up again after Covid lockdown, has aged extremely well.

No-one in New Zealand rugby has been able to better that, though Cam Roigard equalled it at All Blacks camp in 2024.

Andrew Knewstubb did clock 4:11 in 2024 with the All Blacks Sevens, though the difference in training methods between the two codes has now become so marked that it would be considered an unfair comparison to anyone in the 15s.

Worldwide, the best apparent time is by midfielder Seb Atkinson, who in February last year registered a stunning 4:08, before going on to debut for England.

As for the here and now this year, the quickest time amongst the New Zealand players (Roigard and Xavier Roe were two hotshots who didn’t make the start lines, while Barrett clocked 4:31 on what was said to be a severely windy Auckland day that slowed his time appreciably) went to uncontracted Chiefs youngster Haki Wiseman, with 4:18.

The 19-year-old, who last year debuted for Taranaki in a pre-season Ranfurly Shield game and was the second-five for New Zealand at the Under-20 World Cup, was two seconds quicker than his fellow uncontracted U20s team-mate Jai Tamati, the Manawatū halfback topping the Hurricanes charts with 4:20.

Preston still won the Crusaders ‘race’, despite being some 12 seconds slower than his searing 4:13 of last year, which he puts down to putting on 4kg during the few weeks he spent in All Blacks camp, when he earned a shock call-up, and a test debut, due to multiple injuries in the No 9 ranks.

He was one second ahead of Louie Chapman, with Mitchell Drummond close behind, in a clear indication of just how much halfbacks tend to shine in the test.

“We do a lot of running in the game, so for us that’s a staple, to be able to be fit and get around the park and to be able to play quick footy,” he acknowledges, revealing his approach to the test centres on trying to stick with the front group for as long as he can, then knowing he’ll have some in reserve to push past the rest later on.

“Naturally you tend to go quite fast on the first rep because you’re all excited and all the other boys go quite fast.

“But there’s so many turns in the bronco, a lot of it’s how you can turn as efficiently as you can and getting out of those turns to accelerate again is probably the biggest thing.

“By the last 60 [metres] your legs are jelly and you feel like you’re running a bit awkward and your technique’s a bit off, but you’ve just got to push through that last rep.”

Size is everything

But while there are whippets sizzling on the stopwatch, some of the more interesting numbers, as far as Gill is concerned, come from bigger men, and how they measure up given their relative size difference.

“Body weight influences your time, significantly,” he notes.

This is where his coined ‘Bronco Power’ comes into play, and he converts scores into watts to measure the power the players are generating. A larger athlete doing the same time as a smaller athlete would mean they have more momentum to go into a collision with on the field.

That’s where he references the likes of Jordie Barrett, at 102kg, clocking 4:31, being impressive.

Then, even more outstanding being Fabian Holland, the undoubted find of 2025 and the World Rugby Breakthrough Player of the Year. He stopped the clock at 4:47, a time not far off the best-performed locks Gill has seen in Scott Barrett and Brodie Retallick, though with the 23-year-old carrying plenty more bulk at 126kg.

“Because you’re having to slow down and speed up to turn, that takes a whole lot of muscular effort to decelerate and then accelerate again up to speed, so these humans, man, it’s like turning a big tugboat around, she’s impressive, that’s for sure.”

And while the Super coaches will be looking for no-one to go much over the 5:10 mark, Gill says the size factor always has to come into consideration, pointing out the difference between the average weight of a Super Rugby prop (around 115-123kg) and an All Blacks prop (around 135kg), and so that the likes of Ethan de Groot’s 5:22, at 132kg, is still a time to be very happy with.

What the Super coaches want (roughly)

Props: 5:10

Hookers: 4:50

Locks: 5:00

Loose forwards: 4:45

Halfbacks/first-fives: 4:30

Midfielders: 4:40

Outside backs: 4:30

Fastest NZ rugby bronco times

4:12 ‒ Beauden Barrett (2020, Blues)

4:12 ‒ Cam Roigard (2024, Hurricanes)

4:13 ‒ Cam Roigard (2025, Hurricanes)

4:13 ‒ Kyle Preston (2025, Crusaders)

4:14 ‒ Jonathan Ruru (2020, Blues)

4:15 ‒ Damian McKenzie (2024, All Blacks)

2026 bronco winners

Chiefs: Haki Wiseman (uncontracted), 4:18

Hurricanes: Jai Tamati (uncontracted), 4:20

Highlanders: Andrew Knewstubb, 4:20

Blues: Cole Forbes, 4:22

Crusaders: Kyle Preston, 4:25

Nic Gill’s notable mentions (given their size)

Jordie Barrett (102kg), 4:31

Fabian Holland (126kg), 4:47