Dan Carter on kicking 1,598 goals in 24 hours for charity: ‘OK, sounds doable’

When Dan Carter signed off from international rugby, he was rightly proud of his 1,598 Test points. Ask him how he feels about them come Friday afternoon.

This Thursday, at 7pm local time, Carter will stride on to the familiar turf of Eden Park in Auckland and start kicking goals once more. Only this time he is aiming to land 1,598 of them, one for each of his Test points, a record haul that surpasses the next best (of one Jonny Wilkinson) by 352.

He has given himself 24 hours to complete the task. Expect him to be cursing his own prowess with every swing of the boot beyond 2pm local – roughly when he should move past Wilkinson’s tally. He will still have another five hours to go.

Carter is using his 24-hour kickathon to raise money for Unicef’s water, sanitation and health (Wash) programme in New Zealand and the Pacific. “I’m big on numbers,” he says. “I’ve always wanted to do something like this. I’ve been an ambassador for Unicef for about seven years and am passionate about enriching the lives of children, so I’ve set up my own fund, the DC10 fund.”

His passion for helping children is well placed, given his wife, the New Zealand hockey international Honor Carter, gave birth to a fourth son in June last year. Carter feels he is up to speed on the sleep-deprivation front; otherwise there is no training manual for him here because, well, no one has ever tried to kick 1,598 goals in one session.

“When I started thinking about this, I wanted to see how long I would need to kick 150 goals. It took 45 minutes, but I pulled a quad and had blisters all over my feet. So I thought again. That’s when I came up with 1,598 in 24 hours, which works out at just over 66 an hour. About a kick a minute. OK, that sounds doable.”

Everyth