Preparing Skaters For Olympic Challenge

 

by James Skitt - 18.12.09

With the Winter Olympics in Vancouver only two months away, this year’s festive period coincides with a crucial stage in the training programmes of many of Britain’s Olympic bound athletes, including the short track speed skaters who have qualified for the Games in February.

The sport, which receives Performance Nutrition, Performance Analysis and Physiotherapy support from the English Institute of Sport (EIS) at it’s Nottingham base, has high hopes of building on the 5th and 8th placed finishes of Jon Eley and Sarah Lindsay respectively in Torino four years ago, meaning there will be little respite from their hectic training schedule over Christmas and New Year, according to GB Performance Director Stuart Horsepool.

“We’ll be training as normal except on Christmas Day” he insisted when eis2win.co.uk caught up with him at the National Ice Centre recently. “We’d be in here then too if we could, but the ice rink is closed so we don’t have that option.”

Horsepool, preparing for his fifth Winter Olympics (third as PD/coach), has overseen the qualification and participation of the British team, with a significant emphasis on them contributing to Britain’s hopes of achieving success in Vancouver.

“We did some research after the previous games in Torino and discovered that only one medal has been won by a skater who hasn’t been part of a team at the last four Winter Olympics, we therefore felt it was important that we tried to build a larger squad capable of qualifying” he says.

And despite a challenging qualification event, which saw an untimely virus sweep through the squad, the team managed to secure two qualifications in each of the men’s distances (500m, 1000m and 1500m), along with a further two in the women’s 500m and one in each of the 1000m and 1500m.

In addition, the men’s relay squad will also be skating in Vancouver, however the women were unfortunately ruled out when an accidental collision at their final changeover led to their disqualification at the qualifiers.

But having beaten the odds, Horsepool is now focused on helping those who did qualify realise their potential in Canada.

“When they go to an Olympic games it all becomes a bit like a circus and it’s about coping with that environment” he explains.

“Huge exposure for the sport in this country is not necessarily  something I crave, but my job is to help the athletes cope with the environment of an Olympic games in which they enter this cauldron where suddenly they are asked for live interviews or to speak at packed press conferences.”

“Some people rise to that – others get suppressed by it. So it’s about understanding each of your athletes and knowing what inspires them and helps them develop their best performance.”

“My philosophy is that you can’t make an athlete great – they’re already great. The role played by myself and my coaches and support practitioners is to get whatever’s inside of them out.”

“We’ve got a great team around us, including the team from the EIS, which are helping us to prepare for the Games. One of the biggest problems in minority sports is that you get National coaches / Performance Directors who think they know everything. They don’t allow people who are experts in various fields to come in – they feel threatened by them. It takes a lot of courage for someone in that portion of control to allow people to come in and develop the athlete onto the highest level, as I see it, my job is about balancing those levels of input to achieve the highest level outcome - Olympic Medals .”

The GB team for Vancouver will be announced by the British Olympic Association (BOA) on the 7th January at the National Ice Centre Nottingham.

Photography © Getty Images