The month of May

The month of May has been all about making a claim for selection to Team GB, and Britain’s Modern Pentathletes have made their moves.  Unofficially, it seems we have 5 women and 3 men who have achieved the Olympic Qualifying Standard (OQS) laid down by the international federation which means we have 8 athletes who have achieved the benchmark of top 36 in the world in 2012.  This is a fantastic testament to Pentathlon GB’s World Class Performance programme and the crucial work of UK Sport and the National Lottery in funding our programme.

To paraphrase Peter Keen, the Director of Performance at UK Sport, pressure, anxiety and fear of failure have been the constant companions of our athletes, but crucially, as he goes on to say, this does not prevent them from performing.

Learning to handle oneself in these situations is one of the great life skills developed by the high performance athlete.  It was thus that Mhairi Spence and Samantha Murray stepped up at the World Championships in mid-May and won gold and bronze medals to secure their qualification, and Nick Woodbridge and Sam Weale continued their consistent run of form with top 7 places at other qualifying events.

A few years ago I wrote my Masters dissertation on the subject of ‘Healthy Competition’ and whether such a state could exist when success was finite – e.g. selection being limited to just a few.  I concluded that it is indeed possible to create a competitive environment that is productive and personally enriching, and I was reminded of this when reading the comments of Samantha Murray about her rival and team mate, Mhairi Spence.  “If there’s one person you can look at every day of the week, look up to and think, if I want to get anywhere in life that’s how I’ve got to work, it’s Mhairi Spence” she said after the world championships.  For me, this indicates how one athlete’s success drives on another, and so long as the terms of reference are about world standards and not just ‘Beating the Brits’, then a positive competitive climate is possible.

This month also saw our final recce to the Olympic Village and first sight of the Team GB House HQ on the edge of Olympic Park that will be the operational nerve centre for the team during the Games.  It is quite clear that new standards have been set by the BOA in supporting the team inside and outside the Village and we really could not ask for more from our management team at this stage.

The difficult task of selection awaits me at the end of this week, when 8 qualified athletes become 4 selected athletes and the final preparation for London 2012 gets underway.