45 days and counting...

45 days and counting, and time appears to be accelerating towards London 2012.  June saw the announcement of the Modern Pentathlon team in the historic surroundings of the Old Naval College at Greenwich – the venue for our riding and combined running and shooting events.  With controversy surrounding some other Olympic team selections, we were eager to cross every ‘t’ and dot every ‘i’ in following our process and picking the right athletes.  This is a moment of truth for management – do you have a policy that is fair and transparent, and at the same time provides scope for professional judgement?  With athletes gaining qualification results over a 12 month period this is not as easy as it sounds; turn the clock back 12 months, for instance, and Samantha Murray, so stunning this season, wasn’t in the top five on the British rankings. 

As it was, our two women selected themselves with their podium finishes at May’s World Championships and Nick Woodbridge’s consistently strong season made him the strongest of our three top class men.  Beijing Olympian Sam Weale took the second of the men’s selections ahead of Jamie Cooke who had done so well to reach the qualifying standard last season as well as win the world junior title in the autumn.  Tough on him as it was, I feel very confident that his time will come.

There is no question that the hype surrounding a home Games has the potential to distract us in the final lead into London.  To mitigate this, we will go abroad.  The first of two overseas preparation camps started this week, and after a 10 day interlude at Bath we will be back out to France for the final run in.  With two new Olympians in the team, I am conscious that they will not get to experience the magic of the Opening Ceremony, but we will do our best to mark it in style nonetheless.  Competing on the last two days of the Games means that the experience they will have of the Olympics will be condensed and tightly managed.  The skill is to tap into the inspiration of being part of a home Games whilst re-focusing on the job in hand.  So much was there to take in, that I remember my first visit to the Olympic village restaurant as an athlete in 1988 lasted 3 hours - and I only went in for a snack!

After the team announcement the next big moment for the athletes will be the Team GB kitting out at Loughborough University, site of the official final preparation camp.  There are more than 80 items to be collected and I have warned the team to have no more than two people per car – otherwise something will have to be left behind.  Being inducted into the team is always a special moment, and I am glad it is happening at one the UK’s finest sporting institutions with a rich heritage of producing Olympians.

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.

'Will doing this help the athletes go faster'?

Sometimes when I stand in a cold, windy field watching our athletes perform I wonder why after all these years I still do it.  Then I witness a performance such as Samantha Murray’s in Budapest two weeks ago and I know exactly why.  She ran and shot brilliantly to move from 20^th place in the world cup event to 4^th, within a whisker of the podium and promptly followed it up a week later by winning bronze at world cup 4 in Rostov, southern Russia.  Samantha has been the story of Olympic qualification so far, having fought her way back into contention with three top six performances at top level competitions in 2012.  Alongside her, Mhairi Spence has also excelled and Olympic silver medallist in Beijing, Heather Fell, has been consistently in the top 8.  It has been really rewarding to see three British men compete consistently at world class level this season.  Picking two from Nick Woodbridge, Sam Weale and Jamie Cooke means the selectors have genuine contenders to choose from.  We meet this week to pick the team for next month’s world championships in Rome which is the next opportunity to qualify a named place for London 2012. 

Around the all-important performances by the athletes, preparation for the Games continue at pace.  I see my role as removing as many distractions as possible from all those responsible for performance on the field of play.  As the Games get bigger cycle by Olympic cycle so do the distractions, and hence my job.  The contracts, sponsor involvement, media interest, friends and family all are important parts of the whole and yet have the potential to impact performance.  Constantly, we ask ourselves ‘will doing this help the athletes go faster’?  If the answer is an emphatic ‘no’ then we don’t do it.  However, if the answer is a qualified ‘no’ such as fulfilling important media interest, then we manage it proactively on terms that have the least impact.  The athletes feel this too.  My advice is always to think of the short term impact of doing something away from training versus the benefits accruing to when they actually perform on the greatest stage of all.  Give your sponsors all the time they want once you have the medal hanging around your neck. That’s when they will most value you!

One of the great variables of the Modern Pentathlon is that our athletes choose their horse by lot and have just 20 minutes to warm up before riding a show-jumping course at a height of 1.20m.  In contrast to more mechanical and repetitive sports, we value adaptability, flexibility and equanimity in our athletes!  Along with pentathletes from Ireland we have assisted LOCOG with the training and selection of horses for London and have been reassured that they are looking at the right type of horse – neither a ‘push button’ operator nor a highly strung prima donna!  With Britain being such a passionate equestrian nation we all want to make sure that the riding event in London is a fair and worthy competition for all.

The international competition season is now well underway...

The international competition season is now well underway with World Cups 1 & 2 in Charlotte, USA and Rio de Janeiro already completed. Results for our British Modern Pentathlete’s were overall strong with Mhairi Spence making the podium in 2nd place in Charlotte. It was good to see Nick Woodbridge achieve back to back top 6 finishes and also Sam Weale come back strongly in Rio to finish 7th. Our two London qualified athletes Jamie Cooke and Freyja Prentice faltered however, and I feel sure they’ll be looking forward to reasserting themselves at World Cups 3 & 4 in the next month. Also impressive was Samantha Murray who finished 6th in Charlotte as well as winning two ‘B’ category internationals in Hungary this year. It all goes to demonstrate our strength in depth - up to six British women who are capable of achieving the Olympic qualifying standard, and of course, we can only take two. Under the circumstances squad morale is remarkably good and I’ve been impressed by how the athletes have handled questions about this tough situation whenever asked. As the coaching and management team it is our responsibility to keep them focused positively on their next performance and make sure that they all have a fair crack at selection. The two men and two women who come through this process really will have proved themselves worthy challengers for the podium, and our carefully considered selection policy may be tested as never before!

It has been a busy month or so on wider Team GB matters. Firstly a logistics planning session at our final preparation base at Loughborough University, followed by a recce to th
Olympic village with all 26 Olympic Team Leaders. The village is in great shape, and yet I anticipate some challenges in living there. For a start, the real estate is 50% the size of the village in Beijing which itself was 50% the size of Athens in 2004. In other words, it’s compact! This will be great for walking around and gaining easy access to the adjacent Olympic Park, however it could be quite noisy. Regardless, it was good to put all our plans under the microscope and see how the attention to detail in all aspects of performing in the village was coming together.

The squad also welcomed Sarah Brown, wife of the former Prime Minister to our training centre at the University of Bath at the end of February. (Pictured above: With Sarah Brown and Jamie Cooke after completing the Piggy Bank Kids Modern Pentathlon challenge) Along with TV presenter Lorraine Kelly, Sarah had been in training for several months to complete a sponsored Modern Pentathlon event to raise money for her charity Piggy Bank Kids. On the day, Sarah completed all five events on her own as Lorraine had fallen from her horse while training and was not well enough to have a go. Egged on by every member of our Olympic squad, she completed the challenge in impressive style and showed an uncanny talent for the laser pistol shooting element of the Combined Event. It really was a brave effort and thoroughly deserving of the National Squad top presented to her as a memento of the day. Several thousand pounds were also raised for a good cause.

It's been a busy start to 2012...

It’s been a busy start to 2012 with the third and final selection trials and various team GB responsibilities. My role as team leader includes the formal selection process for the team and with a quota of only two men and two women, it has to be fair, transparent and sophisticated at the same time. We have athletes world ranked 4, 8, 13 and 20 in the women’s event alone. All would be worthy of a place at London 2012, and there are another three hard on their heels! We have to make sure we have the best two there. They will have to keep proving their form right up to 6th June 2012 when we make our final nomination to the British Olympic Association, so it is an intense and demanding process.

The third selection trials were distinguished by having the extreme ends of our talent pipeline competing at the same time in the same place - our high performance centre at the University of Bath. 750 nine to sixteen year olds were competing in the schools run / swim biathlon including my own daughter Cordelia, while no more than 200m away on the outdoor Combined Event shoot run range, our Olympic squad were slugging it out. There’s no buying-in talent here, you have to develop and nurture it over the years and as ever it is a combination of factors that makes the difference: opportunity provided by interested parents and teachers, commitment, ability and resilience. Only those that develop a strong combination of these qualities will make it across to the future Olympic squad.

January ended with a day at Loughborough University site for Team GB’s final preparation camp. We had Team Leaders from across the sports working through the specific requirements of their individual sports – kitting out, accreditation, entry into the Olympic Village, selection dates and the Team Member Agreement. The TMA defines every aspect of becoming a member of Team GB and is signed by athletes and officials alike. Although quite legalistic in tone, it is essential guidance when you consider we will have more than 1000 team members across 26 sports all with their own different ways of working away from the Games. I noticed that the subject of online betting has taken on a much bigger profile this time around probably in light of spot betting in Cricket and the like. I’d better make sure I stick to the Lottery then!