NEW ZEALAND ATHLETES NEED HARDER TRAINING

Press, Volume XCIII, Issue 28008, 30 June 1956, Page 3

NEW ZEALAND ATHLETES NEED HARDER TRAINING

YEW ZEALAND athletes do not do nearly enough hard training, according to the former Dutch Olympic coach, Mr Vlademar Briedis. A professional coach before leaving Europe for New Zealand five years ago, Mr Briedis. a Latvian by birth, has been acting as an amateur coach since his arrival in Canterbury, supervising the

training of several prominent athietes. The best of his charges is Miss Valerie Sloper, who in the last two seasons has developed from a girl of average athletic ability into a shot putter of world class. Miss Sloper was ranked No. 1 Olympic choice by the athletic selectors.

Too much attention is given to the study and teaching of technique by New Zealand athletes, Mr Briedis said. “More emphasis should be laid on hard training with systematic progression throughout the year and from one year to the next. “There are no secrets in technique We can all see the athletes competing, or read accounts of them,” said Mr Briedis. “What we do not see, and what we get garbled and disjointed accounts of. is the method of training used by other athletes. ‘‘One cannot coach merely from fol-

lowing the training schedule of a champion, however, for it must be remembered that usually it has taken him several years of progressive training to reach such an intensity of effort,” said Mr Briedis. “This is where the value of an efficient coach came in,” said Mr Briedis. An inexperienced athlete or coach tended to follow slavishly schedules given in books or contained in articles discussing champions, knowledgeable coach was able to assess the needs of the individual athlete according to his age and physique and frame his training programme to suit that.

Most New Zealanders regard athletics as a summer sport only, said Mr Briedis, and that was one of the factors limiting the standard of the sport here. The winter was the period for building strength and basic skills on which the next season's improvement was based. Full advantage must be taken of what little light there was on the short winter evenings and that must be supplemented by the use of indoor facilities, which New Zealand appeared to lack.

The handicap system of raring, prevalent in New Zealand, had little to warrant its retention, according to Mr Briedis. He recommended a system of grade racing instead. Although Canterbury had used such a system, its benefits had been negated by insufficient planning and supervision. It was wrong that athletes should nominate themselves for the various grades as had been done in Canterbury, Mr Briedis said. There should be a special grading committee whose job it was to draft standards to define the grades in each event, and supervise the grading of each athlete. As the general level of performance within an event rose or fell, then the standards could be adjusted accordingly. There might be some justification for handicaps in distance races, but here again he thought it better to combine the grades into one race and distinguish the competitors of each grade by a different coloured sash. Additional encouragement would be given by the grade system in that there would be three placed competitors for each grade, whereas when all the competitors were combined into a handicap race there were only three placings.