Differences and similarities at coaches conference

After a one year gap, the 2010 World Rowing Coaches Conference came back in fine form to give insight and inspiration.

The conference was topped off by a gala dinner with winners of Female Crew of the Year for 2009 Susan Francia and Erin Cafaro (USA) and Adaptive Crew of the Year, Tom Aggar (GBR) accepting their award in person. Francia and Cafaro paid tribute to their coach Tom Terhaar (who was Coach of the Year, but could not make it to the dinner in person). Francia and Cafaro also described their road to getting chosen for the pair and racing at Worlds being their first ‘real race’. “It wasn’t pretty but it worked,” they added. Aggar talked abut what adaptive rowing means to his life. Winner of Male Crew of the Year, Mahe Drysdale (NZL) sent a video acceptance along with recipient of the Distinguished Service to Rowing award which went to Don Rowlands (NZL).

Copenhagen played host to the coaches conference with the theme of “Duration, Optimisation of Rowing Performance and Training.”

Organised by FISA’s competitive commission, World Rowing spoke to commission member Rosie Mayglothling about the weekend.

World Rowing: Are there any general points you would like to make about the speakers?
Rosie Mayglothling: The speakers were of a really high quality and fairly consistent in their messages about low intensity and high quantities of training for success with small amounts of intensive training. The Norwegians have a really good balance and stability programme as used by their skiers and Olaf Tufte.

WR: Can you give me a bit of an overview of points made by coaches Hartmut Buschbacher (GER) and Premysl Panuska (CZE)?
RM: Buschbacher gave an overview of the systems that he had worked in: German Democratic Republic (GDR), USA, China and Germany. For GDR he was an athlete and then a development coach. He coached the GDR women's sweep and had good success. It was an organised system with consistently quality training.

The USA was a fragmented programme based around the universities. The athletes are semi-professional, training two times a day as they are not supported. The athletes did not cut corners, they were open to change and had to pay their own way in the sport. The women's standard was raised by having 80 women's university programmes for rowing.
 
In China there are 22 provinces with rowing programmes. The numbers and size of the athletes is very impressive. The athletes are full time and train very hard. The China Games (every four years) are very important. The athletes are underdeveloped in strength but have a great attitude to training. They could do 7-9 weeks of altitude training on one go.
 
Germany has had different centres fort the different disciplines and as a result there are different testing systems. Hartmut has introduced more side-by-side training. They are now building on junior and under-23 successes. The senior men that won the eight last year were not so big and not so fast on the ergo but they were really outstanding in technique and synchronisation in the boat.

WR: What was most striking from the history of 150 years of rowing faster?
RM: The history of rowing faster was the increase in the size of the participants decade by decade. This increase in size resulted in faster boats but it was not linear relationship. The introduction of the sliding seat made the most difference to the speed of the boat.

WR: What were Seiler’s thoughts on trying to predict future performance?
RM: There are complex reasons why the athletes of the future are unlikely to be able to go over 8 litres per minute in oxygen uptake. The future developments may come from blade developments but this is a very complex area to model.

WR: Is there a coaches conference planned for 2011?
RM: Yes, it will be the 22nd to 25th January in London.

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