Using technology to make the boat go faster

South Africa’s Olympic medal winning coach, Roger Barrow heads the list of contributing coaches as Coach in the Spotlight. Barrow’s 2012 lightweight men’s four became the first African boat ever to win at the Olympic Games and his lightweight men’s double are 2014 World Champions. His men’s pair took silver at the Rio Olympics and in 2016 Barrow became World Rowing’s Coach of the Year. Barrow will discuss creating a winning culture with a limited budget.

Also featured on the programme will be Tom Dyson from Great Britain. During his time as para-rowing’s Lead Coach at British Rowing, he led Tom Aggar to three consecutive world titles in the para PR1 men’s single sculls and the PR3 mixed coxed four to four world titles. At Rio 2016, the British para-rowing team won three Paralympic gold medals and one Paralympic bronze. Dyson will be addressing the conference attendees on how to create a performance environment.

The underlying theme at this year’s World Rowing Coaches Conference will be ‘Using Technology to Make the Boat Go Faster’. Rather than looking at what technology can measure, the discussion will be how coaches can use the information to adjust their programme.  Conny Draper, a sports biomechanist, focusing her presentation on how to best analyse performance and GPS data using Peach Innovation and Nielsen Kellerman tools.

Dr. Valery Kleshnev, an Olympic silver medallist who is a well-known sports scientist and biomechanist in the world of rowing, has more than 25 years of experience with elite athletes in numerous research and development projects. He is the owner of BioRow, a consulting company which works with more than 20 national rowing teams, to help analyse their technique and efficiency and he will discuss BioRow.

Adrian Cassidy from Great Britain will introduce Rowe.rs a training and coach application whose purpose is to help enhance all aspects of training and review training data.

Alison Maitland from the consultancy firm Lane4 in Great Britain conducted a study on what coaches needed from coaching and to stay as a coach. This study looked particularly at the issues that cause women to drop out of coaching.

Chelsea Warr, Director of Performance at UK Sport, has analysed events at the Rio Olympics in terms of developing talent, transformational leadership, winning environments and sustaining success. Warr will close the conference with a presentation that applies her studies to the coaching of rowing.

To view the detailed programme and register for the conference, please click here.