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Staying Cool Key To Medal Success in Beijing

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UK Sport/BOA Press Release 04 June 2008

With competition for medals in Beijing this summer set to be the most intense in living memory, UK Sport and the British Olympic Association (BOA) today revealed some of the secrets behind their preparations for the world’s biggest sporting event.

Whilst many commentators have been focusing on the role that factors such as pollution will play, the two bodies have singled out heat and humidity as the biggest environmental threats to success. UK Sport’s Research and Innovation Consultant, Dr Scott Drawer and the BOA’s Head of Sports Science and Research, Dr Marco Cardinale, have responded to the challenge by seeking out the UK’s leading experts in the management of thermal stress and the effects of travel and jet lag to ensure Team GB’s athletes line up in the best possible shape.

Drawer said: “With medals won by increasingly small margins, we have analysed every factor that can affect the ability of our leading athletes to perform to their potential. Every Games location brings with it its own set of special challenges and our job is to equip every sport with a toolkit that will allow them to meet those challenges head on. With Beijing’s prevailing conditions of high temperatures coupled with high humidity, the first priorities must be cooling and hydration and that is where we have concentrated our energies.”

Drawer’s first move was to develop a strategy in consultation with Cardinale, whose role left him uniquely placed to test and roll out appropriate solutions with the UK’s Olympic sports. Between them they commissioned some of the UK’s leading experts in managing thermal impact, hydration and pollution, whilst also liaising with Team GB suppliers such as adidas on clothing issues and Coca Cola on hydration. Cardinale said:

“We focus on the challenges that a Games will present the moment a host city is announced, as it can take years to devise the best package of counter measures. In the last couple of years we have been able to use test events in China as opportunities to experience the conditions first hand and check on the effectiveness of our strategies. We won’t share all of the lessons we’ve learned because we believe that some of them will continue to deliver us a competitive advantage but we are confident that all athletes in a British vest will have had the best possible support and preparation, with nothing left to chance.”

John Derbyshire, Sailing’s Performance Director, was quick to point out that attention to detail was the secret behind his sport’s Olympic success story:

“A critical part of any Olympic campaign is understanding the working environment you’re walking into. For us, trends in meteorology create the canvas on which our performance can be drawn. We use historical and theoretical data and then validate it by what we can gather on the ground. Anticipating what the weather is likely to do can generate the 1% advantage that can make the difference between being the best or amongst the rest.”

The competitive demands vary for every sport, but those who compete in certain outdoor events have been singled out for special attention. What the athletes eat and drink and how they control their body’s temperature can have as profound an affect on their performance as clocking up hours of hard training. As a result, UK Sport has invested £250,000 in seeking out the nation’s leading scientific expertise to devise strategies that each sport can tailor to its specific needs.

The project has been a true team effort with the home country institutes of sport playing a key role both in terms of involving their leading practitioners in working with sports and in making facilities, such as heat chambers, available to sports as part of their preparations. Elsewhere, sports like Sailing have shared their world leading meteorological expertise with other British sports to help them know more about the variety of conditions to expect during the period of the Games.

With travel and jet lag identified as critical issues ahead of the Games, the search for the best preparation camp facilities took place between 2003 and 2006 when the BOA undertook visits to Hong Kong, Hiroshima, Bangkok, Seoul, Macau and various locations throughout China.  Representatives from Olympic sports were consulted and gave their opinions on the performance advantages of each location.

The optimum location for most sports was Macau (a Special Administrative Region of The People’s Republic of China) and extensive arrangements have since been made with the Macau sporting and Government authorities and the Westin Resort to ensure that Team GB has exclusive usage of world class training facilities (many new facilities were constructed for the East Asian Games in Nov 2005) for the 2-3 weeks prior to the Games. Macau is in the same time zone and offers similar climatic conditions as the Olympic Host City to aid acclimatisation and is also within a half-day transfer to the Beijing Athletes’ Olympic Village to avoid recurring travel fatigue.

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