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UK and China seek 'Tomorrow's Champions'

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Matthew Crawcour 18 January 2008

The two next summer Olympic hosts China and Great Britain today announced their intention to work together to give their athletes and coaches a shared experience of the pressures of preparing for and competing in a home Games.

The ‘Tomorrow’s Champions’ programme was announced by the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, during a visit to the Chinese capital and site of this summer’s Olympic and Paralympic Games.  He was accompanied by Dame Kelly Holmes, an ambassador for the programme, which is being run by UK Sport, the UK’s high performance sports agency.

‘Tomorrow’s Champions’ is part of a wider Memorandum of Understanding signed between UK Sport and its Chinese equivalent, the General Administration for Sport in China.  It looks to bring together some of the UK’s brightest future talents with their Chinese counterparts for training and sparring exchange visits. Through the visits the UK’s athletes and their coaches can learn more about the unique experience and pressures that a home Games brings, whilst their Chinese counterparts will have an early opportunity to learn about the environment in which they will compete in 2012.

Sue Campbell, UK Sport’s Chair was with the Prime Minister in Beijing and together they saw Darius Knight, Paul Drinkhall and two more young British table tennis players taking on Chinese opposition.  She was quick to see the opportunities that ‘Tomorrow’s Champions’ would offer:

“It is entirely appropriate that the Prime Minister should drop in to witness some of our brightest table tennis prospects sparring with Chinese opponents in the shadow of the Beijing Olympic complex. For any athlete the step up from international competition to competing at an Olympic Games is intimidating enough, but to have to do so for the first time at a home Games can be one of the toughest challenges in sport.

“Tomorrow’s Champions aims to take some of the pressure off, by helping our athletes and coaches learn from those for whom the experience is freshest in their minds. At the same time we can add significant value to those sports already working with, or wishing to develop, meaningful training relationships with their opposite numbers in China.”

UK Sport and the People’s Republic of China’s General Administration of Sport (GAS) have had a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) in sport since 1998 to develop sporting exchanges and promote international relations between the two countries. But with the recent renewal of the arrangement and the developing bond between the next two summer Olympic hosts, UK Sport is seeking to ensure that the agreement delivers as much of a performance impact as possible and ‘Tomorrow’s Champions’ is an early product of that approach.

The opportunity to be a part of Tomorrow’s Champions has been offered to the UK’s Olympic and Paralympic sports and a number including table tennis, judo, taekwondo, waterpolo, diving and goalball have already come forward.

UK Sport and their counterparts in the Chinese GAS will now work through the detail of the scheme and confirm which sports will be involved in the scheme’s launch later this year..

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