UK Sport guest blog: Biz Price, Synchronised Swimming
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Olivia Allison and Jenna Randall
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Biz Price 08 December 2011
This summer we achieved our goals at our benchmark meet of the year, the World Championships, and we gained confidence from that as we enter the Olympic year. The results showed that our preparation for the competition was right and we are on track.
There were a lot of really positive things to take out of the World Championships. It was a real milestone for us to move ahead of our rivals. The key ones were France in the Duet Free and the USA in the Team Free.
We have entered the Olympic year and I am excited about the new choreography and the strength gained by the athletes over their summer break.
We have just submitted our Mission 2012 plan to UK Sport and there were many things to celebrate. Synchronised Swimming in the UK has taken significant steps forwards in the past four years and I am proud of each one of them. We have a centralised High Performance Centre where the athletes have access excellent facilities and support staff on a daily basis.
While I have worked for British Synchro the team has progressed from 20th in the world up to placing in the top nine at the World Championships in Shanghai and this has only been able to happen from investment from key partners like UK Sport.
Biz Price is British Swimming’s Performance Director for Synchronised Swimming and was today speaking at UK Sport’s Mission 2012 briefing for the 2011 Annual Investment Review, alongside UK Sport Chief Executive Liz Nicholl, UK Sport Director of Performance Peter Keen and UK Athletics’ Paralympic Head Coach Peter Eriksson at UK Sport HQ in Russell Square.
The Mission 2012 system was designed to keep eyes firmly focused on every element of the performance system, help sports to identify the issues and challenges they face in hitting their respective performance ambitions and find ways of dealing with them quickly and effectively.
Mission 2012 also represents a cultural move away from the traditional relationship between funding body and sport. It encourages sports to conduct their own assessments of how their system is performing and to bring additional expertise to bear in finding creative solutions to problems. Both good practice and potential problems will be captured three times a year and tracked ahead of the 2012 Games.
