Arising from various queries received from paddlers regarding the trial the Sprint Committee convened an urgent telecom meeting last night and resolved as follows:
1. The trial will go ahead as announced on the 3rd December 2011 as this in accordance with the request of the coaches and as there is no suitable alternative date.
2. Having regard to the fact that we simply don’t know when and how much Lotto funding will become available, the Sprint Committee is unable to say that any salaries to members of the residential squad will be paid in the months following the trial. If salary funding is made available it will be on a far more limited scale until further Lotto funding is received. Please note that the latest news is that Lotto applications open in early December and that Canoeing South Africa will ensure that we are first in the queue
3. Support following the trial will take the form of Sports Science support, testing, Physiotherapy, Psychology, and limited training camp support.
4. Because the trials are over non-standard distances times will not be a criteria for selection, this will be done on the relative performances of the athletes in their chosen distance.
5. The reason for the new trial distances are as follows:
In order to not negatively affect the base preparation phase of our sprinters we have decided to measure those attributes which would indicate that the athletes were on track in their preparation for this specific phase of training.
By asking an athlete to peak in December for a sprint trial will shorten their valuable base conditioning phase and they will not be able to produce the same performance peak as that of an in-season trial. Therefore, a race distance trial at this time of year would not only fail to produce a high quality performance but also potentially sabotage the conditioning of the athletes to perform at their highest levels later in the year when it counts the most.
The science behind the decision to change the distances is that a 2000m trial provides an indication of the aerobic power of athletes - both in terms of fitness and genetic ability while the 100m trial provides an indication of the explosive power and inherent speed of the athletes.
Our inclusion of the 250m distance to both the 2000m trial and the 100m trial would further test the inherent speed of the 1000m athletes and the aerobic fitness of the 200m athletes, and provide the coaches and selectors with a more complete picture of an athlete’s strengths and weaknesses thereby aiding their evaluation of the trialist’s general conditioning.
In this sense, the selection is aimed at identifying those athletes whose natural abilities can be developed into excellent sprinting performances and therefore has its focus on the longer term identification and development of athletes. This information would be more difficult to ascertain from a race distance trial during the pre-season where the athletes are not able to produce the necessary high level performances.