Signing in...

Greetings from Portugal. I’m currently here in Rio Maior with the GB team, on a prep camp for the Europeans. All is well out here, nice weather, nice company (ish!! Joking), good facilities...main complaint is the non-existent internet connection, but what can you do?
I’m not sure what this place IS exactly. It seems to be some kind of Portuguese Institute of Sport, and I’d be very surprised if it isn’t subsidised by the government (there are a fair few full time staff here)...yet on the other hand it’s available to foreign teams such as ourselves...something doesn’t add up. Either way, I’m not complaining, as it has enabled me to get some really good training in. I feel like I arrived here with some really good raw fitness, but the opportunity to apply that to some more race specific sessions with all the other top athletes here is helping hone my fitness to what I need to dominate come race day.


On reviewing the camp so far in my head, I have disturbingly concluded that most of the highlights have included a close proximity to sweaty men: post-track set group photo (see below), copious post-run ice/heat baths (communal, woop!), and a massage where I was flung around like a rag-doll by a thick set hairy Portuguese man with peach chewing gum breath and safe arms. Dreamy.

It’s been great to spend more time with Will (before we lose him to joint pensions, day trips to IKEA and Mothercare catalogues...he’s getting married in October), we are sharing a room as per usual (if you didn’t know already: will-clarke.com). In the other boys’ room is Jonny Brownlee (Sartrouville team mate and all round nice guy...and before you ask, yes there is two of them Brownlee boys!), Phil ‘the Quads’ Graves (the Kona bike guy, you’ve heard of him, though maybe not by his new name, “The Cougar Tamer”...he’s going to kill me for saying that), and also an ex-Commonwealth 3km Steeplechaser called Adam Bowden, who defected to the dark-side when seduced by Tri-Gold scheme being peddled by the Sith Lords at BTF towers. I should probably clear up that I’m not implying that British Triathlon are evil, it’s just got carried away by that Star Wars reference. Geek-power.

There are also some girls here as well. In fact, we are being pretty much outnumbered two to one, which isn’t actually as pleasant as it sounds: in the open water swim the other day I did a rep without my wetsuit while the others were in their wetsuits, which put me firmly in the main pack, and OMG (cool-kid text-speak for ‘Oh My God’), those girls are vicious! Holly Avil was clawing the feet, Ness Raw smashing the goggles and Helen Jenkins was working the elbow to the head. It was like a Lynx advert gone horribly wrong: brilliant, I’m surrounded by loads of girls in swimming costumes...but wait, they are all zombie harpies trying to gauge my eyes out and feast on my flesh. Not ideal. Where is my hairy massage man to save me? This is of course not to say that the girls themselves are nasty, they just know how to take care of themselves in a swim. Fair play.

I’ve been trying to keep up with the World Cup, though the Portuguese commentary isn’t helping. Is it just me or does Portuguese sound like the unwanted love-child of Spanish and Russian? It’s not a pretty language. Wimbledon is off the cards unfortunately, there is clearly no love for grass-tennis here on Europe’s westernmost peninsula. As the internet situation here is less than ideal, we have had limited connectivity to the world outside of this camp bubble. Instead we have been having to content ourselves with crowding round a single laptop to watch some old episodes of Peep Show, and infrequent games of ‘Who can hold the gaze of one of the Portuguese Womens’ Basketball team the longest before crumbling into a shameful, gibbering heap of embarrassment, fear and self-loathing’? We shortened it to “Wchg1PWBlbcsghefsl?” No we didn’t. That never happened. We’ve never even played that game.

Losing sanity.

Need contact to outside world.

Need internet.

Signing out...

Heya guys,

Well I had a fairly innocuous race for Satrouville over the weekend. Certainly not vintage, but not a disaster either. I definitely coped with the whole ‘training through a race’ thing a lot better than I did in Dunkerque, but still would have liked to have put together a stronger performance overall. Two 13th place finishes in back to back weeks has to be some kind of nightmare for those of superstitious disposition...good thing I’m not (apart from avoiding 3 drains...and the whole ‘touch wood’ thing...hmm!)

There was also a very impressive performance by GB’s own Tim Don over in the States at the big money race in Des Moines. Nice one Tim, guess you won’t need to be worrying about the price of groceries for a while...!

With World Cup fever taking over the nation (and indeed the world), it is amazing to see how a sporting occasion can bring a population to a standstill. Despite the large investment and high-def coverage that the World Champs Series (along with some other races) are now displaying, triathlon is obviously still a long way from reaching the kind of exposure that some more mainstream sports like football achieve. The reasons for this difference are many, some bleeding obvious and others not so, but I feel that the key for triathlon breaking into the mainstream is someone cracking the TV-coverage formula.

It’s fair to say that triathlon is less than easy to televise. For a football match you essentially have one static camera for 90%+ of the action, along with a few other static cameras for replays and close ups. Seeing as the ‘action’ of the match is almost exclusively happening within a few metres of where the white round thing is, it’s not exactly rocket science to decide where to point the camera.
Triathlon, on the other hand, requires as many static cameras as you can afford (for the swim, transition, bike, run and finish), along with at least one helicopter to get a shot that provides ‘perspective’ on the race, and then cameras on boats for the swim and motorbikes for the bike and run.

And let’s be honest, with triathlon, it’s not as easy as just pointing the camera at the leader, as the tactics of draft-legal triathlon mean that the eventual contenders are often not ‘at the front’ for the whole race, be that intentionally or otherwise, and if they are, then chances are there are other contenders busting their asses just behind to bridge up. (By the way, to those who aren’t fans of draft-legal racing, remember that draft-legal racing was born out of a need to take the sport to TV audiences for the Olympics, and imagine the number of cameras you would need to televise non-drafting races in a way that your average punter could understand...and the point still stands regardless, how many international races feature the winner leading from the gun...PUT YOUR HAND DOWN CHRISSIE, stop spoiling my argument!). Broadcasters do seem to be using technological innovations to help make bike racing more TV-friendly, but triathlon broadcasters have the difficulty of conveying this information along with the added complexities of a swim and run on either end, and the sometimes counter-intuitive race situations that transpire (why is that guy 1 minute back despite going faster than the leaders?...Well he’s a weak swimmer but a strong biker etc etc).

Some broadcasters have managed to show that it’s very easy to make triathlon look very boring, very slow and very complicated. I think the boring bit comes from editors and commentators not understanding the sport enough, how fast (and therefore exciting/impressive) it appears is due to the quality of the camerawork, and complicated is often born from having to condense a men’s and women’s 2hr race into a 45-60mins highlight program, again with editors and commentators not fully understanding the tactics. This condensing used to be avoided by a series that used to be held in Australia which had all the races at Super-Sprint distance, and made athletes wear trisuits in their nations colours at all races (something the ITU is at pains to implement with us), and had commentators who were ex-pros who knew the athletes very well...

This whole blog entry probably shows why I was never any good at English or History at school...I mean, I’ve waffled on for however many hundred words without actually making any statements or coming up with any solutions! I really wanted to put a few of the issues out there to see if anyone has any thoughts on how the sport could reach a wider audience? Let me know on the forum!

Anyway, I’ll check back in next week.

Keep safe.

Olly

Another week, another race. OK fine it’s been two weeks, I’m sorry, it’s all been a bit crazy and I lost track of time.

So last week was the third race in the 2010 World Champs Series (my 2nd), in Madrid. Madrid has hosted World Cups and World Champs Series races for as long as I have been on the circuit, and it’s always one of the hottest and toughest races on the calendar. Along with the gruelling hill straight out of transition, I was reminded that the temperature would probably be a factor when we went out for dinner at 7pm on Friday and the digital thermometer on the bus stop flashed up 34°C!
After having run pretty badly in my first two races, I was relatively anxious to step my run up a notch or two in this race. This adversely affected my mental preparation and strategy, and I ended up backing off a lot more than I should have on the swim, and suffering the consequences by becoming the filling in a Russian sandwich at the first buoy. Those boys are bred on vodka and harsh winters, and I spent the rest of the swim feeling like I’d endured a month in 1940s Stalingrad. Anyway, so bad swim, my own fault, but it didn’t matter as we all came together after ~10km of the bike. Most of the rest of the bike was relatively tactical, though still every lap was taking its toll in 35 degree heat. With 2 laps to go a break got away, which I should have put myself in, and by T2 they had about a minute on us. I put myself on the line on the run, and managed to haul myself near the top 10 by picking off stragglers in the front group, but slightly faded in the last lap and finished 13th. Overall I was slightly disappointed with the result, but pleased with the progress I showed on the run, which will give me confidence that from now on I can put myself on the line and aim for podium finishes again.


Apart from that I have mostly been wasting my time by revising (or pretending to revise) for an Open University exam (for my Computer Science degree) that I have on Tuesday. I’m now completely saturated with Java bloody f-ing Java, so have been looking for any excuse to get away from it, and have therefore got so many odd jobs done in the last week that I’m starting to think that I’m at my most productive when I have something to avoid...but it’s got to the ridiculous stage now where I’ve filled out and filed my tax return about 7 months early purely to avoid revising File Transfer Protocols, which in reality I would have probably enjoyed more than telling the tax man how much of my non-existent winnings from last year he can relieve me of.

This weekend I am heading back to France to race for Satrouville again, hopefully I will be able to squeeze out a better run than in Dunkerque, though if I do it will be no thanks to Glenn...I need to remind him that shorter sessions aren’t easier sessions when every rep has to be done basically flat out! Oh well, it’s all good fun.

Hopefully I will have some slightly more interesting things to report on in the next couple of weeks when I have got these exams out of the way! In the meantime, enjoy the tennis (Queen’s, Eastbourne and Wimbledon), cycling (Dauphine and Tour) and football (erm...World Cup?!), because let’s face it, my ramblings can’t compete with them!

Olly