Six Years Of Olympic Preparation Coming To A Head   29 Jun 2012

Planning for the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games began in 2006, and with only a month to go the New Zealand team looks well placed to achieve its targets.

The most reliable indicator of Olympic performance is how well athletes and teams have performed in the previous year at their respective world championships.

In 2011, New Zealanders had 21 podium finishes at these events -- our best ever result in a pre-Olympic year.

“With the team performing at this level we should be able to achieve our target of 10 medals or more, and if we do that we’ll get New Zealand’s 100th Olympic medal,” says Alex Baumann, Chief Executive of High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ).

HPSNZ was formed in 2011, from a merger of the New Zealand Academies of Sport and the high performance unit of Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC, now Sport New Zealand).

“Over the past six years our people have worked extensively with athletes and teams in the targeted Olympic sports (athletics, cycling, rowing, yachting, swimming and triathlon) and other medal-potential sports,” Baumann says.

“Those people include strength and conditioning specialists, performance and technique analysts, nutritionists, physiologists, doctors, psychologists/mental skills trainers and many others.

“In addition, the Government has invested around $180 million into high performance sport in the past four years. Much of that money has gone into supporting our Olympic athletes in their preparations for London, and Rio in 2016. As well as direct support for athletes the money has also funded new world-class sports facilities around the country.

“When it’s all added together New Zealanders have every reason to be hopeful of a successful London Games. And whatever the result I know that, like me, they’ll be proud of the effort put in by our athletes and the support crews they’ve worked with.”

(High Performance Sport)

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