TERRY SPACKMAN ON ATHLETES ATTITUDE & PERFORMANCE COACHING
Cooking in the kitchen today with the TV up loud, I liked what Kerry Spackman had to say about training winners. Heading into the Olympics it’s a buzz topic at the moment. Watch Q+A: Dr Kerry Spackman (6:57). Gregg Boyed has the psych up chat.
On Olympian Training, Phsychology et al:
A programme called Gold Mine, which is half funded by Sir Stephen Tindall and half funded by High Performance Sport New Zealand, and what we’ve tried to do is bring back Formula 1 type technology into New Zealand sport. Sport is about technology today and New Zealand was lagging behind. The best programmers and electronic engineers in the world have come together. We’ve developed our own in-house electronics and software tools to assess our athletes. 450 pieces of equipment tha we developed are now used over Europe.
The US or the UK particularly have big backing of very big organisations. Boeing is a sponsor.
GREG $180 million invested over the past couple of years. Is that enough? It sounds like an awful lot of money for a country of four million people, but is it enough?
KERRY How efficiently we spend that money is vital. So we constantly narrow down, like a science. My job is to really give the athletes and the coaches the very best technology to get the best results. We were playing catch up with Australia. Now we have a legacy, we keep building. We’ve got a good attitude. Look at our All Blacks. They front up. They’ve got a good attitude. You look at some of our other athletes, they have a very good attitude. I think it’s more the support around them that’s been lacking. Our athletes work pretty hard. You look at Mahe Drysdale.
The thoughts you run through your head determine who you are and how successful you are. There’s the big topic at the moment about people with alcohol abuse being talked about with politicians. Legislation is good. For me, I want to know what’s going on inside the people’s brains that are going out and getting drunk every night, who are going out and pulling society apart. I really want to know, as a nation, what is our philosophy going forward in terms of everyone seems to be thinking about,
‘What’s in it for me?’ This is our celebrity culture, all this type of stuff. But we really seem to lack a thought process for what we’re part of society. Now, these are difficult questions to deal with. They’re very hard to legislate, of course, so politicians tend to ignore them. But if you look back to old societies, Greece when it was at its heyday, you had the philosophers who were influencing the politicians, and you had your Plato and Socrates and so on. And all throughout the history of mankind, philosophy, the thought processes that unite a society are really crucial. So I’m really passionate about that. And I’m heading up to London in a couple of weeks, and I’m hoping to meet some very influential people there, because I think these bigger issues need to be brought back to the table.
GREG Bringing that back to Olympics and London and medals and so forth, apart from the people who win the medals and us puffing our chests for a while, how is that beneficial to a nation’s psyche?
KERRY It is beneficial, but not in the right way. It’s a bit like a sugar rush. You feel good for a short moment, and then- You know, the World Cup was great. We all basked in the glory of our guys winning. But six months later, the same problems still exist. Households still have trouble with budgets. There’s crime still going on. So those are nice things to have, but, for me, they’re not central.
GREG All right. Dr Kerry Spackman, thank you so much for your time.
[Source: TVNZ Q+A]. Photo: Dr Kerry Spackman with broadcaster Mike Hosking, Newstalk ZB.
~Posted by Horiwoodblog, Aotearoa New Zealand, Polynesia Asia-Pacific. 8.7.12~
