Britain Schemes To Come in Fourth In 2012 OlympicsHost of the Summer Games Scouts Talent, Trains Hard In Really Obscure SportsBy NIRAJ SHETH
November 30, 2007; Page A1
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119637142410508413.htmlNOTTINGHAM, England -- On his second try in an hour to balance the sleek, white racing canoe, Tom Marshall fell -- again -- into the freezing Regatta Lake.
"It's get on, wobble around, get off," said the 18-year-old, who, at 198 pounds, is more accustomed to playing rugby with friends.
On this winter day, Mr. Marshall and nine others were vying for a chance to spend nearly five years of their lives training, at no pay, to represent their country in the 2012 Olympics. The prize: maybe a medal in the obscure sport of flatwater canoeing.
It's all part of a highly pragmatic and uniquely British effort to maintain national pride when London plays host to the Summer Games in 2012. Britain has a goal: fourth place in the overall national medal count. Britain's Olympic organizers calculate that they need 18 to 20 gold medals just to come in fourth, and that's a tall order for a nation that won just nine in Athens in 2004. It placed 10th that year.
"We tried to take the real world into consideration," says Matthew Crawcour at Britain's national sports agency UK Sport, explaining the modest aspirations. "The U.S., China and Russia, they're relative untouchables."
The British aren't trying for big-ticket draws like swimming or track and field. Instead, sports officials have analyzed past competitions to identify areas where the competition appears weak. Hence the interest in sports such as team handball, women's sprint kayak and flatwater canoeing.
Facing a dearth of ready-made competitors, Britain launched several training programs, modeled on the idea behind the Soviet and East German state systems for elite athletes decades ago: that young people with the right physical and mental attributes but no experience can be turned into champions.
For an added boost, UK Sport is also retraining champions retired in one sport to do something else where age matters less. In "Project Swap Shop," gymnasts are becoming divers, for example. (They have the same strong abs.)
UK Sport put out a call on TV, in newspapers and online in February for tall men (6-foot-3 and up) and women (5-foot-11 and up), for a program called Sporting Giants. About 4,800 people applied for team handball, volleyball and rowing.
Chelsea Warr, head of recruiting at UK Sport, tested the 2,500 most promising over the summer. Those who had played a team sport before interested handball recruiters because they were presumed to have the "game intelligence" to pick up the new sport quickly. Those with long arms but no experience were channeled into rowing.
Huw Goodwin answered a newspaper ad from UK Sport calling for athletes to play for Great Britain. He didn't know the rules for team handball and had never seen the game played. Now, less than a year later, the 25-year-old Mr. Goodwin has left behind a job treating eating-disorder patients to train full-time as a member of the Olympic team, in return for living expenses and a bed to sleep in.
Mr. Marshall's father heard about the Sporting Giants program on the BBC and emailed his son. Mr. Marshall, who is 6-feet-2-inches tall, was thinking about joining the Royal Marines or taking six months off to travel the world. His background in athletics consisted of playing rugby for a local club in Bristol, in front of a crowd of maybe 100 friends and parents.
Mr. Marshall filled out an online application and was invited in for tests over the summer. Coaches put him on the ergometer, a rowing machine that tests endurance by bringing arm and leg muscles to exhaustion. He scored well above average. He also made high marks on the bench pull, which tests upper-body strength.
Not quite tall enough for rowing, he was invited to try canoeing. "I didn't even know the sport existed," he says.
On his first day here in October, Mr. Marshall sat among 34 others and watched a motivational video of clips from races around the world accompanied by a chest-thumping soundtrack.
Coaches started the men in wide-hulled canoes. Mr. Marshall promptly capsized. After a week of practice, 25 men were sent home. Mr. Marshall, though, got the hang of paddling, and progressed to lighter racing canoes.
"It's like water-skiing with a toothbrush out there," he says.
Mr. Marshall takes the train from his home in Bristol every Friday evening to bunk four to a dorm room at the National Water Sports Center here. The team is often joined by children because the facility bills itself as a family-friendly spot for sailing and boating. During the week, he works for his father's software company and follows a training plan to run for half an hour outdoors in the morning and lift weights in the afternoon, jotting down every detail to show his coaches.
Mr. Marshall says he doesn't mind falling into the cold water, currently about 45 degrees Fahrenheit. He doesn't care that few people have ever heard of his sport.
"It's just walking out those doors at the opening ceremony, shaking like a leaf with all my mates," he says. "I'm already getting that spine-tingling feeling."
Athletes who make it through the preliminary physical tests must prove they have what it takes mentally. Natalie Dunman, UK head of talent identification for canoeing and kayaking, says they evaluate recruits for traits like "coachability." Trainers observe how easily recruits can shed their natural habits to pick up unfamiliar technique, like twisting a canoe paddle at the end of the stroke to steer.
Trainers also put athletes in unfamiliar situations to see how they deal with pressure. Mr. Marshall and the canoeing hopefuls were assigned to research their new sport and give oral presentations, for example. And for four days in August, six aspiring female kayakers were taken camping outside Düsseldorf, Germany, to see how they managed that.
On Regatta Lake one afternoon recently, Brendan Purcell, the head coach for women's sprint kayaking, looked on with a stopwatch while three women lined up their kayaks to race. At the whistle, 20-year-old Victoria Towers plunged her double-bladed paddle into the water and accelerated across the lake.
"Bury the paddle! And that's too long in the back, Vicky," shouted Mr. Purcell from the pier, gesturing to show how the paddle should come out of the water at the hip.
Ms. Towers nodded, and swung her kayak back around to try again.
Ms. Towers was competing in a university swim meet in April when Ms. Dunman spotted her and persuaded her to try kayaking. Ms. Towers put off her studies in physical therapy indefinitely and moved here to train full time in September.
Britain didn't win any medals in flatwater canoeing and just one bronze in kayaking in 2004. But coaches say they'll be happy with three or four, of any color, in 2012.
Even if they are barely balancing their boats right now, athletes who make it through the next five years of training are expected to bring back medals, says Ms. Warr of UK Sport. "It's not just an eight-week summer camp."
