I may not think much of a plan to recruit near-elite runners into walking,
but Great Britain is funding a much larger and more ambitious talent search
through lottery proceeds.

Talent swap shop offers athletes chance to chase Olympic dream

Owen Slot, Chief Sports Reporter

The hunt for British medals in the London 2012 Games will take an
extraordinary step forward next week when 180 athletes receive a letter out
of the blue, inviting them to pursue their Olympic dream - by switching
sports.

The Times can reveal that the lucky group has been chosen from 1,200 who
have been in and out of UK Sport's lottery-funded programmes since their
inception in 1997. They have been selected because they fit two essential
categories: they are of medal-winning age and come from sports whose basic
talents can be transferred to others.

The window for potential medal-winners at London 2012 may be closing fast,
but Team GB's selective recruitment programme shows the lengths to which it
will go to squeeze a few more through.

Gymnasts who have dropped out of the system may want to take an especially
close look at their postbags next week because they are the most
transferable athletes and are likely to be redirected to diving, pole
vaulting or wrestling. Likewise, rowers could become cyclists and swimmers
could turn to rowing or canoeing.

This Talent Transfer programme is the brainchild of Chelsea Warr, the
Performance Consultant at UK Sport. The 180 who receive her letter will be
asked to fill in a questionnaire that will provide a further indicator of
medal potential. The letter will also request permission for Warr's team to
investigate their athletic history, speak to their former coaches and get a
sense of their suitability to switch sports.

At the end of that process, the survivors will be invited to a Talent
Transfer Assessment Day. If they get through that and are identified as
potential medal-winners, they will be put on fast-track programmes and told
to pursue their dreams.

This is what Warr calls a "talent swap shop", in which she hopes to prove
wrong accepted wisdom in the business of creating world-beaters.

It has long been the unwritten rule that to reach elite levels of
performance, an athlete needs to invest ten years and 10,000 hours of
training. However, Warr believes that a little more than five years is long
enough for athletes who already have a history of high performance.

Her evidence comes from the Australian Institute of Sport, which recently
surveyed 259 of its athletes on scholarships and discovered that, rather
than take ten years, 28 per cent of them had reached international level in
less than four.

There is further evidence from the 1988 Seoul Olympics, where the hosts, a
nation with little or no history in hockey, assembled a women's team who
went from scratch to silver medals in only six years. The South Koreans were
also smart about their recruitment policy - they looked to turn sprinters
into strikers and basketball players into goalkeepers.

Warr's letter will list a couple of home-grown examples of how athletes can
transfer successfully. The first is Shelley Rudman, the former 400 metres
hurdler who switched to skeleton bobsleigh and won a silver medal at the
Winter Olympics in Turin last year. The other is Rebecca Romero, who won a
rowing silver in Athens in 2004 and the National Track Cycling Championships
less than a year later.

"There are a lot of heavily disguised, potentially elite athletes out
there," Warr said. "But they just don't know it."

Her next stop will be rugby and football, sports in which the talent pool is
overflowing with trained athletes who did not quite make it. Time may be
running out for them, but 180 others are about to receive one last chance.

.

<http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=452564/grpspId=1705066486/msgId=
17267/stime=1171573860/nc1=1/nc2=2/nc3=3>


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]