PROFILE
Nigel Walker
He represented Great Britain as a hurdler and Wales as a rugby player, and now Nigel Walker is helping other athletes achieve in his role as national director for the English Institute of Sport. He talks to Magali Robathan
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K Sport recently announced that it believes Great Britain can make history at the Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2016 by being the
fi rst country to win more medals post hosting the Olympics and Paralympics. It’s an ambitious target, but there’s
no denying that Great Britain is fl ying high in terms of sporting suc- cess at the moment. The recent Commonwealth Games in Glasgow saw the home nations win 63 per cent of the medals in Olympic and Paralympic disciplines (including 77 per cent of the gold medals), the Sochi Winter Olympics were Team GB’s best in terms of medals since 1924 and Team GB far outperformed its target of 48 medals at London 2012 with a total of 65 medals.
This success is not a matter of chance. The UK now has a very well funded elite sports system, and behind each athlete is a whole team of people – from coaches and physi- otherapists to performance analysts, scientists and engineers – working to improve their chances of success. This is where the English Institute of
Sport comes in. The EIS – or the ‘team behind the team’ as it’s often referred to – is UK Sport’s science, medicine and technology arm. Introduced in 2002, the publicly-funded body now has more than 300 staff and delivers over 4,000 hours of sport science and medicine to around 1,700 athletes every week out of its network of high
Nigel Walker has been national director for the EIS since 2010
performance centres around the UK. The organisation worked with 86 per cent of the Olympic and Paralympic medallists at London 2012, and 70 per cent of Team England, 30 per cent of Team Scotland and 35 per cent of Team Wales at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow this year. Next on the horizon, of course, are the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio, and the EIS is already working hard to prepare Great Britain’s athletes for success. Here we talk to EIS national director and ex athletics champion and rugby player Nigel Walker about how the EIS works, the athletes it’s helped and its plans for Rio and beyond.
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How would you sum up the aims of the English Institute of Sport? The EIS is there to provide support and intervention across science, medicine, technology and engineering; in short to make our athletes more equipped, better equipped, more robust and tech- nically more profi cient so that their chances of success on the interna- tional stage are increased. Science covers strength and conditioning, physiology, nutrition, psychology, performance analysis, bio- mechanics, performance lifestyle and talent ID. Across medicine our work centres mainly around the provision of physiotherapy, soft tissue therapy and doctors. Our work within technology and engineering is mainly done with our partners – including BAE Systems and McLaren Applied Technologies – and is in those sports, predominantly, which have a vehicle of some descrip- tion, such as rowing, canoeing, sailing, cycling, bobsleigh, and skeleton.
Can you give an example of an athlete EIS has helped? Lizzie Yarnold is a good exam- ple. Lizzie was identifi ed by one of the initiatives we run as part of our Performance Pathways scheme [the Girls4Gold talent identifi cation scheme is a joint initiative run by the EIS and UK Sport]. Once Lizzie had been selected as a skeleton athlete, we helped her with physiotherapy, strength and conditioning and all the science and medicine I’ve already talked about. We also helped to design her sled, and we designed her helmet and suit to
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