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DISABILITY SPORT ADAPTIVE ROWING

competition the GB team took top slot winning two out of a possible four gold medals and with a final medal tally that included a bronze in the coxed four. There were less than 20 months available to the coaches and support team to take the athletes to this level of performance and it meant getting a lot of things right - and right the first time around. At the closing date for entering the team, only eight athletes were classified to compete. As there were only eight available seats in boats it meant that there was no “fat” in the system in terms of athletes failing to perform or becoming injured, a fact that put added pressure on the support staff. It is my purpose here to describe how we mapped out our pathway to success.

Different thinking - a philosophy To get to where the team needed to be by the 9th September 2008, the first day of competition at the Games, the lead coach determined that we needed to move away from traditionalist thinking. Without throwing away all that we knew and had proven was good, the individual members of the support team had to become developers, thinking creatively to find an edge over our competition. The head coach wanted to create ‘developers’ among the support staff. Each of the support services was given the freedom to develop their own methodology with a view to sharing their experiences. This allowed us to learn from each other without being constrained by any particular format, recognising the individual’s ways of developing. From a physiotherapy perspective, I was able to bring

to bear eight years of experience working with the Olympic rowing squad. Initially I stripped it right back to looking at how I thought about things. The head coach had lent me a copy of John Buchanan’s book, If Better is Possible. Written by the most successful Australian cricket coach of all time, it is a series of accessible essays offering guidance on making important and life-changing choices, creating a culture of success, gaining mental toughness, using systems and processes to achieve a winning advantage, providing leadership opportunities, and matching competitors’ ideas. It presented valuable insights into the strategic thinking behind leading an elite team to success and, due to the fact that it had a profound effect on how our coach now thought, I believed it would be a good place to start. There is a quote that is attributed to both Albert Einstein and an old Chinese proverb, that states, “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. For my part the physiotherapy service needed to change how things were done, not least because I was now providing a service to a client group with completely different musculoskeletal requirements from those I had worked with previously. This had to be tempered with not throwing away what already worked and not changing for change’s sake.

New paradigms In developing a new programme philosophy for the delivery of physiotherapy, I needed to identify areas where performance gains could be made, bearing in mind a very overused but none the less true phrase of the performance director “will it make the boat go faster?” I asked myself what factors could I influence that would make the boat go faster? I realised that I needed to operate within a new paradigm and it would have to be one that was built from simple concepts.

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NOTHING IS GOOD IF BETTER IS POSSIBLE

Once this paradigm had been constructed, I then had

to find a way of enabling it to operate within the overall framework developed by the head coach and then had to ensure that it easily integrated into the workings of the wider support team so that the our combined effect was greater than the sum of our individual parts. It would be no use if each individual in the support team

was delivering at a world class level if this, at best, was not integrated so that it was working well with the other disciplines to enhance athlete performance and at worst was having a detrimental effect on the overall outcome.

GOALS, PATHWAYS, QUESTIONS AND PROCESSES One of the things we quickly recognised was that clarity of thought and asking the right questions of the programme was going to be key to getting where we needed the athletes to be, in such a short time frame. To do this we set individual athlete goals.

Goals n The sport n The athlete – sporting/personal n 2008 Medal n Athlete’s long term health n Intervening World Championships n Intervening World Rowing Cups n GB Squad Trials n Domestic Racing

Pathways To ensure the Performance Support Programme moved forward smoothly a suggestion was put forward for regular case conferences involving the various stakeholders. These were arranged at intervals and embedded within the flow diagram as shown below. I have illustrated it with a problem particular to physiotherapy but it can be done for any of the services that an athlete has access to. It is the team’s choice who they deem to be the primary (1°), secondary (2°) and tertiary (3°) stakeholders in their environment or for a particular problem. Timelines would be devised at these meetings so that

Start 1°2°3°

Weekly 1°2°

Benchmark/goals 1°2°

Drop dead Wrap 1°2°3°

1°2°3°

n Start – planning the process by which the objective can be met n Weekly – athlete interactions with support team staff during “normal business” n Benchmark/goals – predetermined points in the process for a review of progress n Drop dead – point at which either the objective is going to be met or an alternative plan needs to be made n Wrap – follow-up critique of how things went and where it could have been done better

Figure 1: The generic structure of a performance support pathway 25

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