INTERVIEW
NIGEL WALKER He represented Great Britain as a hurdler and Wales as a rugby player,
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
U
K Sport believes Great Britain can make history at the Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2016 by being the first host country to win more
medals at the Olympics and Paralympics after the home Games. It’s an ambitious target, but there’s no denying that Team GB is flying high in terms of success. 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 physiotherapists to performance analysts, scientists and engineers – all 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 more than 4,000 hours of sport science and medicine to around 1,700 athletes every week out of its network of high 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
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Nigel Walker has been national director for the EIS since 2010
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 former athletics champion and rugby player Nigel Walker about how the EIS works, the athletes it’s helped and its plans for Rio and beyond.
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 technically more proficient, so that their chances of success on the international stage are increased. Science covers strength and conditioning, physiology, nutrition, psychology, performance analysis, biomechanics, 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 description, 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 example. Lizzie was identified by one of the initiatives we run as part of our Performance Pathways scheme [the Girls4Gold talent identification scheme is a joint initiative by 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. We also helped design her sled, helmet and suit to cut down wind resistance. Of course she went on to win a gold medal at the Sochi Winter Olympics.
What does your role as national director of the EIS involve? My role is to set the direction of travel for the organisation; to make sure it’s equipped to provide the support service
sportsmanagement.co.uk issue 4 2014 © Cybertrek 2014
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