Photo (L to R): Janus Staufenberg, Dylan McCullough, Eva Goodisson, Henry McMeking, Olivia Thornbury, Saxon Morgan, Brea Roderick, James Corbett, Nicole van der Kaay, Trent Thorpe, Ainsley Thorpe, Lachlan Haycock and Tayler Reid at Karapiro.
By Kent Gray/Triathlon.kiwi
The 2023 season reviews are complete and concrete plans for 2024 in place. Roll on the Paris Olympics – and Los Angeles 2028.
That, in a nutshell, encapsulated Tri NZ’s annual High Performance (HP) Forum which wound up at the Sir Don Rowlands Centre at Lake Karapiro near Cambridge on Thursday.
Fourteen athletes from the governing body’s HP and development programmes received an updated Paris-focused plan for 2024 from Tri NZ General Manager of Performance, Travis White, before fronting a panel with their coaches for their annual Individual Performance Plan (IPP) sessions.
Intermingled with early swim training on each of the three days, the attendees also partook in strength and conditioning benchmarking, medical and wellness sessions, a race analytics and performance trends review and a Drug Free Sport NZ presentation.
In addition to new bike fit sessions, ASICS offered footwear updates and orthopedic assessments while a number of athletes attended a factory visit at Radix Nutrition, Official partner of the Tri NZ Mixed Relay squad.
Kiwi No.1 Hayden Wilde was unable to attend due to sponsor commitments in Bahrain. Nonetheless, White was pleased to tick off an important three days that will reverberate long after the XXXIII Olympiad in Paris in July-August next year.
“It was a great opportunity to review 2023 and the promising results we had and present our 2024 plan which includes the Paris Olympic Games,” White told Triathlon.kiwi.
“A key focus of the camp was to also set the scene for the transition through to 2028 LA Olympics. It was a positive week. We had a couple of athletes who were probably on the cusp and are aware now where they sit, a few athletes who have had very good years and are just eager to continue on their pathway and Paris campaigners that are in good shape.”
Tri NZ’s rebadged ‘Triathlon Summer Series’, including Oceania Cup Wanaka on February 16 and World Triathlon Cup Napier the following weekend, the latter featuring a WTCS Mixed Relay, are now the target for the athletes.
With a number of the HP and development squad members and HP coaching staff based in Cambridge, an open invitation training camp will run in Waikato parallel to the Oceania and World Cup racing. This includes several trans-Tasman hopes and a return to Napier for the Oceania Standard Distance Championship on April 14 before the majority of the squad migrate north for the European/North American summer.
“We’ve got a quasi-camp situation happening in Cambridge at the moment and there is a junior development camp in Christchurch next week. The Cambridge camp is looking very good. Over the course of the HP Forum, we had close to 20 athletes in the pool on each morning, really, really good energy with the coaches on pool deck,” White said.
“We’ve got a handful of international athletes joining the camp at the moment, three French athletes and a Canadian, so that’s adding a bit of energy around it.
“We’ll also run a camp in Cambridge at that time [the Oceania season racing]. Essentially it’s an open invite camp because you’ve got athletes who already live there but it’s an opportunity to have dedicated coaching on pool deck and in the environment and access to all the provided [HPSNZ] network as well.”
