FOCUS
Kurosh continues, “The main focus was for our team to reach greater professionalism, but at the same time give them the tools and discipline necessary to reach their dream goals. How do you work towards reaching your goals? You take a look at where you are now, where you would like to be and what it will take to move you from where you are towards your goals.
A complete slalom windsurfing athlete has to have physical, mental, technical and tactical strengths which will carry him or her through any given competition conditions on the planet. And to reach this equilibrium, we pushed for having an all-round training schedule which included morning and evening gym / fitness sessions and briefing/debriefings. While our physical coach was pushing us hard and looking at the level which our bodies could perform at, we were pushed to the limits of our stress levels during our race training sessions.
When pushed to the limit, it’s easier to identify your weaknesses, and this is something our coaches worked hard at. Our coaches were looking at our overall performance and the points in our “game” which were dragging our level down.
In fact, every little piece of the whole race is broken down and you are forced to be realistic with yourself and give an assessment of how good you perform at each specific part. All of it is combined into one performance spreadsheet and used as an analytical tool. All of our sailors went home with this knowledge on how to self analyse their game and work on their weaknesses along with footage of nearly all aspects of their racing.
In this sense, we have achieved what we set out to do. With the help of Andrea Cucchi, who was the initiator of this program, I feel that we managed to set something unprecedented up and looking back at it now, I am proud of what we accomplished. We set a new standard for training, talent development and mental approach and we are already looking ahead with new ideas for our slalom training!”