Category: Training

And finally, after all of that, I can turn towards the United States and start moving towards my point.  Over the last 2 weeks or so I bored you to death with Kenyan distance running dominance, talked about UK track cycling, the Soviet sports machine, East Germany, Bulgarian Ol’ing, Australian swimming and finally covered the current Chinese sports machine in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 8 yesterday.

If you got anything from my endless repetition I hope it’s this: consistent success or outright dominance in sport is universally predicated on a complex interplay of factors ranging from sociocultural, political, economic, physiological, etc.  You need the numbers of athletes going into the sport which means having facilities and availability, along with coaching, the athletes need support, incentives to go into the sport and put themselves through the training, etc. etc.  You simply can’t speak of one factor in isolation without considering the others.… Keep Reading

Continuing from Part 7, one last stop on the historical and world-tour of sports dominance before I can spend another 80 weeks talking about the US (ok, maybe only 2 more weeks).  And that stop is in Communist china.  Because, as you’ll see when I quote some statistics below, the Chinese showed some outright ass-kicking dominance in Beijing in 2008, at least in the handful of sports that they targeted.  But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

In many ways, China represents, in a sense, the logical end result/culmination of everything that had gone before in both the earlier Communist and Socialist sports machines.  Basically, they seem to have taken a bit of the best from each of the systems and integrated them into an optimized whole.  Hopefully this will make more sense in a second and, frankly, I await a flood of Chinese sport secrets to flood the market any day now.… Keep Reading

Having looked in some detail at the former Soviet Sports machine in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 6, I’m going to move somewhat chronologically to talk about the East German sports machine (dominant in about the 80’s) along with Bulgarian Olympic lifting (which actually overlapped with both).  While both share a lot of similarities to what the Soviets had done, there are a few key differences worth noting. Then just to fill some space I’ll briefly talk about Australian swimming.

For the groups I’m going to talk about today, I’m not going to do the subsections I’ve been using. This is to prevent me from being excessively wordy and it is getting repetitive at this point. Mainly I’ll sum up where things were the same and focus on difference and how they impacted on the end result in any given system.

I am, gradually, getting to a point.… Keep Reading

Ok, believe it or not, all of the truly long pieces are done until I get to the US.  Having spent two days on UK Track Cycling, finishing on Tuesday in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 5, I promise not to spend more than one day on any one group until I get to the US.  That’s gonna be long.  At this point it would be a bit redundant to just keep making the same points over and over again.  So I’ll be a bit briefer so I can look at more groups faster.

So over the next few parts, I want to take more of a snapshot of a variety of different sport systems that have shown success or outright dominance in various time frames.  And since it makes some logical sense, I’m actually going to look at them in somewhat of a chronological order (that is, in terms of the times they were dominant) since this makes some other points about changes in training and focus some of which I feel are relevant to my ultimate topic of US Ol’ing.… Keep Reading

So last time, in Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 4 I started a discussion of UK Track cycling and how the UK went from also rans to the highest levels of the sport in a relatively short period of time.  First I introduced track cycling in general, bored you to death with a bunch of sociocultural crap, talked about some of the events and the physiology involved in success

From there, I introduced how the UK  decided to go from nobodies to dominance, did so in the span of about 10 years and how an infusion of UK lottery money was sort of the ‘key’ to let this happen (I’m sure the idea that money solves everything will make at least one forum poster happy).  But there was still a critical factor in all of this.

Oh yeah, briefly, it has been brought to my attention that some of my description of the the UK and what it is comprised of are not exactly correct. … Keep Reading