Coaching and Care of Athletes

COACHING AND CARE OF ATHLETES and the athlete work together. The year 1936 was that in which the Olympic Games were held at Berlin. Early in the year my son had been provisionally selected to represent Great Britain in the pole vault, and some weeks before he came down from Cam– bridge to Earl's Colne, in Essex, where we were living at that time, I saw Mr Sykes, the headmaster of Earl's Colne Grammar School, who very kindly placed at our disposal his gymnasium, and also had made for us a very good . runway on g:r:ass and a proper vaulting-pit. Dick was not due to return home until June I r, which would leave him less than two months to train for the Olympic Games. For that reason I should have decided in any case that his training should be done on grass, rather than on cinders. Here is a hint for coaches. Provided you can be sure of getting your athletes a sufficient number of trials and competitions on cinders, if the competition for which they are training is to be held on cinders, it is far better to train them on grass, as long as it is of a good, springy, and lawn-like nature. Grass is far easier on the athlete's legs than are cinder tracks. This means that he can do far more work without any chance of going stale, or without being inflicted with that awful bugbear of the athlete known in athletic parlance as 'shin-splints,' but to the medical profession as peri- -~ ostitis. Prior to Dick's arrival home on June I I I had obtained a couple of new vaulting-poles from Westbury's, in London; but when he started training on the I 2th both of these poles proved far too whippy. Limbering up on that day was of a light nature, firstly because the weather was sunny and dry, with no wind, and, secondly, because we were planning only a light work-out. Half a dozen vaults were what we intended, and these were carried out from r r ft. 2 ins. to 12 ft. 2 ins. The same afternoon I wired for another pole, which arrived upon the following morning, only to prove so stiff that it jarred the vaulter's left forearm rather badly. Add to this the fact that it was raining hard and the turf was extremely slippery, and you will see that it only needed the next happening rather to damp our ardour, for at Dick's second jump the new pole broke, and he took a heavy fall right on to the back of his neck. However, he went on vaulting with one of the whippy poles, and reached ·r I ft. 8 ins. before we had to abandon work on account of the .treacherous nature of the run-up aiJ,d take-off. lOO