Rio 2016 - Unless you're continuously improving, you're falling behind

by Sail-World.com on 24 Aug 2016 Former Laser Masters World Champion, Professor Mark Orams was a member of Peter Blake's Steinlager II crew and is now associate dean of AUT Millennium and head of the school of sport and recreation at Auckland University of Technology.

In this commentary he looks at the merits of the controversial Medal Capable selection policy used by the countries who topped the 2016 Olympic Medal table, and some other lessons across all sports.

New Zealand's most successful Olympic Games ever has ended. The Olympics once again displayed the reality of elite sport - that unless you are continuously improving, you are falling behind.

So after we have celebrated our athletes' successes and enjoyed the moment, it is important that our Olympic performances are thoroughly reviewed, to ensure the key lessons of the Games can be learned.

The lesson from the track cycling results, where New Zealand had a target of improving on its three medals from London 2012 but returned only one in Rio, is that you need to be improving faster than the opposition to succeed at the Olympics.

Great Britain did just that with a staggering haul of eleven medals in track cycling, six of them gold, bettering their performance at their home Olympics four years earlier.

New Zealand track cycling improved on its London times and performances, but not as much as the Brits. So it's not just improvement that's important, but improving faster than everyone else.

Interestingly New Zealand's most successful sporting code at the Rio Olympics, in medals won, was sailing. They collected a gold, two silvers and a bronze. Yachting New Zealand's selection strategy for the Games was controversial. While New Zealanders qualified in all 10 sailing classes, only seven were selected to compete at the Rio Games.

Yachting New Zealand was adamant it would only select those athletes who were 'medal capable', which meant both board-sailing athletes and the female single handed class were not selected. A tough call, but with results of four out the seven classes selected winning medals, plus a fourth, a seventh and a tenth placing, it's hard to argue with their approach. Contrast this with swimming, where if you meet the Olympic qualifying time you get selected. No New Zealand swimmers made a swimming final in Rio.

The lesson from this might seem straightforward: set the bar high and select only those 'capable' of winning a medal. That way High Performance Sport NZ, national sporting organisations and the NZOC are able to put more resources behind a smaller number of athletes and, if the Yachting New Zealand model works for others, then we should see a greater return on that investment (ie. more medals).

But if such a standard had been adopted we would not have seen Luuka Jones (K100 Canoe slalom) win a surprising silver medal (Jones was ranked 22nd in the world leading up to Rio).

(S-W: Two sailing medalists in 2016 would not have been selected under the 'Medal Capable' policy used by several countries.)

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