With less than a month to go before the world descends on Rio for the 27th Summer Olympic Games, thousands of athletes, coaches and sports practitioners are gearing up for the flagship sporting event of the year. The largest contingent will be representing the red, white and blue of the United States of America and such a big team comes with a host of big challenges. Finbarr Kirwan is a High Performance Director at the United States Olympics Committee (USOC) heading up two of the largest teams at the Games: track and field and swimming. He walks us through some of the obstacles he faces and divulges how he and his team are plotting for gold.
Elite sport is cutthroat industry where the only thing that matters is the success of the team. Coaches and managers who fail to meet the expectations of fans and stake holders all too often get the sack. This can be a difficult and painful process. Stuart Lancaster knows what this feels like as he was axed as England Rugby’s head coach last year and has been replaced by Eddie Jones. Jones has enjoyed a successful start to his tenure but as CONQA Sport discovers, part of that success may be due to an unprecedented show of maturity and goodwill from Lancaster. Hopefully, his selfless act can used as a model for coaches and federations in the future.
Allister Coetzee has been appointed the 23rd Springbok rugby coach and has immediately sought to establish an era marked with youth and excitement. With an average age of just under 26 years, this is a team that might lack experience but has all the potential for something truly great. What Coetzee will need to do is unify all 31 players under a single ethos – perhaps the most challenging task for any head coach or manager of a national team.
Have you ever wondered why supremely gifted athletes don’t always form successful partnerships? Together with Warren Kennaugh, a behavioural strategist with over 20 years’ experience working with some of the world’s most successful teams, we uncover what constitutes a winning pairing. With elite teams constantly searching for the smallest gain in performance, perhaps the secret to success could be hidden in the emotions and values of their star athletes.
Nothing divides opinion in elite sport like the selection of a team before a major tournament. Everyone has their favourite combination of players and anyone who contradicts them is not only wrong, but an insult to the game they love. Roy Hodgson, manager of England’s national football team, has a tough choice to make: whether or not to include Wayne Rooney in his plans for European domination. It’s a tough decision to make, and one that will depend on more than purely footballing reasons
In elite sport winning is hard enough, winning time and time again is almost impossible. And yet some teams manage to do it. Throughout history there have been sporting dynasties that dominate their code with an air of impunity. But how do they do it? What is the secret to sustained success? Great British Cycling Team are establishing themselves as a modern dynasty. Few others have swept all before them in consecutive Olympic Games, and with Rio 2016 just a few months away, this era of dominance shows no sign of stopping.
Like a family member or loved one, our favourite athletes and teams reach into our hearts and souls and pull on certain strings that compel us to be biased. We can’t help it. There’s nothing we can do. Our athletes and teams are just and virtuous, and exempt from derision, while the opposition is the antithesis: deceitful, unsportsmanlike, unworthy of praise or achievement. The subjective nature of sport creates an environment where the same action or behaviour can yield very different responses depending on which side of the fence you sit.
There’s nothing like sport to get one’s emotions soaring. Nothing compares to the thrills you feel when your team secures a dramatic victory or the agony of watching the athletes you love fail to reach their potential. Elite sports teams know this and now tap into that emotion by building a brand and an ideology that transcends the borders of the field of play. Fan engagement means so much more than merely rolling out a colourful banner and building positive brand equity could prove the difference between a successful season and another mediocre one. CONQA Sport explores how off-field marketing can drive on-field performance.
World tennis is reeling in the wake of wide-spread match-fixing allegations. Tennis now joins the growing list of sports with questionable integrities after the recent scandals that rocked football and athletics. While there is no question that match-fixing is a heinous crime at the elite level of the sport, a closer examination of the inner workings of tennis might shift your perceptions. CONQA Sport explores the challenging financial environment that low ranking players live in and discovers that the temptation to throw a game for money can be rather enticing.
When Alexander the Great brought his Macedonian army in front of the uncountable force of the Persian Empire, he apparently eased the concerns of his generals with a thought on leadership: "I am more afraid of an army of sheep lead by a lion, than an army of lions lead by a sheep", or something akin to that. Great captains can make ordinary teams great. Some are worth there place in the side through their leadership alone. But what makes a great captain, and is leadership a skill or an innate gift bestowed on a few? CONQA Sport explores.
As we head into 2016, the world has never been more connected. With high speed internet, affordable air travel, and satellite TV, there world is literally a global village, one that is shrinking everyday. The sports world, like business or entertainment, has cottoned on to this new way of thinking and more and more, athletes are representing domestic and national teams in countries they were not born in. So what place does patriotism and national pride have in all this? If we are all united by a love for sport, and ideologies such as nationalism are outdated, is there any point in international competition? CONQA Sport explores.
Every week there seems to be another example of sport and politics mixing in an unsavoury fashion. Whether it is one more FIFA delegate being implicated in a corruption scandal or a star athlete accused of doping, it would appear to be a given that sports articles feature on both the back and front pages of newspapers. But perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. CONQA Sport explores the often tumultuous relationship between sport and politics and discovers that if history is anything to go by, these two key representations of the human identity will forever be linked.
Every job, no matter how glamorous, can get tedious from time to time. So then how do they do it? How do those elite athletes who reach over 100 caps for their country or compete in multiple Olympic Games stay hungry and focussed over many years in the same sport? Of course the pursuit of glory is a driving factor, and motivation comes easy when things are going well, but every athlete goes through dips in form and enthusiasm. This is when motivation can be used as a tool to set things right. CONQA Sport speaks with Professor Pieter Kruger, Performance Psychologist for the South African national rugby team, the Springboks, and debunks a few misconceptions surrounding sports psychology, and finds how motivation affects performance in elite sport.
Sports fans are a fickle bunch. They'll heap praise on their team, players, and coaching staff when they're winning. Accolades and plaudits flow in abundance as long as positive results are doing likewise. When things go bad however, the well of well-wishes dries up and a flood furious anger washes over the once loved heroes. No one is at the mercy of this turbulent climate more than the coach or manager. They’re the ones holding the wheel, they’re the ones making the play, and when things are going badly, they’re the ones standing where the buck stops and the hard questions start. Using Jose Mourinho and Heyneke Meyer as examples, we explore the risk and reward of sacking a coach.
Remember your first day at a new job? Were you nervous? Were you eager to impress straight away? Now imagine that you had the world’s eyes fixed firmly on your every move. Every decision you made, every experiment you attempted was scrutinised by millions of strangers. Now you get a sense of what Jürgen Klopp, the newly appointed manager of Liverpool FC must be feeling. To understand what challenges the new coach at a prominent team faces, CONQA Sport spoke with Gary Kirsten, former head coach of the Indian and South African national cricket teams
No one loves cricket more than Indians. The same could be said of New Zealanders and rugby. Ditto for Canadians and ice hockey. Certain nations have forged a part of their identity around a particular sport that it's impossible to mention one without the other. But how would a new sport wriggle its way into the psyche of a population and forge its own identity in a community besotted with a particular pastime? CONQA Sport explores this conundrum by finding out whether this is done through success in competition, the formation of a community, social upliftment, youth development, or an amalgamation of different variables.
The Pygmalion effect, or the Rosenthal effect, is a psychological phenomenon whereby the expectation placed on individuals and groups dictates the way they perform. Tell an athlete or team that they have a particular attribute for an extended period of time and they will soon adopt that attribute. Team identity is an abstract concept and yet some teams just exude a certain personality. The way they play, the fans that support them, the players they recruit; every facet of their being embodies an ethos. We explore the identities of two of the greatest sports teams on the planet; Real Madrid CF and the New York Yankees and find out whether team identity can be translated into success.
Team Unity vs Unrivalled Talent: it’s an age old debate that selectors and managers have had to grapple with. Do you select the gifted, yet troubled, genius with sheer natural ability and determination who can win you matches all on his own? Or, do you opt to leave the outspoken troublemaker out of your team in order to maintain team cohesion and a unified philosophy? Newly appointed Director of Cricket for the England and Wales Cricket Board, Andrew Strauss, had to make a tough decision over the selection of Kevin Pietersen. Strauss chose team cohesion over individual brilliance and denied Pietersen an England call-up. A brave choice, and one that poses many questions.
The Royal Belgian Hockey Association (RBHA), despite being a successful organisation, has a unique challenge in world sport. They are an international team whose players speak multiple languages. Clubs and franchises around the world can relate, but not many nations can. Multilingualism exposes individuals to different cultures, but when coaches and managers are trying to unite their players under one ethos, it can prove challenging. Murray Richards, High Performance Manager for RBHA explains how his team have overcome this obstacle.
Baseball is America's pastime while cricket represents English culture and global influence. They are two sports that encapsulate the ideologies of two great nations. Separated by geography, culture, and attitude, the two sports share a history that spans hundreds of years. With minor league baseball players struggling to carve out a career on the diamond, Julien Fountain, an Englishman with experience in both sports, is hoping to offer an alternative on the oval. Switch Hit 20 is aiming to change the face of world cricket by building a bridge for minor league players to become big hitters in cricket.
