The 2016 Olympic Games is something of the past and the coaches are already planning for the 2020 Games in Tokyo.

“Nowadays in sport there is no time to rest on one’s laurels. A look at some of the winning margins in Rio shows how important it is to study the results and continue to work on ways to improve. For example, Luvo Manyonga missed out on winning the gold medal in the long jump by one centimetre.  If Akani Simbine ran 0.03 seconds faster he would have won the bronze medal in the 100 metres, and 0.05s faster would have meant a silver medal,” said Wayne Coldman, a conditioning coach at the High Performance Centre (HPC).

“We are not talking about massive margins, which proves that the secret to success is to be as accurate as possible throughout the four year Olympic cycle. We can always look back at what we did to prepare the athletes for Rio, but the problem is that we will never know whether we could have done something better, because we will never know what would have happened if we had tried something different.

Simbine and Manyonga are two of the athletes Coldman helped to prepare for the Games.

Referring to what might change from now until Tokyo, Coldman said that Manyonga is still relatively new in the HPC training environment. 

“We have only been working with him for about six months. It was actually quite challenging to work with Luvo because he only started to train again at the end of last year. So we kept things fairly simple. We basically just tried to keep him injury free so that Neil Cornelius, his coach, could work on his long jump technique. 

“We know what works for Luvo at the moment, but we are always looking for ways to adapt. Obviously we will have to see if what we have done so far will still work for him next year. To be honest, I expect that we will keep the core of the programme that worked well but be as experimental and creative as we can with the other 20-30% of the programme. 

“The main thing about Akani is his willingness. He has a real desire to learn and that is why he has improved so much over the last two years. Akani does not just come in and do the work, he also learns about what he is doing, why it is making him better. He always wants to know if there are ‘stuff’ that can make him better.

“The scary part is that if an athlete fails, you, as his coach, feels as if you had a hand in the fact that he did not achieve the goal he has set himself. The opposite is also true. When an athlete succeeds it is fulfilling to know that you have helped him to improve from where he was, say, nine months ago to a position where he has more opportunities before him than most people will get in a lifetime,” said the HPC coach.