Rows upon rows of polished canoes line the shed that nestles under the paradise of the nerds. Technicians feverishly scuttle by. This is what £6.3 million pounds of Lottery investment buys: a working laboratory, located within the wide-open spaces of Lee Valley Park in north London.
Worth every penny, suggests John Anderson, the performance director of British Canoeing and one of the architects of the sport’s high-tech hub. “We’re now leading the world,” he proclaims. Out of the water and – he hopes – within it when his charges enter the slalom and sprint fray at the Olympic Games next weekend.
Their experiments weren’t always so extravagantly furnished, he recounts. Born and raised in Ayr, Anderson’s passion for paddling was enlivened when Alistair Wilson, an Olympian in 1964 and again in 1968, took him under his wing. His protege became a devotee, even when he joined the Royal Air Force at the age of 17.
He rose to the ranks of wing-commander. “I ended up training management which is kind of what we do here,” he expands. “It’s about people. It’s about nurturing young people and really supporting them.”
A coach foremost, it was in 1997 when British sport was ported into a new era with Lottery funding. The mend-and-make-do school of volunteers, squeezing training and travel into days off and spare time, was swept away. “It was a fantastic opportunity to be involved in professionalising the sport I love and been in since I was 10,” he says. “I left the RAF on Friday and took this job on the Monday.”
And has held it ever since, one of the two Scots bound for Rio in positions of team supremo along with sailing chief Stephen Park. Thin pickings, a symptom of UK Sport’s Anglocentricity that has left curling as the lone high performance hub outside of England. Anderson moved to Nottingham first and then London when his outlandish plans became reality. It has given him the tools to look beyond what is currently achievable and imagine the possibilities.
To the benefit of his two prime Scots, David Florence and Fiona Pennie, who will both pursue medals in Brazil. While training, each wears a tracking device as they negotiate the course, their personal ecosystems monitored while a litany of cameras record every twist and turn.
“So when David and Fiona finish their session, within 10 minutes they’re in front of a laptop with everything analysed,” their boss outlines. “There are only two places in the UK where that exists: our base at Lee Valley and Manchester United. That’s where we are in technology. We’ve worked on the boats, the construction, the seat fittings, everything bespoke. We look at how you can make the paddles and their shafts. We just go: ‘what else is out there?’”
Without the raw graft of three hours per day riding the rapids, the right nutrition, the gym work (Florence, famously, eschews) and the right mentality, the boffins would suffer a system error. “But that’s how you achieve high-performance,” he proclaims. “Doing it better than anyone else in the world. The Olympics is the icing on the cake. But you have to get the basics right and I think we do that better than anybody.”
In 2012, British Canoeing had its greatest-ever Olympic return: four medals, including a gold and silver in the two-man slalom event. UK Sport has set them a benchmark of three this time around. It will prey, quite naturally, on Anderson’s mind over the next fortnight.
“But I keep those numbers absolutely away from the athletes and coaches. We don’t talk about it, genuinely. It’s not even an elephant in the room. I’ll let the coaches know once a year but then I go: ‘let’s get on with it.’”
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