Oceania Triathlon

Team OTU - Fiji Continental Cup Camp June 2015

The Team OTU camp was recently held in Fiji as a part of the Fiji Triathlon Festival. The objective of this camp was to bring together team members in a supported environment to prepare for and race in the Fiji Continental Cup. Their first experience ever at this level of racing.

The athletes arrived in camp on Tuesday evening and quickly settled into training at 7am the next day. Given that the athletes were to race later that week we had to carefully manage load to ensure they were ready to race.

3 sessions per day were conducted for the first 2 days and after that we focussed more on skill work to freshen athletes up. Athletes and coaches were then able to experience  ITU race demands by attending race briefing and uniform checks, as well as course familiarisations.

Race day arrived on Saturday and all athletes raced well. They quickly realised the speed of the swims and dynamics of transitions and draft legal riding are things they are going to have to go back and work hard on. However, all athletes raced well and finished strong.

Post race was focussed on recovery for the day after the race and on the following day, which was the the final day of the camp, we were able to train 3 hours again.

All athletes and coaches reflected well on their first experience at Continental Cup racing and what it will take to become competitive. Many reflection sessions were undertaken so as to get the athletes and coaches thinking hard about how they can get themselves to be racing competitively at this level.

Many thanks must go to Terry Sheldrake of OTU for his support in driving athlete and coach development in the region. Thanks also to Zita Csovlyek from ITU Development for being an integral part of our camp environment and travelling such a long distance to be with us.

Congratulations to mentor coaches Dave Dickinson (Fiji) , Nathan Thompson Siofa (Solomon Islands) and Malcolm Limbai (Papua New Guinea) for their work in camp and for their selections at this camp.

Well done also to the team!

Boris Teddy - SI
Jad Nalo - SI
Rocky Ratu - SI
Andrianna Tukuvia - SI
Troy Kua - PNG
Casmer Kamangip - PNG
Stephen Sanday - Fiji
Lavinia Dickinson - Fiji

Peter Clifford - HP Coach Oceania Triathlon Union