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MASTERS ATHLETICS 2014.
The qualifying period for performances to be considered
conforms to EMA/WMA time limit.
All disciplines of Masters Athletics will be eligible.
The Award be presented to the winning Male and Female
during the next BMAF Championship in which they have
entered.
Irie Hill, MMAC, has won the European Masters Best Female
Athlete of the Year Award and I hope all members travelling
to the EMA Indoor in Torun will be present to see her receive
her well-deserved Award. It is the first time a female pole
vaulter has been chosen.
This is the second successive year that a BMAF female has
won as Angela Copson won last year; we congratulate two
wonderful Ambassadors.
Ian Richards was our Best Male choice after his fantastic
Race Walking record spree, but that and the World Award
went to Guideo Muller of Germany. Former Houghton-le-
Spring runner, W70 Lavinia Petrie, Australia, won the WMA
Best Female Award.
Francisco do Carmo Oliveira, Brazil, who won the M85 800 /
1500/ 5000m and claimed two World Age Group records at
the World Championships last year in Porto Alegre.
A Statistician questioned his age, Oliveira has now been
found guilty of falsifying his age by 10 years and had been
doing so for some years. He has been stripped of his World
titles and banned from competition for life. There were no
BMAF members in this age group in Porto Alegre.
Publication of the Official Results had to be delayed, if you
ordered a copy it should be dropping through your letter box
imminently.
When not risking his life teaching the Undrivables in the ITV
Series, Master Driver Peter Torre, VAC, was winning the
M70 Lake Tahoe 10k in the USA again.
At the European Veteran Athletic Association General
Assembly in Izmir Delegates voted in favour of changing the
name to European Masters Athletics.
Has Competitive Sport Been
Travelling Down The Wrong Road?
Tony Crocker and Bill Davies. Cardiff
Metropolitan University School of
Sport, November 2014
At the competitive level world-wide across large range of sports
there’s quite a crisis going on. For several years sport has
been heavily influenced by the beliefs that teaching athletes
how to relax will lead to higher performances; because too
many athletes are affected by not being able to cope with the
emotional tension in pressurised competitive situations. As
recently as November 2013 Guilherme Pineschi and Andrea
Pietro, in the Journal of Sport Psychology in Action pointed to
the negative effects of self-beliefs when competing. Negative
effects such as feelings of tension, apprehension, and
nervousness all leading to reduced performances in high level
competition. Sometimes this seems to be when an athlete’s
attention is shifted from the task in hand into trying to control
body movements which are already automatic. World-wide
“experts” have argued that successfully relaxing can reduce
muscle tension, will improve speed of recovery, so that after
one demanding event, athletes can successfully compete
again in the next one soon afterwards. Relaxing can also
improve sleeping and energy storage. Even taking control of
our breathing after a demanding event can be advantageous –
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i.e. directly taking charge and breathing deeper and slower
reduces anxiety levels more rapidly than ‘exhausted’ breathing.
Joan Vickers and Mark Williams, reported on their research
findings in the Journal of Motor Behaviour in 2007. They were
particularly interested in why it is that some athletes perform
well in situations of high pressure whilst others “choke” – they
can’t cope with the pressures of intensive competition, high
levels of physiological arousal, and psychological stress.
Choking has been known for many years and was defined in
1984 as “Failure to perform up to an athlete’s known ability
level.” It is a reaction shown in many intensively other highly
stressful situations as affecting members of the military, fire-
fighters, emergency medical staff and the police. For over 100
years researchers have tried to find out why some people can
produce high levels of performance in stressful situations whilst
others can’t. One aspect of this is that being able to perform at
very high levels, even when our bodies are exhausted depends
mostly upon our Central Nervous System (i.e. our minds, not
the rest of our physical bodies.
As a result of the impact of researches and reports from
internationally respected scientists and sporting coaches
relaxation became increasingly important in a range of sports.
But now it seems “all-change” may have arrived on the scene.
For example: Martin Turner (“Smarter Thinking in Sport.” The
Psychologist Aug 2014), argues that we are all irrational.
Particularly in situations that are important to us. “Failure would
be terrible, awful. The end of the world”. He points to the recent
failure of the England football team to score penalty goals,
where it has the world’s worst shoot-out record at 17% success
rate. He says “Of course winning is important to athletes and
so having tough opponents makes that difficult. Today winning
at all costs is being driven by coaches, parents, and athletes
themselves. It leads to a climate where only winning matters.
But athletes have to cope with such as competitive pressures,
long and short-term injuries, rejection by coaches, unfair
treatments by other athletes, other important events in their
lives, and actually failing when it really matters. We have to
learn how to live with pressure.
Additional change from worshiping relaxation amongst ‘experts’
has also been shown by people such as Amy Welch and Mark
Tschampl in the Journal of Sport Psychology in 2012. In
particular they focused on American athletes in sports such as
weight lifting, tennis, and throwing events in track and field
athletics, where explosive power is needed. In all of these
sports many athletes yell or grunt in order to increase their
production of force. A lot of sports competitors and officials
believe that ‘kiaping’, (grunting), coordinates minds and bodies.
Other competitors and officials believe it’s done to distract
opponents. In tennis this belief has been shown to be true as it
causes the receiving player to temporarily switch off for a
fraction of a second before starting to work out where the ball is
heading. A few years earlier Todd, in 2003, had concluded that
newcomers to athletics who were grunters were about 12%
better in their throws when they grunted than when they didn’t.
It didn’t work though for highly experienced throwers who didn’t
normally grunt but who were persuaded to start. For them
starting to grunt, when they hadn’t previously done so,
interfered with their already well developed performance styles.
In addition to the advantages we obtain from our total physical
and mental commitment to competitive involvement in our
events it is perhaps worth being aware of the general health life
that other aspects of our everyday lives can provide. In
particular there is much research evidence linked to regular
healthy exercise, diet and sensible behaviour in strong sunlight
that can help us to still be out there competing once we reach
our 100th birthdays.
Professor Julia Verne in Public Health England tells us that
raising the level of vitamin D in our food by eating such as
eggs, avocados, olives, coconuts, coconut oil, almonds,