You can find the German version of this story here.
The German national team and the so called “perspective team” with the most promising swimmers are currently training on the island of Phuket in Thailand in the Thanyapura Sports & Leisure Club – a multi sports facility which features an ozone-filtered Olympic-Standard-50-meter pool, a 25 m teaching pool and an underwater video analysis window. Referring to their website it’s “one of the finest aquatic facilities in the world”. FINA also held a training camp with youngsters who are in the special program “Scholarships for swimmers – targeting Rio 2016” there last year. In a FINA press release, published on April 5, 2015, the facility was remembers as “the FINA credited center in Asia.” Also the national swim teams of Great Britain, Australia, Netherlands trained at Thanyapura.
German swimmer Alexander Kunert took this picture during the German training camp
Many of Germany’s top swimmer like Steffen Deibler, Dorothea Brandt (who spent some days on Bali before she travelled to Phuket), Jenny Mensing, Alexandra Wenk, Jacob Heidtmann, Alexander Kunert prepare in this beautiful environment for the upcoming Olympic Games and of course the qualification before. Open water World and European champion Isabelle Härle, who will celebrate her 28th birthday on Sunday, also trains in Thailand – but she is already qualified for the Olympics. Other swimmers like World champion Marco Koch or European champion Franziska Hentke don’t attend the training camp – Marco prepares in Spain on the island of Tenerife at the “Trainingszentrum T3” at the moment and Franziska prefers her home town Magdeburg at the beginning of this important Olympic season. Franziska said in a short interview with SwimSwam that she plans three altitude training camps and that she was on the road frequently for big international meets in December and at the moment she has the possibility to train in artificial altitude at the University in Magdeburg – so the trip to Phuket didn’t fit in her individual long time preparation.
For Germany’s head coach Henning Lambertz, this training trip is one step in his plan to Rio: “After some well earned rest on the Christmas holiday, we will work hard under very well circumstances” he told the German publication “Die Zeit”. He also hopes that training in the sun will minimize illness the swimmers often suffer during the cold German wintertime.
The German team also will test in Thailand to swim under the Rio time table – because at the Olympics, heats take place noon and finals start at 10 pm. Swim teams worldwide must find ways to prepare for the unusual competition schedule. For example, the Australian team held a first training camp in Canberra in September 2015 where they lived and trained for 5 days under the “Rio schedule” that meant for example breakfast at lunchtime local Canberra time.
The German team in Phuket contains Olympic experienced swimmers but also youngsters like Alexander Kunert and Jacob Heidtmann who had his first international appearance this year in Kazan where he finished fifth in the 400 m IM. Alexander is Germany’s fastest 200 m butterfly swimmer at the moment – his ultimate goal are the Olympic Games and he wants to break Michael Groß’s nearly 30 years old German record (1:56,24) which is the “oldest” German record – Alexander was born in 1996, 5 years after Groß’s swam his last races.
The qualification for the German swimmers for Rio includes again two steps:
First the swimmers must reach the qualification times at National Championships (5 to 8 May, Berlin) in prelims and in finals and afterwards they must confirm these standards at another selected meet – the Mare Nostrum tour or the German Open. German national head coach Henning Lambertz said in an interview with swimswam: “I noticed in earlier days that the times German swimmers reached at the season highlights, very often were much slower than at the trials before. Statistics said that 8 of 10 swimmers performed worse at the big international meets. So our nomination procedure is an attempt to keep the performances on a good level.” After Germany didn’t medal in the London Olympic pool, the team obviously is on the right way – Lambertz was very satisfied with the result at the SC European Championships in December 2015 where the swimmers place third in the medal ranking, bettered 4 German records and set numerous personal best times. Lambertz now is the German head coach since 2013 and Rio will be his first Olympic Games as a head coach – and it seems like he has given some good input so far.
You can check out the training facility in Thailand here.
Report from “Die Zeit” (2015/08/10)
SwimSwam’s previous reporting about FINA scholarship swimmers training in Thailand