Norway: Educate club coaches & build training environment in the clubs

Jan Kocbach August 28, 2015 MiniNews Comments Off on Norway: Educate club coaches & build training environment in the clubs

Norway does not have a formalized structure with youth teams, regional training centers or even a dedicated junior national team as most of the other top orienteering nations. Instead Norway’s approach is to put a lot of focus on helping the clubs building a training environment in which future World Champions can develop, according to the presentation of Norwegian high performance orienteering the International Orienteering Coach Conference in Faak am See, Austria.

The team structure in Norway consists of an Elite Team with 8-10 athletes and a Development Team for 10-15 athletes aged 19-25. There is no junior national team, and for athletes below 19 years there is no team structure. Instead a talent developer is employed by the Norwegian Orienteering Federation in order to educate club coaches and ensure that the athletes have the best possible training environment in the clubs.

Close cooperation between clubs and Federation

Development of young talents and Norwegian success in the future therefore builds on a close cooperation between clubs and Federation. There are four central focus areas in this cooperation:

Camp Norway: 2-3 training camps each year in Norway or Europe – for athletes and coaches. Focus is on the age of 15-20 years, but the training camps are also open for seniors and even for foreign athletes. Focus is on educating club coaches and athletes – together.
Train best at home: Via the talent developer there is high focus on improving the training work done at home, in the clubs. The talent developer visits clubs/trainings. There is focus on how to achieve quality in local training and educate in the “Norwegian model”
High performance coach forum: Club coaches or personal coaches with athletes close to international top level are invited to a number of meetings throughout the year
Formal meetings between national team and clubs: A number of yearly, formal meetings are set up to improve communication both ways. The clubs are always represented by the club coaches.

There are also some orienteering gymnasiums in Norway, but these are not as central as in Sweden’s athlete development.

Olympiatoppen important partner

Even if there are no training centers for orienteering in Norway, orienteering benefits strongly from the High performance center of “Olympiatoppen” in Oslo. Here there are support facilities both for the top athletes and for the coaches – and “Olympiatoppen” is also important in the funding of the top athletes through stipendiums and high performance orienteering through funding of development projects. As of 2015, 8 athletes have personal stipendiums from Olympiatoppen of up to 15.000 Euro.

Norwegian training model

When comparing the Swiss and the Danish athletes’ approach to training with the Norwegian athletes, it is evident that there are significant changes. The “Norwegian training model” is based on many hours of low intensity training, while Swiss and Danish runners have very few long trainings at low intensity (I1). Danish coach Lars Lindstrøm even said that he sees no reason for trainings longer than 90 minutes. Comparing this with a typical training week of Magne Dæhlie (see below), this is a very different story. This again proves that there are many different ways to the goal – you need to find the best way for each athlete.