Raised grants will benefit paraathletes
RESULTS are never guaranteed, but New Zealand’s top Paralympians should head to Tokyo better prepared than ever in 2020.
It was announced on Tuesday night they will now earn the same as their ablebodied counterparts from their performance enhancing grants.
There were plenty of positives to take from that for the Athletics New Zealand Paralympic high performance manager, Raylene Bates.
The Dunedinbased coach said the major change would be that top paraathletes would now be able to train as fulltime athletes.
‘‘Most of the top athletes don’t work — some of them study parttime, which makes it easy for them to be fulltime committed to their big campaign.
‘‘That’ll be the big thing, that it’ll allow [the paraathletes] to do that.
‘‘It will allow them more time to focus on the recovery and the biggerpicture things that make a difference.
‘‘So from that point of view, it’s really good.’’
She was unsure what the structure of the grants or the criteria to qualify for them would be.
However, they could be used for a variety of things to help the athlete boost their performance.
That included being a primary income — so athletes could focus purely on training and competing.
It could also include paying for extra services, travel to competitions, and taking a coach to those competitions.
There will be hopes the move brings home more medals from the next Paralympics.
However, Bates said it was important for athletes to focus on putting themselves into the position to achieve those results, rather than directly on the outcome itself.
‘‘I don’t know about better results; you can’t control the outcome.
‘‘But what you can control is your preparation.
‘‘What it will enable people to do is do those extra things at that level — which is your additional services, such as recovery — and not be stressed.
‘‘Some of them might still study and do a parttime job, but that will be centred around training, as opposed to training centred around work.
‘‘When there’s a lot of travel going on, it enables them to focus on what they’re doing, as opposed to still have to study and things like that.’’
The Tokyo Games are now less than two years away.
At the last Paralympics, in Rio in 2016, New Zealand won a haul of 21 medals, including nine golds.
Otago track and field athletes were prominent: Anna Grimaldi, Holly Robinson, Jess Hamill and Rory McSweeney all won medals.