The European Horizontal Jumps and Sprint Symposium elicited another excellent response with 120 participants from 70 countries attending a packed three day event in Karlstad, Sweden from 15-17 November.
The Symposium was jointly hosted by Swedish Athletics and the High Performance Center for Jumps in Karlstad and this formed the second part of European Athletics’ Coaching Summit Series programme in 2019.
One of the standout speakers across the programme was Dan Pfaff from the United States who began the Symposium on Friday afternoon (15) with a lecture on “Energy leaks and disturbances: Maximising movement excellence, programming and promoting athletes’ health factors for sprinting events.”
On Saturday morning, Pfaff gave another lecture on Key Performance Indicators [KPIs] which was followed by a practical session for which he was accompanied by European U23 100m champion Henrik Larsson.
Another renowned coach to speak at the symposium was Goran Obradovic, the coach of reigning world and European indoor long jump champion Ivana Spanovic.
Obradovic gave two presentations during the course of the symposium, including one presentation which looked specifically at long term planning and the training process, using Spanovic as the case study.
The symposium broke up into two sections on Saturday and Sunday with programmes tailored specifically for sprints and jumps alike. The sprinting section featured practical and theoretical presentations from Pfaff and Hakan Andersson while the jumps section was led by Anders Moller and Yannick Tregaro, the coach of Christian Olsson and Kajsa Bergqvist.
The symposium also provided an opportunity to pay service to long-standing servants of the sport. Anders Borgstrom was presented with his European Athletics Member Federation Award by Swedish Athletics General Secretary Stefan Olsson while the symposium concluded with a presentation from the recently Michel Torneus, the 2015 European indoor long jump champion.