Sir Clive Woodward: How We Will Have The Edge At The Olympics

Sir Clive Woodward, director of Elite Performance for the British Olympic Association (BOA) introduced Dr Sherylle Calder, the newly appointed Visual Performance Skills Consultant for Britain's Olympic athletes at Bisham Abbey, Buckinghamshire.

Calder has been attributed to the success of Woodward's 2003 world cup winning England rugby team, and she is now contracted by the BOA until 2012. She will be ased permanently at Bisham Abbey, where she will work with British athletes competing in the Beijing and the 2012 Olympics.

"Over the seven years that I was coach of the England Rugby team, I did a lot of things 1% better," Woodward says. "I had hundreds of specialist trainers and they all made that 1% difference - and every 1% adds up."

He first heard about Calder in 2000 when she was working with Australia's cricket team, and invited her to meet with him and explain what she does as a Visual Performance Skills Consultant.

"She asked my why, when I trained the players physically and mentally, I didn't weight train their eyes? I just had vision of dumbbells in Laurence Dallaglio's eyes," Woodward says laughing. "But it's a fact that the eye is supported by six main muscles, so why can't you train them just like you train any other muscle in the body?"

Calder, herself an ex-hockey professional, worked on a variety of exercises with the English rugby team to work on these six muscles around each eye to increase peripheral vision, 3d vision, improve focus speed and response times.

"An athlete with good visual memory always seems to be in the right place at the right time, and of course nothing happens in sport until the eye tells the body what to do," Woodward continues.

"We all have a strong eye and a weak eye," Woodward explains. "Sherylle would make the players put a patch over their strong eye at training, and they were running into each other, all over the place."

She also developed a code for the England Rugby team - CTC.

"It stood for ‘crossbar, touchline, communicate'," says Woodward. "The players had to look at the crossbar, look at the touch line and then communicate, talk to each other about what they were doing."

"When we were training someone would hold up a red board with CTC on it. Even the padding around the post at the training ground had CTC on it, but not a single journalist has ever asked me what it stood for. If you said CTC to any member of that team today, they would know immediately what it means."

Calder is part of a wider vision programme at Bisham Abbey which is sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, the official Vision Care Product Partner of the BOA. They approached Woodward with AchieveVision, an elite athlete vision care training programme they developed. According to their statistics, over 50% of the athletes competing in the 1992 Barcelona Games had never had an eye examination. Johnson & Johnson will be providing British athletes with sports specific eye examinations and corrective contact lenses if required. All of Britain's Olympic competitors will have access to an online vision training programme which develops and improves accuracy and reaction time.

Woodward believes that with the AchieveVision programme and Calder posted permanently at Bisham Abbey up until the 2012 Olympics, British athletes have a greater chance of winning gold.

"World Cups and Olympic medals are won by players or athletes with coaches who have complete attention to detail. I've not met a single medal winning athlete who doesn't have a medal winning coach."

"Of course Wilkinson scored that winning try but it was Steve Thompson who threw him the ball. Thompson had done a huge amount of work with Sheryl, and that is where the 1% is evident."

In terms of the forthcoming Beijing Olympics in August, Calder will be working with Shanaze Reade, BMX rider, Kelly Southerton, heptathlete, the Badminton, Judo and Boxing athletes.

It is hoped that she will work with athletes in other sports before the 2012 Olympics, but Woodward says, it is up to the coaches to decide if they think vision training is beneficial.

"Sherylle is not an optician, she's a sports scientist specialising in visual performance. She's a coach; she's the icing on the cake. The BOA is a provider of services. If sports want to take advantage, it is up to them - but the coach has to buy into this, not just the athletes."

Whether coaches think vision training makes a difference to their athlete's performance remains to be seen in the take up; Woodward however, has no doubts.

"We work on the unexpected. It's the little things that win world cups or lose world cups and with Sherylle as Britain's vision coach, I think we are going to have an edge over every other country."

By Rachael Hannan

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