A MELKSHAM swimming coach will see the culmination of years of work with Team GB Paralympians next month, as the athletes get set to fly to Rio de Janeiro to compete in one of the biggest sporting events on Earth.
Steve Fivash, a former teacher at Melksham Blue Pool, has been busy coaching seven of Team GB’s swimmers as they prepare for the 2016 Paralympic Games, where they hope to continue Britain’s winning ways.
Steve tells Melksham News, “Swimming is one of GB’s strengths and the team are all brilliant professional athletes so there are great expectations, but we try to focus on their own successes.
“We push the swimmers to try and swim personal bests and any medals are a bonus. If they’ve done the best they can, everything else takes care of itself.
“I find it hugely rewarding to watch the swimmers’ journeys; I’ve worked with some of them for years and to see how they’ve improved as athletes and then to see them succeed on the international stage is really amazing.
“Although I won’t be in Rio, I’m more than happy to watch from home, screaming at my TV!”
Team GB is fielding 31 swimmers at this year’s games, including world champion and OBE recipient Ellie Simmonds.
Swimming is historically Britain’s strongest Paralympic sport. The nation won 39 medals at London 2012, and has won 634 medals in the games’ 56 year history. Only track and field athletes have come close to the swimmers’ medal haul, with a total of 29 in 2012 and 516 since 1960.
“The excitement is really starting to build now in the squad,” Steve added. “The swimmers will go to the holding camp in London this weekend and they’re all still training hard.
“There is a lot of technical content in the training and it is challenging; some of these guys have been to two or three Paralympic Games before, and some have been working for six to eight years to get to this pinnacle of competition.
“It’s important that we don’t get distracted in the lead-up to the races, and that everybody stays focussed on competing and doing the best they can.”
Paralympic competitors are divided into three classes of disability – physical (i.e. loss of limb, cerebral palsy); visual impairment; and intellectual impairment (learning disabilities).
Steve is an experienced para-swimming coach and coaches regularly at a national level. This will be the fourth Paralympic Games he has been a part of, and earlier this year he took a team of swimmers to Florida for the Invictus Games, where they won 46 medals and won 19 out of 29 events.
The Rio 2016 Paralympic Games start on Wednesday 7th September.
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