"The relay teams are the backbone of our team"

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The relay teams are the backbone of our team

National coach Dirk Lange is fully committed to the German relay teams at the 2010 European Swimming Championships in Budapest. They are one of Lange's favorite projects, "the backbone of the team", as he says, and he takes them correspondingly seriously in his training work. Since March, his athletes have been working on perfecting the relay changes under the guidance of the Training & Movement working group headed by Prof. Dr. Kibele. The new starting blocks with larger plates allow the swimmers to jump into the start on the move and thus dive into the water at a higher speed. The price of this acceleration is that the starting swimmer no longer has the incoming swimmer in sight at the crucial moments ? the timing and coordination must therefore be perfect during the blind changeover. He accepts the associated risk. We have to go to the limit, work at the limit, get the maximum out of it," says Lange.

The relay project in the DSV is run in cooperation between the Training & Movement working group headed by Prof. Dr. Armin Kibele and the coaches of the German Swimming Association, Thomas Lebherz and Petra Wolfram. Since the beginning of the year, relay changes have been practiced in compact training camps.The training stations included the Teneriffe Top Training Center, the Olympic Training Center Berlin, the Olympic Training Center Potsdam and, in the immediate run-up to the competition, the Olympic Training Center Heidelberg.A new mobile power measurement start block wasdeveloped at theUniversity of Kassel especially for this project, which complies with the current Fina specifications and thus enables direct feedback of the central parameters of a start analysis.

The team from the Training & Movement working group is proud of the German relay teams' performances so far at the European Swimming Championships in Budapest and wishes the German swimmers every success in the remaining starts on their way to the 2012 Olympics in London. Further results can be viewed at: www.omegatiming.com/calendar/index.html

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