Is it really about the mental practice
The European championships were held in Barcelona just last week. Among the best nations were for example Russia, Great Britain, France, Germany and Spain.
The Nordic nations didn´t do that good. Finlands track & field -federation had hopes for three medals, but only one was achieved by Tero Pitkämäki at the mens javelin. There were good performancies at our team. Well done Janne Ukonmaanaho, Jonathan Åstrand, Mikael Bergdahl, Niclas Sandells, Petteri Lax, Otto Kilpi and 4 x 100 meters relay team.
In many mediaforums there is now a debate about what to do to get some success for our athletics. Some say that Finland needs coaches from abroad or that coaches should co-operate more. Both of these statements are accurate at some level.
Many well known people have said that our athletics need more mental praparation, which might as be true: it is well known fact that mental preparation carries an athlete like longer that poor concentration. At Barcelona I saw one peculiar issue on this mental side, and those moments happened right after the competitoin when athletics were interviewed by YLE-reporter.
The answers were like "I don´t know why this and that happened" or "at the moment I don´t want even think about highjumping". For some reason, at least from my perpective, there was no joy present at some performacies. Just normal weekday 8 am to work and 4 pm back to home.
But back to this mental training. I ran in our national team between the years of 1980-87. I can remember well that this issue about the mental preparation has been up and awake some many times. The thing that makes me sad is that our generation of track & field -figures are taking the same line as the older generations.
There was one good writing at Helsingin Sanomat on monday. I write more about that later, but main issue in this writing was that Finland with its 5,2 million people can´t be good in every event. This writing basically said that we should make decision what are our events. Ice-hockey is one event, because there are not that many countries involved, but what are the other events.
