HEADLINE: First Person: New Olympic Training Facility CAPTION: The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association opens a brand new $22 million indoor training center in Park City, Utah. The new facility is expected to give the athletes a boost just in time for the Vancouver Olympics. (July 16) [Notes:ANCHOR VOICE] Park City, Utah :00 Troy Flanagan/USSA Director of Sports Science :07 "This is one of the most instrumented facilities to train in the world." "We've totally instrumented the gym with censors so every lift is measured and every effort is captured and pretty much it becomes a competition every time you train with yourself. Nats "3, 2, 1 jump." "This is one of the most state of the art strength assessment pieces that is completely custom made. We designed it ourselves, wrote our software and what we are doing here is testing neuro-fatigue. So how the athletes are responding to training and understanding how they fatigue. We can also categorize what type of athlete, whether they generate speed and power quickly or whether they are just a brute strength athlete." "We have a force plate in the ground. So we're measuring all of the force the athlete is putting out and we have a string attached to the ceiling measuring its displacement to the millimeter every time he jumps. So with that, if you have the force displacement you can get their power that they are outputting." "Here we have a large treadmill a very large treadmill that we can actually nordic ski on. So the guys have roller skis on and they can do a very controlled training session on the exact speed and gradient that we set. The other thing we do on this treadmill is fitness test where they can actually ski to exhaustion. We measure all of their expired air and see how big their engine is getting and how fit they are getting and whether their training programs are on track." "This track was put down by the same people who did the Beijing Olympic track. The difference with this track is it is actually double the thickness of any athletic track that they have put down. The reason why we wanted that is that a lot of our teams like moguls athletes, etc spend almost a quarter of their time bounding up and down this track training their explosivity. Not only moguls athletes but cross country skiers as well." "This is an instrumented start gate that we are constructing right now that is on snow flakes which is kind of plastic but it behaves almost as exactly the same way as snow and the guys are able to ski and snowboard out of that start gate." "The snowboarders spend more of their time in the skate boll there. Boarder cross track on the outside is for fitness. But we actually do running and agility work as well with our alpine teams. and this ramp here we call it a kicker is actually for big air. So for athletes to actually skate down there and actually land into the foam pit and practice their big air tricks." "Ok, so this is a demonstration kitchen where the athletes actually learn how to cook. One of our biggest problems that they have when they are training or racing in Europe is that the athletes don't essentially like the food. So they've got to prepare their own. Some of the athletes actually have really good skills in cooking and others have terrible skills in cooking. So we have our Olympic chefs in here designing the Olympic menu with the athletes but also our dietitians teaching them everyday how to cook and prepare food that is going to fuel their training and fuel their performance and what we've found when we get that right is their performances go up." You can license this story through AP Archive: www.aparchive.com/metadata/youtube/a9325d20aba03a8870e5428f83270788 Find out more about AP Archive: www.aparchive.com/HowWeWork

Be the first to comment