South American athletes in Sherbrooke (© IAAF RDC Santa Fe)
The 3rd IAAF World Youth Championships held last July in Sherbrooke, Canada produced the best South American performance in the history of these championships.
This great performance, confirms the very good results achieved in Kingston, Jamaica where two bonze medals were obtained and fourteen athletes reached the finals, thus becoming the best performance in the record of the Juniors category. Adding the fact that in Sherbrooke there were eleven athletes in the finals representing six countries, it is clearly evident that the whole South American Area is improving.
Even more interestingly, out of the eleven South American finalists, six were in field events which obviously have a greater technical demand. The examples are very clear: pole vault, two athletes in octathlon, javelin and triple jump.
A remarkable fact that should be highlighted is that the majority of athletes who reached the finals, in the past both Youth and Juniors Championships, are trained by coaches from the IAAF System. In the case of the three gold medallists’ coaches, all of them are IAAF Level II Coaches and two of them are Level I Lecturers. They are Andrés Barrios, from Uruguay, Joao Paulo from Brazil and Guillermo Chiaraviglio from Argentina. They are all young coaches with excellent skills.
Without doubt, among the various aspects influencing the South American progress, coaches play a fundamental role, therefore their education and updating has a great impact; a field where the IAAF Education and Certification System is of vital importance. There are many indicators of the progress due to the coaches’ development programme, which started a decade ago and is now beginning to show its fruits.
