Gecsek
and Kiss to head centre of throwing
excellence
Balazs Marik for
the IAAF
15 January 2002 – Veszprem, Hungary – VEDAC, the Veszprem-based top Hungarian track and field club in 2001, has signed up Tibor Gecsek - the reigning European Champion in the hammer throw - to be the new coordinator of the club’s thrower section, in which Atlanta Olympic Champion Balazs Kiss- Gecsek’s biggest rival in Hungary in the last seven years - trains.
Kiss has been the top athlete of the club for the last several years and will help as a special counselor, because the club’s brand-new concept is to create a centre of excellence for a new generation of athletes; a throwers’ school in which top athletes like Kiss and Gecsek will guide the rising generation of new coaches and athletes.
The special twist in this affair is that Gecsek has also decided to continue his career in the rival club in Szombathely: “I am focusing on my family, and on our future. We have a four and a half month old baby named Fanny.
“ She is my first child, and naturally she and my wife are the two most important and influential aspects in my life. My career is complete, I am totally satisfied. Nevertheless, I am still in training.
“After last season I had to prepare myself to follow my coach’s training. As you know, Pal Nemeth’s training system is one of the hardest all around the world. I am ready for the training ahead of me and getting up to the challenge of competing at this year’s Grand Prix meetings, and probably in Munich at European Championships. I feel it’s my duty, since I am the title defender.
“But I have to look forward. VEDAC called me, and I think this is a great opportunity to help them and do something good for the new generation.
Both the program and we ourselves will have been successful if our competitors can represent Hungary at the highest level of international competitions four or five years down the road. Do not forget, we are bidding for the 2005 World Championships and will bid for 2012 Olympic Games, so we need youngsters to represent Hungary at that time. We have to take care of the future generation of Hungarian throwers” said Gecsek.
Balazs Kiss’s first impressions are positive: “We have competed together in the last few years, as we have same manager. We helped each other out a lot both on and off the field and this will not change a bit, even if the rivalry remains.
“Before the Sydney Olympics I suffered the worst injury of my career, but I have came back and leapt back to the top six in the world. As far as my club goes, they are in trouble and in desperate need of help, so I advised them to try something new, what others may call revolutionary. Coaches are hard to come by these days, so I told Tibor that it was our time to stand up and make a difference. All the people around us were and still are strangely inspired- to my surprise.
I told them that nothing in life came with a written guarantee, but they would surely have fun. They loved it.”
“Hungarian Athletics has to grab every opportunity to stay up there on the international circuit,” said Gyula Zsivoczky, Olympic Champion in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and vice-president of the Hungarian Athletic Association. “This is an unexpected, but exceptional idea, a project that offers a lot of hope, in which the quality looks guaranteed.”
The club received permission to name this workshop after Jozsef Csermak, Olympic Champion in the hammer at Helsinki 1952, who lived near Veszprem, and passed away last year. His spirit will be an inspiration as well.
Balazs Marik is the senior athletics writer for Hungarian sports daily newspaper Nemzeti Sport.
