Asia Triathlon

The Dubai ITU level 1 coaching course took place from April 30th to May 4th in the “Dubai Police Sports Club” with good training facilities. 15 participants from 10 countries took the 5 days course integrating a broad overview of coaching roles and responsibilities, teaching methodologies, sport-specific information, and holistic topics such as nutrition, sport psychology, growth and development.

The course is targeting on newly founded national federations in West Asia such as UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Palestine and Kyrgyzstan. Each NF entered coaches who will oversee their youth and junior national teams in the future. 4 female coach candidates showed their strong desire to improve their coaching skills and knowledge throughout the course. They expressed that they will do their best to spread our sport in their countries with harsh environment for women. They have been working hard to get over all challenges restricting women’s sports participations.

“Through this course, we spread small number of seeds to offer opportunities to enjoy our sports to young female athletes in countries with this kind of harsh environment. We will do our best efforts to help these female coaches develop their coaching careers properly in our sport, and make their dream of women having equal opportunity to sports come true.” Said Ki, Wookyong, ASTC Sport Development coordinator.

ITU facilitators, Vicent Beltran from Spain and Eugene Lee from Singapore, created interactive sessions by inviting questions, offering group tasks, and asking for feedbacks to share their expertise and knowledge. In this comfortable atmosphere, candidates bombarded facilitators with questions they had in their minds. Vicent understanding Arabic culture and sports environment allocated plenty of time to provide consultation and advising participants after the sessions.

On behalf of participants, Ahmed Jaber expressed his satisfaction on the coaching course and appreciations to facilitators who shared their knowledge and experiences. Also he requested more sports development projects in the West Asia to enhance our sport development in their region.

Najla Aljerwi, participant from Kuwait, very pleased for the given opportunity to attend the course. She is keen to develop the female triathlon participation in this region. She said that female participation will dramatically increase when they can have equal access to the appropriate training facilities in this region. I hope we can trigger the change of sports environment in Arabic countries.

The next sport development project in Asia will be the Taipei ITU level 1 Technical Officials Seminar on June 4th and 5th.