ROWING: Tony O'Connor is succinct on what he sees as the purpose of the camp he is helping to run this weekend at the National Rowing Centre in Cork.
"It's to give people a reality check, really," says O'Connor. "If people want to succeed at international level they will be shown the standard they must reach in the medium and long term, and they will then be able 'to put up or shut up'."
O'Connor is the assistant coach for the national elite squad, but the camp is for those who have graduated from junior ranks but are not in this elite group.
It is the first step in a programme put together by the High Performance Director of Irish rowing, Richard Parr, who says that work for the coming season must start before the beginning of the calendar year.
Aspiring internationals will be educated as to where they need to be in performance terms, looking towards 2004 or 2008. But he also hopes to use the camp, and the other parts of the programme which roll out over the next eight months, to identify talent - and to try to qualify a boat or boats for Athens next year. "I would like to qualify a boat for the Olympic Games," said Parr yesterday. "This is where it starts."
His efforts to form a heavyweight men's pair earlier in the season were stymied by the reluctance of some of the more experienced heavyweight oarsman to go into a pairing and team up with Seán O'Neill, who returned from New Zealand for the national trials.
Parr admitted last evening that he did not know whether O'Neill would attend this weekend. However, US-based Seán Casey, the second-fastest single sculler - by .05 of a second - in the American national trials and a winner at Canadian Henley, has been in contact and is expected to be back for the next stage of the senior programme, the five-kilometre time trial on November 22nd.
The response from nearer home has been more muted. "Seán Jacob is the only one of the major players out of Dublin who will be there this weekend," Parr admitted, although both Albert Maher and Ciarán Lewis have been in contact to explain their reasons for not attending.
"When people communicate with me, I don't have a problem with that," Parr said.
