Swimming-I’m willing to help Seychellois swimmers and coaches – Roberts |27 March 2009
“I was unfortunate as there was a Russian coach at the time and I met him. But months after I had returned to Norway, I heard he had drowned. But I did not bother to push for the job,” he said.
The retired Roberts, who has always been interested in physical conditioning and swims 10,000m a week, competed at the Masters World Championship in England in 1996.
“It was very interesting,” he said.
Related to retired Seychellois swimming star Kenny Roberts, Roberts explained that “as a coach you work as a father, a psychiatrist and an adviser.”
According to Roberts, local swimmers are at a disadvantage in the Roche Caïman pools.
“The water temperature is too high in the pool. It’s too hard for the swimmers to train,” he said.
“This is a drawback and it discourages swimmers from training really hard. When swimmers train on acidity – on their maximum – the water is too hot. They lose a lot of energy because of the heat.
“Norwegian swimmers would protest if they were to swim in the pools here. The water is too warm. In Europe, the water temperature standard is 26 degrees,” he noted.
Roberts added that he would like to run a seminar and share with local coaches the different methods of getting good results.
“Coaches who do not know how a human body works won’t get results from their swimmers,” he said.
“Swimmers must also understand why they are doing such drills and this will help them to train harder. Sometimes swimmers say: ‘Are we going to swim five times 200m again? Can we do something else?’ I reply: ‘No. As long as your times are improving, you’ve got nothing to complain about. I know what I’m doing’.”
“If the swimmers’ results don’t improve, then there must be something wrong with the coaches’ training programme,” added Roberts, who played water polo in the British Army.
Although he is to leave on May 4 for Norway, Roberts wants to stay in touch with Seychelles’ swimming.
“In swimming we’ve got the 16 micro-cycle. This is training for 16 weeks to be in the right form for big competitions. That’s very important,” he said.
“I could help by coming here three or four months prior to a major international outing if I’m asked to. During this time, local coaches and I could put our experience together to get the best out of the swimmers.”
For Roberts, swimmers aged 14 and over must train between 50,000m and 60,000m a week, and for a junior to qualify for the Norwegian national team he has to swim the 100m freestyle in 55 seconds because the qualifying times for big international events are getting harder.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya, of Seychellois parents (his mother is Gonthier and father Roberts), Roberts was brought up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He went to England in 1962, joined the British Army and was stationed in Germany, Kenya and Aden.
He did his technical education in diesel engineering before starting his own business in diesel fuel injection with two partners in London.
Roberts married his Norwegian wife in Norway in 1970 and he moved to the Scandinavian country to work in Volda. There, he started his own business after getting authority from the government.
The 68-year-old became a swimming coach after completing levels one and two coaching courses in Norway.
G. G.