This is why Poland has won only one medal. “Dog money”. Why is Slovenia able and we can’t?

One time, the Polish Ski Association asked the jumpers to submit the names of their club coaches. To the awards from the ministry of sport. The ministry decided that the people who helped train the players who won medals of major events for the country should be appreciated. “Do what you want, but we do not see the coaches from the clubs with our eyes! Nobody helps us, except for the staff, so I enter the servismen’s name” – replied one of our champions. And so he did. “He does something for me, and the club’s coach does nothing” – the activists heard.

“Dog money” and a plan for adults implemented with children

for 10 years he has been leading the team of Norwegian jumpers. When he had a positive covid test a few weeks ago, I asked him how complicated it was for his team to prepare for the Olympics, how he was training. I expected him to connect with online HR. He replied that it was not needed because everyone was with their coaches in clubs and knew very well what to do. This is how the system works.

Meanwhile, we hear about training courses that none of the clubs sign up for and complaints that you have to work above the norm for “dog money”. The author of such complaints was calculated that he was charging a total of PLN 9,000 a month from the club, the regional ski association and the PZN. He replied that he could, but he thought he shouldn’t work 9-10 hours a day anyway.

Here you can hear that there is still no other coach like. Discoverer of talents incl. and has a great attendance during trainings, because he takes the kids for walks in the mountains, because on the jumps he tells them beautifully about historical events and great masters, because he goes to the river with these kids and lets them jump on stones, thus exercising them coordination and balance. Almost 64 years old, Szturc knows very well with which age group to train completely without the V style, what loads to choose, how to lead a young talent from childhood to adulthood. At the other extreme, there are coaches who licked the national team as players and now it seems to them that the activity plans they have learned there can translate into work with several-year-olds. And then they wonder why they have the scourge of an injury.

Miracle. It happened to us!

We have been hearing for a long time that with all those children who would like to be like or Maryna Gąsienica-Daniel, there is no place to work. Let us stay a moment longer with the jumps and let us emphasize one more important difference between Poland and Norway. We have a dozen or so hills in the country – several hundred of them.

Tomaszów Lubelski has 20,000 inhabitants, there are no mountains, but children go cross-country skiing during physical education lessons. In the second grade of primary school, she started running on an artificially lit and artificial snow track. A few years ago little Monika took a picture of herself with.

Monika Skinder and Justyna Kowalczyk Photo Waldemar Ko³cun

Skinder had such an opportunity because she was one of the best participants in the “Run for the Olympics”, a program aimed at helping to find Justyna’s successors, just as the Lotos Cup in jumping helps to find the next champions of jumping after Adam Ma³ysz.

The young skiers from Tomaszów Lubelski won the team classification of this program many times. Hundred of children train there regularly. An alternative is roller-skating training. Skinder has tried this sport as well. She rode so well that in roller skating competitions she even defeated Karolina Bosiek from another Tomaszów – Mazowiecki.

Today, both of them are back from the Olympics. Skinder returns with a good ninth place in the team sprint with. And with the hope that in four years they will fight for a place on the podium together.

Slovenia has a lot of such miracles

Places on the Olympic podium and medals are not all that we should look at when assessing the performance of the Polish team on. Of course, one bronze of Dawid Kubacki is not enough. As always, we are enviously looking at the Netherlands, which has such a great skating culture that it can once again boast a bag of medals (a total of 17, 8 gold, 5 silver, 4 bronze and sixth place in the classification of countries). But we can envy not only them or another rich and traditionally powerful nation, such as Norway (we won the medal classification with the record number of 16 golden rings at the Winter Olympics).

Let’s look at little Slovenia. She appears more and more as the perfect example. It has only a little over 2 million citizens, and in this group there are really a lot of great athletes from various disciplines. In Beijing, their team won 7 medals (2-3-2) and took 15th place in the classification, in which we are on the 27th place.

How has Slovenia done this? She is a strong strength of many such Tomaszów Lubelski. It is a miracle for us, for them it is normal. There are new talents popping up all the time, because they have a place to jump from. There, clubs are formed by local communities and there are 100-200 people working in these clubs. Without payment. There it is something normal that the older ones prepare objects for the younger ones, that grandmothers and grandparents cheer. And at our lotus Cup jumping, where children take part in so many competitions that the competition lasts for hours, only one grandfather is reportedly regularly supporting his grandson.

Sports associations? Augean’s stable is waiting

Let’s go back to the medal standings, which shows our place in the world of sports winter. We are not in the elite. It’s clear. We are also not because there is still a lot to be done in Polish sports associations, not only in local communities, in our small homelands.

The first Augie’s stable, in which it is necessary to finally clean up, is the Polish Curling Association, which is not so active that our specialists in this spectacular chess on ice. Certainly, one cannot accept the apathy in which the Polish biathlon fell any longer. And it’s very good that there. And the biggest of our winter federations, that is the Polish Ski Association, is being hit rightly. If, of course, snowboarders are not short of anything and that Oskar Kwiatkowski, the seventh in Beijing, the eighth Aleksandra Król or the ninth Michał Nowaczyk, can certainly compete for medals in four years, but snowboarding is also a half pipe , big air, slopestyle and snowboard cross. And our activists seem to be completely oblivious to it and are betting only on the alpine leg of snowboarding.

One track is already allowing you to accelerate

Our sport does not exist in many areas of the Winter Games. Curling, almost all snowboarding, all freestyle skiing, ice hockey, really women’s ski jumping, bobsleigh, skeleton. We are not there everywhere. It wouldn’t be a problem if we really specialized in something. But even in men’s ski jumping we were not sure of ours, and in other sports we are just starting to create something meaningful, which has a chance to translate into really good starts at the Olympics.

is the locomotive that attracts our alpine skiing. But as he gets them almost out of the box, we need to have a lot of patience. For now, we have to accept the fact that now it was even easier for the Alpines from £ ódŸ (Magdalena £uczak) or Warsaw (Zuzanna Czapska) to reach the Olympics than from the mountains. And we must believe that thanks to better and better work of activists, this trend will reverse.

We have a speed skating track in Tomaszów Mazowiecki and we have a covered track in Zakopane. . – I think that as soon as we harvest the crops of Tomaszów and Zakopane, where the track will soon be covered, we may be able to win several medals at the Olympics – says the head of the Polish Olympic mission for the Beijing Olympics.

His closest skaters (he is the sports director of the Polish Speed ​​Skating Association and the Olympic medalist in the Sochi 2014 games in the team) in China did not reach the podium. But we hear that now he regularly trains 300 people with us, and in the times of Niedźwiedzki’s career there were six-eight riders. Since he still made it to the Olympic podium, there really is a chance that from such a large group, those who already, at the age of 16, are the fastest juniors in the world, will come to their dreams.

Anyway, such Piotr Michalski, fourth in Beijing at 1000 meters and fifth at 500 meters, could clearly confirm that we can look at the ice tracks with really great hope. He missed the medals by 0.03 and 0.08 seconds. And the skaters in general – – can be seen in the important ranking of Polish places in the top 10 of the Beijing Olympics.

Let’s look at this list:

• 3. Dawid Kubacki (jumping, normal hill)
• 4. Kamil Stoch (jumping, large hill)
• 4. Piotr Michalski (speed skating, 1000 m)
• 5. Piotr Michalski (speed skating, 500 m)
• 6. Kamil Stoch (jumping, normal hill)
• 6. Piotr ¯y³a, Paweł Wą sec, Dawid Kubacki, Kamil Stoch (jumping, team competition)
• 6. Nicole Konderla, Dawid Kubacki, Kinga Rajda, Kamil Stoch (jumping, mixed teams competition)
• 6. Natalia Maliszewska, Patrycja Maliszewska, Kamila Stormowska, Nikola Mazur (short track, relay)
• 7. Oskar Kwiatkowski (snowboard, parallel slalom)
• 8. Aleksandra Król (snowboard, parallel slalom)
• 8. Maryna G ± sienica-Daniel (alpine skiing, giant slalom)
• 8. Karolina Bosiek, Natalia Czerwonka, Magdalena Czyszczoñ, And¿elika Wójcik (speed skating, team run)
• 8. Klaudia Domaradzka, Mateusz Sochowicz, Wojciech Chmielewski and Jakub Kowalewski (tobogganing, relay race)
• 9. Monika Hojnisz-Starêga (biathlon, race)
• 9. Izabela Marcisz and Monika Skinder (cross-country skiing, team sprint)
• 9. Kaja Ziomek (speed skating, 500 m)
• 9. Micha³ Nowaczyk (snowboard, parallel slalom)
• 9. Wojciech Chmielewski and Jakub Kowalewski (tobogganing, twos)
• 10. Magdalena Czyszczoñ (speed skating, mass skating)
• 10. Maryna Gą sienica-Daniel, Magdalena Łuczak, Micha³ Jasiczek and Paweł Pyjas (alpine skiing, team ski)

Poland fared the worst at the Winter Olympics in the 21st century. We have always won medals since the Nagano 1998 Olympics – two in Salt Lake City, two in Turin, six in Vancouver, six again in Sochi, two in Pyongchang, and now only one. But to be honest, you don’t just look at medals. There were eight points – in the range 1-8 – four years ago. And now there were 13.

The gutter is a fad? Or maybe it’s worth it

We even had one of these places in tobogganing, where. It may be difficult to require such a track to be built in a country that lacks the usual routes for recreational cross-country skiing. But on the other hand – since we are building a lot of football stadiums, we cannot create one gutter for the three Olympic disciplines?

The powerful Germans won as many as 9 of their 12 gold medals in Beijing in luge, bobsleigh and skeleton (and a total of 16 out of 27 medals). They are the only ones in the world who have as many as four tracks.