Comment
Share
Posted on Friday June 12th at 9:59 a.m.
Tweet
Keene coached the United States to four medals two gold and two silver at the Winter Olympics in Turin in 2006.
He visits New Zealand every year and will bring his snowboarding team to Cardrona, near Wanaka, for a six-week training camp in August. He said the halfpipe there was "the best in the southern hemisphere".
The Vermont-based former professional snowboarder in Christchurch yesterday as a keynote speaker at the New Zealand Academy of Sport South Island's Accelerating Talent Forum said he was impressed with New Zealand snowboarding's progress.
"You've got great riders here and great mountains and a great sporting population ... New Zealand's standing in the world is rising daily."
The New Zealand team briefly topped the world rankings in August after the first two stops of the Ticket To Ride (TTR) World Tour, with James Hamilton ranked the top individual male.
New Zealand also had their best teams result at the World Cup halfpipe event in Quebec in February with five athletes achieving top 20 placings.
Keene said he knew New Zealand's leading coaches, Tom Willmott and Michael Bell, and had "a lot of admiration for the job they are doing" with the New Zealand freestyle snowboarding programme "from a population of four million".
More New Zealanders were performing with distinction at international events and Keene predicted even more would become regular Olympic competitors, not one-off qualifiers like "the Jamaican bobsleigh team".
Keene retired as US Olympic team coach in 2006 "because of a desire to spend more time with my family". But he is back as US snowboarding's head of development. As one of the most experienced coaches in the world, he felt he was best suited to nurturing young talent. Some of his recent proteges have been as young as nine.
In a wide-ranging address to his Christchurch audience, Keene implored coaches to keep "inspiring athletes to achieve".
He said coaches should never "pass up an opportunity to boost the confidence of an athlete", an adage which was just as relevant "for a 21 or 25-year-old Olympic gold medallist" as it was for a young sportsperson.
SOURCE: THE PRESS
ARTICLE: By TONY SMITH