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Q&A with Sascha Kindred

Sascha Kindred OBE is one of Great Britain's most successful Paralympic athletes of recent years. He made his Paralympic Games debut at Atlanta 1996, winning a Silver medal in the Breaststroke. Four Gold and two Bronze medals followed at Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 before two more Golds and a Bronze at Beijing 2008. With London 2012 on the horizon, he’s fully focussed on his ‘home’ Games.

Q&A with Sascha Kindred

Q: You’re ranked number one in the world. Which opponent do you fear?

I respect anyone who reaches the top of their sport. There’s a Ukrainian lad Maksym Veraksa who is a great swimmer, so I’ve got a lot of respect for him. Obviously I want to try and stay one step ahead of him and try and retain the titles I won in Beijing. There’s a guy from Brazil called Daniel Dias who won eight gold medals at the World Championships last year. He’s sort of the main guy who gets the media attention because he stands out in Paralympic swimming terms and he’s the one I’ve got the most respect for because of the amount of training he does.

Q: How much of success is due to talent, how much perspiration?

Definitely the latter. I always worry about having Christmas Day off. What about my rivals? Are they having the day off? Does he get that extra session that I’ve missed?

I have to think about what my rivals are doing to get an advantage over them. So it’s not just what we are doing in the pool, but the support out of the pool like nutrition, looking after your mental attitude with psychologists, looking after your condition making sure your body and muscles are strong.

I think about the psychological aspects when I’m in the pool, all my training’s done with how I can get an edge over my rivals. How I can psych them out, put them off, make them nervous, so I have an advantage when I’m on the block and ready to race.

Q: What do you do specifically to put them off?

It’s a case of making them feel nervous and making them feel like you’re the best. A race can definitely be won and lost in the 15 minutes beforehand. You can see people qualify in the heats and break a world record and then in the final they bottle it and lose it. You can definitely win the race before it’s even started. I think that’s a big part of it.

Q: How many hours are you in the pool?

Basically we do between 8 and 9 two hour sessions a week in the water and then between 2 and 3 gym sessions as well. It’s up and down and a lot of it is on your own. It can be boring because you’re trying to focus on your turns. There are different aspects to each training session so that you are working different energy systems: there’s always something to keep your mind focussed. In swimming terms a lot of people say it is an unsociable sport due to the early sessions in the morning and night sessions but it comes down to how mentally focussed the person is. That’s why I think most swimmers are strong in that way because we are very much focussed on ourselves and on controlling what we can do. Nobody else can do that for you. I think it’s the best sport in the Paralympics. Early mornings aren’t great but I have to think about how I’m going to get better for next year. I’m always trying new techniques in training.

Q: How should Trackside readers best follow your sport?

I think everyone who is interested in the Paralympics can help to promote it. We have to get the name out there of what the Paralympics is and what the Paralympics is about and who the athletes are. If we try to fill the stadiums for the Paralympics it’s going to help. Not only for world sport moving on but the Great Britain Paralympic team will perform better. There have been competitions in Manchester and when there has been a full house it has helped performances enormously, so if we can spread the word about how elite a sport the Paralympics is it will hopefully boost performances and make Britain proud of what Paralympic athletes can achieve.

London 2012 Olynpic Games

156 Days to go

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London 2012 Paralympic Games

>189 Days to go

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Did you know?

  • PARIS 1900: The first woman to win an Olympic event was England's Charlotte Cooper, who won the tennis singles.
  • The dining room in the London Olympic Village will be the size of three football fields and seat 5,000. It will serve an estimated 100 tonnes of meat alone.
  • There are 700 rooms within the Olympic Stadium, including eight changing rooms and four prayer rooms.
  • The London 2012 Olympic Games ticket application process is open from 15 March to 26 April 2011.
  • Our history with the Olympic Movement dates back to 1948 when Lloyds provided banking facilities to the 1948 Games, the last time they were held in London.
  • 11 – number of residential blocks within the Olympic Village, each the size of a football pitch.
  • MELBOURNE / STOCKHOLM 1956: To avoid the problem of quarantine for horses, the equestrian events took place in two different cities (Stockholm and Melbourne), and in two different seasons (June and November).
  • There are 26 Olympic sports and 20 Paralympic sports in the London 2012 Games.
  • If all London 2012 sports events were held on consecutive days, there would be 318 competition days for Olympic Games events and another 133 days for the Paralympic Games.
  • The London 2012 Olympic Stadium will have an 80,000 seat capacity.
  • More than one million people will visit the Olympic Stadium for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012.
  • 90% - proportion of material reclaimed from demolition within the Olympic Park which can be reused or recycled.
  • 800,000 – the number of people expected to use public transport to travel to the London 2012 Games on the busiest day: about the same number as the combined population of Cardiff and Edinburgh.
  • SYDNEY 2000: Korea (South Korea) and Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) marched together under the same flag.
  • Around 900,000 items of sports equipment will be needed for the Olympic Games including 1424 FIFA-approved footballs, 1100 Badminton shuttlecocks and 65,000 towels.
  • 53m – height of the Olympic Stadium: three metres taller than Nelson’s Column in London's Trafalgar Square.
  • TOKYO 1964: The first Fair Play prize awarded to Lars Gunnar Kall and Stig Lennart Kall, who gave up their chances of winning the regatta to help two other competitors whose boat had sunk.
  • 76 – number of lifts in the Olympic Village to ensure the buildings are fully accessible.
  • SEOUL 1988: South Korea turned democratic in order to welcome the world to the Summer Games.
  • For London 2012, rail links to the Olympic Park will have capacity to take more than 240,000 people to the Park every hour.
  • LONDON 1908: The first time a relay was included in the athletics events.
  • Following the London 1948 Olympic Games, Lloyds was given a 1948 Torch thought to have been donated by an employee who ran with it.
  • Ancient Olympics: The word gymnasium comes from the Greek root "gymnos" meaning nude (and yes, they did).
  • MUNICH 1972: Mark Spitz won seven gold medals and broke seven world records.
  • The London 2012 Olympic Games will have 300 medal events for 26 Olympic Sports in 34 venues over 17 days of competition.
  • In 2012 up to 25,000 people could be transported to and from Stratford International Station each hour on the Javelin® train from St Pancras International station, in less than seven minutes.
  • The London 2012 Paralympic Games will award 471 medal events for 20 Paralympic sports in 21 venues over 11 days of competition.
  • BARCELONA 1992: In the women's 100m sprint Merlene Ottey (JAM) finished only six-hundredths of a second behind the winner, Gail Devers (USA), and yet she ended up in only fifth place.
  • The Olympic Park is the size of 357 football pitches.
  • ATHENS 2004: The marathon races followed the same route as the 1896 race, beginning in Marathon and ending in Athens' Panathenaic Stadium. Vanderlei de Lima (BRA) was in the lead with less than 7 kilometres to go when he was pushed off the course.
  • 35m – height of the Basketball Arena, the same as London's Tate Modern and the Falkirk Wheel
  • A ticket application process was announced by LOCOG as a way of ensuring a fairer process in order to make London 2012 everyone’s Games.
  • 8.8 million tickets will be available for the London 2012 Olympic Games, with another 2 million for the Paralympic Games.

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