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Coach profiles > Gerry Adams: National pentathlon coach adds value to sports profile
Gerry Adams: National pentathlon coach adds value to sports profile
Issue: Volume 27 Number 2
Any sport designed, as modern Olympic founder Baron Pierre de Coubertin once said of modern pentathlon, to test an athlete’s ‘moral qualities as much as his physical resources and skills’, is bound to have a similar effect on a coach.
And so it is for Australia’s national modern pentathlon coach, Gerry Adams, who not only has responsibility for finetuning the preparation of two Australian athletes for the Athens Olympics, but also coaches another 30 athletes at various stages of development in both pentathlon and his speciality, fencing.
To put this into perspective, pentathletes compete in five disciplines — shooting, fencing, swimming, riding and running — on one day of competition. Adams oversees athletes’ training across each of those disciplines. When you consider that most pentathletes train up to six hours a day, that they train across five disciplines and that Adams has more than a score of athletes under his wing, you wonder where he finds the time.
‘You never have a boring day,’ Adams says, and as he does so, you sense that he is not being wry, but is simply expressing one pleasing aspect of the sport he loves.
Pentathlon was not something that was on Adam’s radar as a child. In fact, he was born with a hole in his heart and doctors told his parents he would be dead by the age of ten.
His sister, who had a similar genetic problem, was one of the first to undergo surgery in the pioneering heart operations of the 1960s. His family had moved from country Victoria to Melbourne for treatment of the siblings and it was there that the world of sport opened up to Adams.
As a then healthy 15-year-old, his sports focus, like others around him, was set on Australian rules football. Then Adams met his school physical education teacher, Cornell Vena. Vena had competed in pentathlon for his native Romania at the Melbourne 1956 Olympics before defecting to start a new life in Australia.
He not only introduced Adams to the sport, but also instilled in him an ambition, drive and vision that Adams still holds today.
‘He really changed my life,’ Adams says. ‘He helped me set some major goals at a young age … goals that included competing at the Olympics, goals that he made me believe were really possible.’
Yet the 42-year-old would take a winding road to get there. While pentathlon had been his focus in his teens, as he grew older, Adams chose to concentrate his efforts on three-day eventing. At the age of 25, he returned to pentathlon, representing Australia in the 1990 World Championships. Throughout his pentathlon career, coaches had noted his particular strength in fencing and encouraged by their support, he again chose to concentrate solely on one discipline, under the guidance of his Belarussian fencing coach Vlad Sher, representing Australia at four World Championships in fencing before finally fulfilling his goal of more than 25 years, to compete at the Olympics.
Just one week after his second child was born, Adams recorded Australia’s best ever epee fencing result with an individual placing of fifteenth , and he was a member of the Australian team that made the quarter-finals in the teams event.
It was through fencing that Adams turned to coaching. ‘One of the juniors [pentathletes] asked me to coach him in fencing and because he knew that I had a background in pentathlon, it kind of grew from there.
‘There were no pentathlon coaches in Victoria at the time. I think after the 1956 Olympics, where the sport was really popular, there were a lot of coaches around. I certainly remember that when I first started in pentathlon there were five or six coaches around me. I suspect that those coaches were getting older through the 1960s and 1970s and gradually leaving the sport and no one was filling the gap.’
Once Adams had accepted one offer, word got around and he was inundated with requests for help. Unfazed, he took the changing focus in his stride.
‘I was always interested in coaching because of my experience with Cornell. He helped me to realise a dream and I wanted to give others a chance to have and live out that same dream.’
Today Adams is completing his Level 2 coaching qualification in fencing. There is, as yet, no formal accreditation for the sport of pentathlon as a whole. Instead, pentathletes ‘buy in’ the services of specialist coaches in the respective disciplines and Adams’s job is to liaise with those coaches to ensure a holistic approach to each athlete’s development, but he also needs to keep up with developments in individual sports.
‘It can sometimes be difficult,’ Adams says. ‘Firstly, none of the disciplines in pentathlon has anything to do with one another in the sense that they’re not relative to one another. They all require their own skill sets.
‘Also, coaches in the specialist disciplines have to understand the nature of pentathlon. Our athletes train up to six hours a day, starting very early. It’s not appropriate for them to have a hard session running or swimming and then be expected to come in exhausted and turn their attention to something like fencing that requires fine motor skills. It’s all about the context.’
Adams says that it is almost inherent that pentathlon coaches have competed in the sport. ‘I think to coach the sport you have to understand the sport and to understand the sport, you really need to have competed in it.
‘Balancing an athlete’s training program is one of the hardest things. Overtraining is a big problem. Athletes expect to see improvements rapidly and can push themselves in particular areas.
‘Someone coming into the sport who might be a competitive swimmer would still take up to three years to develop the necessary strength to compete in all the other events on the day, not to mention the technical skills needed to ride, shoot and fence. There’s some long-term vision needed and that’s why we often like to get athletes at a young age. We’re finding kids from pony clubs have a good start because they can usually run and swim and they have riding skills, as they get older we just need to introduce them to the other disciplines.’
Adams relies heavily on the use of video in his training. ‘For competitions where we’re in a lottery for horses, I’ll usually try and get some film of the owner of the horse jumping and then show that to the athlete so they can see how the owner rides that particular horse.
‘I’ll also use video, particularly with the fencers, to provide them with feedback. I can shoot it, edit it down to the specific matter I want an athlete to work on, and then I can even send a ten-second grab by email for them to review.
‘I’ve now got a pretty extensive video library and I like to show the athletes that, for example, 12 months ago this is where you were and now look where you are. It can be really effective.’
Meanwhile, with the Olympics looming, Adams is turning his attention to Australian qualifiers Eszter Hortobagyi and Alex Parygin. Parygin won the gold medal for Kazakhstan at the Atlanta Olympics before moving to Australia. Hortobagyi was a Hungarian junior world champion in 1996 and is now also resident in Australia. Adams says both have good chances to bring home medals for Australia.
‘Alex certainly knows what to do to win gold and Eszter knows what she has to do too,’ Adams says. ‘You just have to remember that it’s five events in one day and it’s about putting it all together on one day of one event. If you can get everything right on the day, it’s something really special, that’s one of the rewards of the sport.’
