The team behind the team

Considering that my day job involves, in part, assisting sports in the development of coaches and officials, I thought it would be very remiss of me to leave the team officials out of the introductions. Here is the team that deals with all the behind the scenes stuff to keep things running smoothly so that the athletes can do what they do best.

Murray Lydeamore, or Muz as he's affectionately known by anyone who's ever spent more than five minutes with him, is our team manager. While he maintains a reasonably low profile, he's always busy sorting out one issue or another to make sure all is as it should be.

Paul Martens is one of the coaches and looks after the tandem boys. He also runs a pretty good local tour and can always be relied on to unload and load the truck for ergo training sessions. That may be why he sometimes ends up like this -



Most of the time, though, he's busy plotting the opposition's downfall!



This is Tom Skulander. He's another of the coaches and apart from helping out with everything from chauffeuring the troops around Italy, and to essential shops to stock up on essential equipment, he is responsible for Alex Green and Jayme Paris at these championships.

I mentioned Peter Steggall in an earlier post. He's our physiotherapist and the one who attends to keeping all the athletes in tip top shape physically. This is him on his way to breakfast. He's probably already run a couple of laps of town and carried out three or four massages just to get warmed up for the day, such is his dedication to the job!

Our mechanic is John Keegan, who insists that his image is copyrighted, so he can't appear on the blog. I think he's just more comfortable working behind the scenes, keeping the bikes running so smoothly that I think they could win the races all by themselves.

Most of you already know me and I did appear in an earlier cameo, but I'm Sian and I'm also one of the coaches. On this team I'm responsible for the Canberra connection, Sue, Kerry and Brandie. Here's me doing my best impression of being a tourist.

The final member of the support staff is the Head Coach, who I'll introduce in a later blog.

Tune in tomorrow morning, by which time I should have blogged some results from the first day's competition. Just a reminder, today we have Michael Gallagher in the C5 pursuit and all four tandems in the 1km time trial.