How to win a medal in individual sports in three consequtive Olympic cycles

Abstract

Planning and preparing for the biggest sports competitions, such as the Olympic Games, involve controlling and monitoring a great number of factors (scope and intensity of sports training, recovery procedures, creating daily routines, athlete’s personality traits, injuries, diseases, adverse external environmental factors, etc.). Even in the event of the best possible outcomes of all preparatory processes, achieving success in a competition and winning a medal will depend on details and seemingly unnoticeable procedures that are designed for a specific athlete. The primary aim of this paper was to present all the procedures applied to working with the athletes in tennis and taekwondo, which led to achieving the competition success, i.e. winning medals at the Games at the end of three Olympic cycles (2005-2008, 2009-2012, 2013-2016). The secondary objective of this paper, which is the knowledge transfer aimed at disseminating personal and professional associate experience to other professionals, experts and sports coaches in the field of sports science, was realized by presenting the importance of psychological approach, diagnostic procedures and the application of biomechanical principles during the preparations immediately before a match or a fight.