“This is the third ICCE Global Coaches House held during an Olympic/ Paralympic Games, after London in 2012 and Rio in 2016, and we’ve been privileged to have IOC Entourage Commission chair Sergii Bubka open each of these sessions,” explained ICCE President John Bales.  “Global Coaches House provides a unique learning and networking opportunity in the amazing atmosphere of the Games where athletic excellence is witnessed every day.”   

Over 230 High Performance Coaches attended GCH across the two sessions in Paris this summer from 29 countries across the globe. 

The GCH programme comprised of Olympic and Paralympic coaches, sport scientists and high performance leaders sharing their knowledge and experience in preparing for the ultimate in sport performance.

Keynote  presentations were given by a range of experts. The Olympic Session featured Iwan Schuwey (former National Coach, Swiss Triathlon) and Ilka Seidel (Scientific Director for High Performance Sport, DOSB); the Paralympics Session included keynotes by Beat Fäh (Paralympic Coach of the Swiss racing wheelchair athletes in London, Rio and Tokyo) and Christoph Weber (National Coach for Science, German Paralympic Committee and Disabled Sports Federation).

Sergio Lara-Bercial (Coach, VP Strategy for ICCE, and Professor at Leeds Beckett University); Frederic Sadys (Lead of the state diploma for the training of high performance coaches at INSEP) and Thierry Blancon (former head coach French athletics, trainer of high level performers and coaches) also led sessions with delegates on ‘Lessons from High Performance Coaches’ and the ‘High-level Coach as a Hyper Specialist’.

Workshops were co-ordinated and delivered in two themes:

• The Challenges and Skills of Olympic coaching – Claude Fauquet (Consultant in High Performance Sport); Iwan Schuwey; Mark Wolf (Head of Coach Education and Olympic Coach Program, Switzerland); Monika Kurath (Former World Judo Medallist and National Swiss Coach)
• Performance Excellence – Jerome Koral (Researcher and Coach, INSEP); Lionel Bordes (Enquêteur DCE, Référent Paris Sportifs et Hippiques; Lothar Linz (Director of the Coaches Academy in Cologne); Jeroen Otter (Coach at 9 Olympic Games in Speedskating); Frédéric Aubert (French Specialists in Physical Preparation); Lorraine Lafrenière (CEO of the Coaching Association of Canada) and Magali Martowicz and Jean-Benoit Charrin (IOC Human Rights Unit, Corporate and Sustainable Development Unit); Pim Verschuuren (Specialist in Governance and Sport integrity); Bill Tait (Paralympics Australia, AIS) and Masa Ito (NSSU and Japan Paralympic Association).

In both sessions, the groups were split into two on day one: (A) Building a Winning Performance Environment for the Athlete, Strategies for Different Sports with Thierry Dumaine (Deputy Head of Performance, INSEP) and Patrick Roux (Former National and Olympic Judo Coach for France, Great Britain and Russia); and (B) Meeting the Challenges of Olympic Coaching with Wolfgang Killing (Former German National Athletics Coach, Coach Educator in Parasport) Ulla Koch (Former Head coach, German Gymnastics, Belgium Olympic coach), Tommi Pärmäkoski (Head of Elite Sport, Finnish Olympic Committee, Formula 1 Coach), Wiebke Fabinski (DOSB Germany), Beat Fäh (Switzerland), Keren Faulkner (Director South Australian Institute of Sport) and Michelle De Highden (High Performance Coach Development, Australian Institute of Sport).

GCH was organised and coordinated by the ICCE Global Coaching Office in cooperation with CREPS, supported by ICCE Board members Frederic Sadys, Lorraine Lafreniere and Sergio Lara-Bercial.

We would like to extend a huge thank you to the venues for hosting us for Global Coaches House in Paris – CREPS Île-de-France and Maison du Handball. We would also like to thank INSEP, Finnish Olympic Committee, Swiss Federal Office of Sport, the German Olympic Sports Confederation, Sport Ireland, MAIF, Energy de France and ghostthinker for helping to make the event possible.

For more information on GCH, please visit www.globalcoacheshouse.net