Switerzland is not considered to be a power in track & field. I was surprised at how many athletes they had in the all the finals at the European Championships. Are they importing talent for their national team? It would seem that they would have a challenging time getting lots of athletes into championship finals. What is their story?
How do they do it? wrote:
Switerzland is not considered to be a power in track & field. I was surprised at how many athletes they had in the all the finals at the European Championships. Are they importing talent for their national team? It would seem that they would have a challenging time getting lots of athletes into championship finals. What is their story?
Ditto in the triathlon runners up in team relay and won the womens' race.
We hosted the European Champs back in 2014 and thus there was a lot of funding for young athletes and clubs. But most of it's benefits started to show after the Zurich champs and we have been seeing some success in the last couple of years.
There are actually no athletes that switch narionality just to start for Switzerland. Even the athletes with roots in foreign countries have been living here for a long time and went through our club system. Most of them grew up here. Abraham, todays Marathon silver medalist, is a bit of an exception but even he has been living in Switzerland for 10 plus years and got help from a local track club when he emerged from Eritrea back in the day.