Ankrom appointed high performance director
The Board of AAI approved the appointment of Ankrom to a post which has remained vacant since the Beijing Olympics in 2008. CEO John Foley yesterday admitted that top Irish athletes are well advanced in their preparations for the London Games in 2012 but is satisfied that the American will fit seamlessly into the existing system.
Foley said: “Our top athletes have their programmes in place and our role will be to support those programmes financially and in every way we can. We are talking about the likes of Olive Loughnane, Robert Heffernan, David Gillick, Derval O’Rourke, Paul Hession, who I know have their programmes in place. But we must have the right procedures in place to support them particularly in the area of sports science and medicine.
“It is absolutely pivotal for us going forward and I feel Kevin Ankrom is the person to do what has to be done.
“He will add a huge dimension to the organisation. He has a huge appetite for work and for doing what is right to drive our High Performance Programme. He has been very successful as High Performance Director of Athletics in New Zealand, a post he has occupied since 2007. They have a great programme in place there and we are talking about a population that is similar to our own in size. He is a doer and a great find. He has a great personality and he has a huge international dimension as well as having worked in the American college system.”
Ankrom will be working in co-operation with the Institute of Sport, the carding of athletes and he will bring a strategy to the process that they have not had before. The role up to London 2012 will be supportive.
“But he will be responsible for putting the strategy in place to lead us into 2016,” he said. “We just have to make sure that they all have everything they need in terms of support to get them out there and competing.”
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