UPDATE AND SOME HELPFUL INFORMATION TO KEEP CONNECTED WITH ACT


Dear Friends of the Commonwealth,

Six months has passed since we met in Lausanne and I thought it was time to get in touch especially as we have some news!

Jane Moncrieff, our Secretary General, is to leave Triathlon Scotland where she is CEO at the end of April. Jane embraced triathlon and her role on the ACT with great enthusiasm and passion and she will be sorely missed. We thank her warmly and wish her all the best for the future.

Darren Coombes, Operations Director at Triathlon Ireland has agreed to step in to the breach and take over from Jane – at least until we meet again. I am delighted to welcome Darren who has done so much to make Ireland a best practice National Federation. It is a particularly welcome step because Darren is able to introduce Slack – a software tool that will enable us to communicate better and share learnings.

When we met as a group of Commonwealth Federations in Lausanne 2019, a number of Federations expressed a desire to improve communications and share learnings within the ACTF community.  As ITU are utilising the ‘Slack’  platform for Age Group projects with some successful outcomes and as some NFs(Canada, Ireland and others) were already utilising Slack internally, Ireland suggested that we would create an ACTF Slack workspace as a pilot collaboration project.

We have now created this workspace and populated with some channels to direct discussion.

This workspace is available to join by Clicking Here! or by emailing  admin@act.triathlon.org

It takes just a minute to set up an account (Please use Name and NF code in your account eg - Ian_GBR or Darren_IRL). The workspace is populated with some simple ‘how to’ training videos - the platform is quite intuitive however and hopefully new users will quickly pick up the basics.

We hope all of our members will engage with the tool - Ireland has shared some project information in some of the channels to get the conversation started. We encourage you and your teams to ask questions, share ideas, post great projects and build relationships!


Birmingham 2022

Preparations continue apace for the next Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. The venue for the Triathlon is Sutton Park which runners might know is a regular host to our National Road Relays. It is a great venue and work is already underway to improve the road surfaces inside the park. The course will consist of a one lap swim, a four lap bike and a four lap run. We understand that as with Gold Coast in 2018, the usual lapping rules will be waived to support the less stronger athletes in completing the course.

National Federations with potential athlete competitors will need to be lobbying their National Commonwealth Games Committees for slots ahead of other sports. We have seen in the past that older sports, more entrenched in the sporting organs and infrastructure of their countries have effectively deprived triathlon of worthy competitors in favour of less merit worthy athletes from other sports. I am attaching the link to the Birmingham Organising Committee for your assistance.

https://www.birmingham2022.com/

Yours in Sport,
Ian Howard