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Team Korea’s bobsleigh coaching staff at Olympic Games will feature a Lethbridge College instructor

Jan 25, 2018 | 11:00 AM

LETHBRIDGE – When the Olympic Games get underway next month in PyeongChang, South Korea, most instructors at Lethbridge College will simply be watching on TV.

But for one instructor, Florian Linder, it’ll be a completely different experience as he will be heading to PyeongChang as a coach with the Korean bobsleigh team.

“Initially I ran track and field at the University of Lethbridge. After I graduated I moved to Calgary in the hopes of continuing my track and field career but ended up being recruited to go into bobsleighing,” Linder replied after being asked how all this began.

Linder competed for Canada in the 2006 Turin Olympics in the four-man bobsleigh and finished 18th.

“After I retired from being an athlete in 2006, I was offered a coaching internship by the Canadian Coaching Federation in 2007,” Linder said.

Then Linder was brought in as part of the coaching staff for Team Canada during the Vancouver Olympics in 2010.

“After that I planned to retire, but then in 2012, I was contacted by the Russian Olympic Committee after they had spoken with Pierre Lueders who was an athlete that I sleighed with,” Linder said.

Lueders is an Olympic, world and World Cup champion bobsledder who is one of the most well known in the sport in Canada.

“He had brought my name forward as someone to work with him in Russia and help the host team achieve success. I guess after we had some good success in Sochi that kind of carried forward, and that’s when the Koreans reached out to us to work together again,” Linder added.

That good success included two gold medals at the 2014 Olympic Games in Sochi.

Lueders and Linder will be coaching the Korean team this time around, with Linder serving as technical starts coach.

Linder says despite this being his fourth time at the Olympic Games, it’s still exciting for him.

“I consider the Olympics one of the greatest sporting events there is, and it’s still fun to go and work with a team. I’m excited to watch the athletes compete, that’s what I do this for, to see them perform at their best and hopefully be successful,” Linder stated.

Coaching any athlete in and of itself is a challenge according to Linder, but especially when you haven’t formed a relationship with the athletes or the team.

“Building a relationship, I would say is the biggest challenge. Your going in there as a foreign coach and they hired you for a reason, but you still have to get an athletes trust in order for them to listen to you. Going into these places, whether it’s Russia or Korea, you might not have a lot of time to develop that trust. On top of trust, obviously the language barrier is a challenge as well,” Linder joked.

Linder’s focus as a coach is working on the technical aspects of the start, because he says there’s a lot of skill involved as well as timing.

He uses data to help build that trust and carve out a connection between himself and the athletes.

“I show them ways to improve their strategies, when you can break things down into numbers to show them how to get better they usually take it to heart,” Linder said.

It’s a lot of work, and quite the whirlwind for someone who never envisioned himself being in this line of work.

When asked if he ever thought after retiring as an athlete that down the line he’d be heading to these places as a coach, Linder replied not at all.

“When I retired from the sport I didn’t have any idea what I was going to do, but I never thought I would make a career out of coaching bobsleighing,” Linder said.

Preparing for the games has usually been a full-time job, Linder added.

“Usually I do travel with the team full time, there’s a race circuit in the winter where teams compete and then in the summer I do some camps as well. I haven’t done that this time, but I did work with the Korean team in the summer. At the end of the June I went to Korea, and then the team actually came to Calgary for four and a half weeks during the summer to train as well. In August and October, I went over for short stints but since then I’ve only provided some feedback over the internet,” Linder mused.

Linder has been teaching at the college for just over a year now, and acknowledges the great situation he finds himself in.

“After I finished with Russia in 2015 I took some other work, but now I’m here at the college full time teaching General Studies. We got a new dean this past August, so I just spoke to him and other faculty members about the Olympics. I asked if I could go, and if that was something that they would bless,” Linder continued.

“I was fortunate the higher ups did approve of it and found that it would be valuable for me to do that. The college has been very supportive of this, and I’m lucky because I’m sure not everyplace would allow someone to go to the Olympics like this,” Linder said, before adding that it does fall during reading week which helps.

The Korean team will get going at the bobsleigh events at the Olympics on Feb. 18, with the opening ceremony of the 2018 Olympic Games set for Feb. 9.

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