In an ef­fort to en­hance it chances of at­tain­ing its gold of #10or­More­Gold2014, the T&T Olympic Com­mit­tee will com­mence and 18-month Long-Term Ath­lete De­vel­op­ment LTAD) pro­gramme from Thur­day.

The fea­ture speak­er for Thurs­day's open­ing day at Guardian Group Head Of­fice, Guardian Dri­ve, West­moor­ings, will be Richard Way, one of the ar­chi­tect of the Long-Term Ath­lete De­vel­op­ment (LTAD) Frame­work.

The sec­ond and fi­nal day of Way's vis­it will con­clude with an­oth­er lec­ture to be held at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, Wright­son Road, on Fri­day. Both days the lec­tures will start at 9 am.

Way has fa­cil­i­tat­ed the use of LTAD for 30-plus sports in more than 50 coun­tries, and re­cent­ly co-au­thored the book, Long-Term Ath­lete De­vel­op­ment, with Ist­van Ba­lyi and Col­in Hig­gs

With much em­pha­sis be­ing placed on its mis­sion of at­tain ten or more gold medals or the cre­ation of ten cham­pi­ons by 2024, T&TOC Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al, An­nette Knott, speak­ing at a me­dia con­fer­ence held at T&TOC's Aber­crom­by Street Head Of­fice, last month said it's was a tremen­dous re­spon­si­bil­i­ty be­cause it's the T&TOC vi­sion and its lead­ers vi­sion and it's not just go­ing to hap­pen just like that.

She added: "So the LTAD pro­gramme that we are part of it's a CANOC pro­gramme which is the Caribbean As­so­ci­a­tion of Na­tion­al Olympic Com­mit­tees. There are six coun­tries in­volved and this pi­lot project is over the next 18 months. What will hap­pen is that we will have our first vis­it from the ex­perts on Feb­ru­ary 25 and 26 dur­ing which time on the first day we will have all the stake hold­ers, Min­istry of Sports, Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion be­cause a very im­por­tant LTAD pro­gramme is phys­i­cal lit­er­a­cy which speaks to our pri­ma­ry schools and phys­i­cal ed­u­ca­tion

"The sec­ond day will then be tai­lored to the coach­es and na­tion­al sport­ing or­gan­i­sa­tions be­cause while we un­der­stand phys­i­cal lit­er­a­cy and the fact is that we would love to en­sure long term ath­lete de­vel­op­ment is with­in all ar­eas of sport in T&T, we have a mis­sion of ten golds 2024 and there­fore we have to fo­cus and tar­get cer­tain na­tion­al sport­ing or­gan­i­sa­tions so that we can al­so reach our goal.

"With this there are cer­tain as­pects of the long term ath­lete de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme where they learn to train, train to train and train to com­pete, and those are the three stages that we will be very in­ter­est­ed in.

"We are talk­ing about ath­letes be­tween the ages of 9-16 and of course when we talk 16 years we are talk­ing of 2020 and nine-year-olds we are talk­ing 2024, so we have to be very pre­cise and fo­cus on what we are do­ing.

The ex­perts will come five times over the pe­ri­od of the 18 months, so in oth­er words they will come speak to the coach­es and ad­min­is­tra­tors and go back while we do our home-work in be­tween and then they come back again and over that pe­ri­od we will be able to mon­i­tor and eval­u­ate the pro­gramme and to see how best it is to op­er­ate.

This pro­gramme has work suc­cess­ful in Cana­da and most of the na­tion­al or­gan­i­sa­tions in Cana­da have a long term ath­lete de­vel­op­ment pro­gramme.