The month of May was very busy for the Club life. Let’s just have a look at the facts and figures of the opening part of the international competition season.

So, for us the May was:

The 4 stages of the Diamond League; 

The 6 starts of the Club's athletes at the Diamond League;

One first, one second and one third place in the Diamond League;

The first and second place on Adidas Boost Boston Games in the US; 

The third place on the Gold Label Road Race in Bangalore, India;

The personal best of Norah Jeruto in Doha on a 3000 m race in 8:37:00;

The start of the season for the Kazakhstan promoters of the Club in South Korea and Latvia;

The 5.5 m of Nikita Filippov, 11:36 and 23:37 of Viktoriya Zyabkina, 46:51 of Mikhail Litvin, and their first, second and third places respectively;

The first two stages of the Altay Kids Cup in Ridder and Semey with more than 600 participants;

21 registrations of the Club's athletes for the June competitions;

A two-week technical practice in the Czech Republic for Varvara Nazarova;

The 61,950 air kilometers for Caroline Kipkirui, despite that torture she won twice and once finished third.

 

          

As it was mentioned before, at the beginning of the June the Club’s athletes have 21 "tracks", and the so-called "waiting list" for 7 competitions.

 

Meanwhile, the Club's leader Olga Rypakova and her staff spent the second half of May at the Turkish coast, conducting a fine tuning training camp. From there, Olga will go to the first competition of the Season, the Diamond League Oslo.

At the same time, in the middle of the month, the President of the Federation Danial Akhmetov held a meeting with the Ukrainian coach with Kazakhstani origin, Elena Khlopotnova (record holder of the USSR and the Kazakh SSR in long jump). As a result, this specialist in jumping will start working in our city with children and youth athletes in the Sports School of Olympic Reserve since July of this year.

 

 

Moving away from the bare facts, I want to share the feelings that we as the Altay Club experience when attending the best track and field events in the world.

It is a pleasure to realize that we as a Club become recognizable in the track and field sphere, and cause genuine interest among the officials, manufacturers of sports equipment, athletes and coaches. These are exactly the feelings that cannot be expressed in numbers, but they are signaling us the "right" direction the Club is moving, following the strategy of the President of the Federation.

In conclusion, I want to say that during the last month the Club was in the negotiation process with the ASV Cologne Club and the leading Cologne Sport University in Germany. Negotiations were held to improve the all year training structure for Kazakhstan athletes on top level and get access to the most modern sports sciences and technologies. This includes also the short-term internships for the Kazakhstani coaches. While these lines are being written, our German counterpart is working on editing their official offer for co-operation

The result will be announced next month, but in any case, it will be either "full package" or "minimum package" of services for the Kazakhstani athletics. This kind of cooperation was made possible for us thanks to the recommendations of our Swiss partners.

I hope this will be the most useful platform with a full range of opportunities for our athletes, which at least in a mid-term prospect will produce good results for our talents.

However, remote from chasing top results, the most important for us was the launch of the pilot project of a long-term youth development program for the entire East-Kazakhstan region, the Altay Kids Cup! We continue to work on these competitions in September.

But now let’s first of all enjoy the summer season!