Talent Identification & Development

(Left to Right) Lizzy Yarnold, Naomie Riches, Katherine Grainger, Hannah Angela and Maggie Alphonsi

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Mission: To drive World leading Olympic and Paralympic Performance Pathways that ensure sustained success at future Games.

Sign up for the latest Talent ID search, Girls4Gold: Canoeing

The Performance Pathway Team is a collaboration between UK Sport and the English Institute of Sport (EIS). It supports World Class Programmes to identify and develop talented athletes and the construction of the underpinning support systems. Funded as part of UK Sport’s eight year strategic investment into development, the Performance Pathway Team’s work focuses on the 714 development (Podium Potential) athletes, and their coaches and managers who have the capacity to impact on future Olympic and Paralympic games.
The work of the Performance Pathway Team focuses on supporting sports to improve their systems of performance development through the following four work areas:

1. Providing thought provoking, educational opportunities to development coaches and managers through the Performance Pathway Programme (P3) covering an array of topics unique to the ‘elite developing athlete’ i.e. athlete profiling, tracking and benchmarking and alignment.
2. Enabling sports to benchmark their performance development pathways against world best using specialist diagnostic tools.
3. Undertaking innovative research projects to gain a greater understanding of the route to excellence in elite sport.
4. Applying technical frontline solutions in partnership with sports to identify and develop talented athletes.

As part of our frontline solutions work the UK Talent Team has run nine national athlete recruitment projects, which have assessed over 7,000 athletes all of whom were previously unknown to the UK World Class system and sports.
These projects have resulted in over 100 athletes selected by sports into the World Class system with 364 international appearances made and a total of 123 international medals won.
In as little as four years since initial identification, several of these athletes were selected to represent Great Britain at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, including Helen Glover and Victoria Thornley (GB Rowing),Angela Hannah and Richard Jefferies (GB Canoeing) and Louise Jukes, Kathryn Fudge, Bobby White, Dan McMillan, John Pearce and Mark Hawkins (Men’s and Women’s Handball).