From David Powell in Sydney
Steph Cook, who became the first women’s Olympic champion of her sport here yesterday, will seek to add the second most important title to her laurels next July when the world championships are staged at Millfield, close to the high performance centre in Bath where she prepared for the Games. Kate Allenby, the bronze medal-winner, will join Cook in an attempt to position Britain indisputably as the leading women’s nation.
In the three years since Cook began to compete internationally, she has accumulated an impressive collection of gold, silver and bronze medals from world team and team relay championships. Small wonder that Allenby, who helped to campaign for women modern pentathletes to be admitted to the Olympics 88 years after the men were added to the programme, is now calling for a team event to be put on the schedule for Athens in 2004.
The Olympic programme covered individual events only, whereas world championships incorporate team and team relay events. “The world championships are in Britain next year, so we have something to prove,” Allenby said. “We want to see a team event in the next Olympics because we have five girls in the top 20 in the world at the moment.”
Based on rankings, Georgina Harland was worth one of the 24 places in the women’s Olympic field here, but each country was restricted to two competitors. However, Harland was brought here for experience and as a training partner for Cook and Allenby.
The highly qualified coaching team assembled by Great Britain, comprising a mixture of trainers from Britain and the traditional stronghold of eastern Europe, has developed the women’s squad into one of superpowers of the sport. Jan Bartu, the performance director from the Czech Republic, applied for the job after noticing that the Modern Pentathlon Association of Great Britain had advertised it on the Internet.
To what extent the unit will continue to function effectively depends on National Lottery funding. Warnings of cuts of up to 40 per cent for some sports, because of falling ticket sales, will not apply, in the extreme, to modern pentathlon, given the success here. However, Dominic Mahony, the Great Britain team manager, still faces an anxious wait to know whether there will be some reduction in funding.
"We do not know what is going to happen with lottery funding other than they have warned us there could be cuts," Mahony said. "It is part of a programme that breeds success. For example Fritzie Foldes [a Hungarian fencing coach] was with Steph for 40 minutes every morning for the last three weeks, giving her lessons."
Nobody within the sport was surprised at Cook’s victory, least of all Allenby, who trains with her at Bath. “I have watched Steph train for the last eight months and she trains like a demon,” Allenby said. “Day in, day out she comes back for more and it is so inspiring.” Working with Cook played a part in Allenby’s success. “Previously I had always trained by myself,” Alleny said. Mahony said “the competitive dynamic between them” had driven them both to a new level.
