In April, Team SPIX travelled to Lloret de Mar, Spain, to hold a training camp to fine tune preparations for the upcoming season. Under the command of Adrien Vivès, a small group of athletes were put through their paces with a focus on race skills.
“We were a small group as some of our athletes were competing in Africa and South America,” explained Vivès.
One such athlete that was away was Vitali Vorontsov. Instead of taking part in the camp, Vorontsov had already launched his season in South America. At the Americas Cup in Salinas he won a silver medal. He then finished 6th at the Americas Cup in Lima the following week.
Leading the squad in Lloret de Mar was Jawad Abdelmoula. Now a WTCS medallist after an exceptional 2022 season, Abdelmoula has been a real success story for Team SPIX. This weekend he will be taking on the M’Diq African Cup with WTCS Cagliari coming two weeks later. A potential win in his native Morocco would be a perfect way to launch a season in which he will try to break into the top-10 of the overall WTCS.
Of Abdelmoula, Vivès said, “we are lucky to have one of the best runners in the world in triathlon in our group so it is very motivating for the other athletes”.
Also in the group was Eloi Adjavon of Togo. Adjavon is a relative newcomer to the sport; all bar one of his international races came in 2022 (his first was the African Cup in Dakhla in November 2021).
Adjavon could make it to the Paris Olympic Games, although he will need to get onto World Cup start lists in the next 12 months. If he manages to do so and earn points, he could put himself in a position to qualify for a New Flag place for Africa.
New Flag slots are given to the best ranked athlete from a country that has not already qualified for the Games. World Triathlon aims to give one per continent so realistically if Adjavon can be the best ranked African athlete not from South Africa or Morocco – and be ranked high enough – he may be able to get to race in Paris.
Sebastian Pascal and Jeremy Quindos were also in attendance at the camp. Pascal is in the process of switching his sporting nationality to Romania. Both athletes will be hoping to race World Cups this year and should be seen at a number of European Cups and at French Grand Prix events.
“The objective of this training camp was to prepare for the start of the season,” said Vivès. “We worked on exercises specific to competition situations.” For example, “we swam in open water several times in order to work on tactical and technical details related to group swimming. The rest of the training sessions were in the reserved 50m pool.”
On the bike, the group also focused on race-specific exercises. These ranged from sessions in pelotons as well as those in a pursuit format. Vivès noted that this aspect of the bike can often be neglected and that some athletes made a healthy improvement.
As a general philosophy, Team SPIX do not favour large training weeks of more than 30 hours. Rather than pounding the distance and focusing on base, there is a greater focus on the individual and tailoring their needs to the race itself. Indeed Vivès said he prefers a more “scientific” approach.
During the winter, each of the team’s athletes are tested in the lab. Their scores are recorded and then form a baseline to be monitored every day.
The more data-driven approach is one that has certainly been on the rise in the sport over the past few years.
With a cosmopolitan set-up, SPIX is home to many athletes with the bulk coming from Europe and Africa. The diversity of the group and the respective ambitions of each athlete could create a challenge to Vivès with different levels for him to tailor towards. However he pointed to that as one the strengths of the team.
In Lloret de Mar, as well as in general, the team focused on the individual rather than the programme at both a sporting and personal level. Whereas the likes of Abdelmoula will be pushing for medals at the highest tier of the sport, some are still at a phase in which they still need to learn at the continental level.
The individualised nature of training is something that many groups (elite and amateur) can recognise and try to implement. With the rest of Team SPIX about to kick off their season, the impact of their work over the winter will soon come to the fore.
