Scottish gymnasts to focus on style over substance in Glasgow

Senior Sports Writer

Friday 19 October 2012

Jim Holt, Scotland's head coach, believes his men can lead the way in skills execution at the North European Gymnastic Championships as they become the first national team to host a major event at Glasgow's newly constructed Emirates Arena this weekend.

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KEVIN FERRIE kevin.ferrie@heraldandtimes.co.uk

Holt has been working with the Scottish team for the past year, having been appointed to head the Glasgow 2014 programme. While he accepts that their stage of development is such that other teams will aim for higher difficulty levels he believes they have the capacity to perform the cleanest routines.

The Scots go into the competition without their two best known gymnasts, Daniel Keatings and Daniel Purvis, who are part of the Great Britain squad and are both based in England, but have indicated an enthusiasm for representing their country at the Commonwealth Games.However, their absence provides Holt with the ideal opportunity to assess how the rest of the squad has evolved since he took over."At the 2011 North Europeans in Sweden we took five guys over and did the best we could," he said. "Now we want to take what happened there and those who have been gathered into our programme and try to compare, as much as we possibly can, apples with apples."If you were to compare this with football we know that in the lead up to a World Cup final it's not important that you win every game. The most important thing is building a programme for establishing your critical success factors and testing them in the heat of battle."What I'm looking for is that everyone involved is very motivated and that we work as a real team with cohesion, enthusiasm and focus."That is why his emphasis is on execution. "What spectators will see from our gymnasts is not the highest level of difficulty but something that is aesthetically pleasing," Holt said. "The model I use is very clearly based on the classicism of the great Soviet teams of the mid-80s to early-90s and our goal is to be the best on execution."Holt's right-hand man at the event will be Marius Gehrman, the Romanian world and Olympic medallist of that same era, whose presence as coach at the City of Glasgow Club which has produced three members of the Scottish team, thrilled him when he arrived in Scotland. "When I realised that Scotland had someone of the calibre of Marius Gehrman working with our gymnasts my view of what was possible changed drastically," said Holt.Scotland's men's team is in action along with Finland, Sweden and Wales in the second of the sub-divisions at the Emirates Arena today. The first sub-division, comprising Denmark, Iceland, Northern Ireland, Norway and the Republic of Ireland takes place this morning, with the women's championships taking place simultaneously with Scotland competing in the afternoon session.

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Scottish gymnasts to focus on style over substance in Glasgow

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