Walling's top job

RIO HERE I COME

A North Wales athlete could play a key part in ensuring that Team GB comes away from the 2016 Olympics in Rio with a huge haul of medals. 

 Andy Walling has just landed what he describes as his “dream job” in helping the country’s top sportsmen and sportswomen to be in peak condition for the Games. 

 The 41-year-old physiotherapist from Bethesda, who has worked with many of biggest names in athletics, has joined the British Olympic Association and English Institute of Sport and works at the Intensive Rehabilitation Unit in Bisham Abbey, Berkshire. 

 There he will work with athletes from any of the 55 Olympic sports who need extra therapy in addition to what can be provided by the parent body of their own particular sport. 

 “It’s an absolutely brilliant job and a great opportunity,” said Andy, who gained a first-class honours degree at Salford University and has been working as a senior outpatient physio with the NHS in Gwynedd. 

 A keen athlete himself, he has represented Wales at cross-country and on the track, and is a member of both Sale Athletics Club and Menai Track and Field Club, of which he is chairman. 

 In recent years he has worked with British Cycling and UK Athletics, a role which has taken him to the European Championships in Helsinki, the World Junior Championships in Barcelona, as well as elite training camps in Kenya and Fort Romeu in France. 

 “At one camp I was seated at a table when Mo Farah came and sat on one side of me and Paula Radcliffe on the other, and I thought to myself ‘I can’t believe this’,” he said. 

 In 2012 he carried the Olympic torch on one of the stages through Bangor, little thinking that he would be playing a part in the next Games in Rio. 

 “I remember watching the 1984 Games in Atlanta on TV with my Dad and thinking ‘I want to be part of that’. I didn’t get there as an athlete but I will be part of it,” he said.

 Andy is currently travelling home to Bethesda every weekend while he searches for a house in the Thames Valley and each Saturday resumes his coaching work with the Menai club. 

 Among the athletes under his wing are siblings Iolo and Cari Hughes, both of whom have won honours at national level, GB mountain runner Nathan Jones, North Wales Cross-Country League champion Alison Lavender and new Welsh international Debbie Williams. 

 

 When Eryri's Rob Samuel won the Snowdonia Marathon two years ago he gave Andy much of the credit for recovering his fitness after suffering from a leg injury.

 “I shall carry on working with them and preparing their schedules, and I hope they will come down for weekends as I regard them as part of the family,” said Andy. 

 This coming Sunday Andy, whose wife Helen and two daughters are still in Bethesda for the time being, will be concentrating on his own performance when he takes part in the London Marathon, his second. Last year he clocked 2 hours 47 minutes. 

“But unfortunately I have a rotten cold that the moment,” he said.