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by Jim van Wijk
Press Association Sport
Britain's judo fighters
remain on course to peak at London 2012, according to head coach
Patrick Roux.
Following on from Euan
Burton's bronze at the World Championships in Japan, the British
women collected a silver through Gemma Gibbons from the GB World
Cup event in Birmingham, where bronzes also went to Sophie Cox
- who has just returned to competitive action after a five-year
break - and Scottish fighter Sarah Adlington.
Veteran Winston Gordon,
a two-time Olympian, meanwhile, won a bronze from the Italian
World Cup event in Rome.
Frenchman Roux, a former
European champion and World Championship bronze medalist in 1987,
was appointed in January 2009 and has overseen the introduction
of a new centralised training centre at Dartford for the elite
athletes as part of a development plan for the sport - with judo
targeting at least three medals from London having failed to deliver
a podium finish in Beijing.
"This is an important marker
for us," Roux said.
"What we have to realise
is this was our best results at this level this year for the Women
GB Team - the main countries are now sending the best players
because of the ranking points and that they need to select the
players for the Olympics.
"This was the target of
the transition stage, to bring a hub of players and to connect
them to a world-class level.
"It does not mean we are
ready, because we are still far away from where we need to be,
but now the players start to get medals at the World Cup.
"What we need for the next
phase is consistency."
Roux told Press Association
Sport: "Of course we try to get the best results we can in each
event, but we need to focus everything on the final outcome, which
is London 2012.
"We needed to improve a
lot of things, including expertise, and it is always a battle
against time.
"However, now we have the
right clues and we start to have players regularly in the top
five, some of them deliver medals.
"So everything is starting
to come together and now we will start to narrow the expertise
around the key players.
"Progressively, we expect
the core players will then stabilise their performance close to
where we need to be."
Britain is set to have
host nation places in London, rather than fighters having to meet
the Olympic qualifying standard.
However, performance director
Margaret Hicks maintains it will not just be a case of "filling
a slot" in all of the weight divisions.
"We are coming to the stage
now where we need to focus our higher-level resources on a smaller
group to have more impact," Hicks said.
"We are at cross-roads
- we have done a lot of work to build a base, and now we have
to push very firmly forwards on targeted players and performance,
while also being mindful we are going to have young players for
Rio as well."
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