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| Rome Diamond League |
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| Place: Stadio Olimpico, Rome Date: Thursday June 6th |
| Cover of the BBC: Watch the highlights of Saturday, June 8 at 13:00, Paris time on BBC Two (repeated on the BBC red button, Sunday, June 9 at 00:15 – 09:00) |
Last fall, Andrew Pozzi was seen offering a choice.
In front of him, in a small Italian seaside town, was Santiago Antunez, the smallest guru in the sprint race. who has already coached Cuba's Anier Garcia and Dayron Robles to Olympic gold.
Pozzi, Antunez explained, had two options.
If they worked together for a few weeks or months, he could adjust the speed of the British hurdle, smooth out some jagged outlines and spend a few milliseconds here and there.
Or he could commit.
If Pozzi jumped into the unknown, if he headed totally to Formia, on the Italian Mediterranean coast, and tried to eliminate language barriers in Italian and Spanish, Antunez would separate and rebuild his hedge technique to from the ground.
This entailed risks. Obstacle races, like a golf swing, are individual. Exchanging what has worked on the track for what works in a manual is not a guarantee of upgrading.
Pozzi, who thought that Antunez had retired and only found him after seeing him in the social media of an Italian athlete, had no doubt.
"I said everything was fine, I want to be here for the Olympics and beyond," said the 27-year-old at BBC Sport.
The athlete, who won gold at the 60-m hurdles at the World Indoor Championships in Birmingham in 2018, left his rented lodgings in Loughborough, sold everything he could not stock with his parents and set up his camp in southern Italy.
In addition to becoming familiar with a new coach and training group, he adapted to life off the track, 1,200 miles from home.
"I'm a big fan of Italian cuisine, so I had to watch a little portion control when I eat at the restaurant," he says.
"I have my car with me, thanks to my kind parents who have driven from the UK, but I do not use it much.
"It's interesting to be doubled three or four times in 400m as you limit speed!
"It's funny the things you miss in the UK When I come back for a visit, I would end up watching cooking shows and watching TV during the day, which I would never have seen before. my life, just for the background sound in English-chatting. "
Pozzi is not the only British athlete to have administered cultural shock treatment while training abroad.
Sprinters Matthew Hudson-Smith, Nethane Mitchell-Blake and CJ Ujah are among those who have crossed the Atlantic in search of new ideas. Adam Gemili has settled in the Netherlands to work with Dafne Schippers' American coach, Rana Reider.
Pozzi's girlfriend, Katarina Johnson-Thompson, has decided to set up in the south of France and has been rewarded with a European silver medal in heptathlon and a victory at the Gotzis meeting in May.
"Of course, we talked about it and I think we were relatively well prepared for some challenges," says Pozzi.
"Every time you live elsewhere and have family, friends, relatives or relationships in other countries, this requires a better level of organization.
"I would say it does not come naturally to me, but since I've been here I have to work a lot harder.
"One of the benefits of what we do is that we end up attending many competitions and we stay in one place for several days.
"But it's important to stay balanced as a person.It's very easy to lose that as an athlete, especially when working in a foreign country.You must be happy on and off the track to make your best. "
Johnson-Thompson and he were certainly delighted to have won the Liverpool Champions League win against Tottenham in Madrid last Saturday. Pozzi believes that the benefits of his winter work with Antunez will unfold in the lead up to the September World Championship season in Doha.
"I was running under a much heavier workload and I was relatively tired in Shanghai," he said about his sixth place at the Diamond League meeting last month.
"My time was competitive, but every time you make big changes, it will take several races to make it happen.
"It's just finding the rhythm at high intensity and the races are the only place where you can practice.I have a very busy schedule, but we are satisfied."
He will then face Sergey Shubenkov – the fastest man in the world last year – in Rome on Thursday night. A meeting with world and Olympic champion Omar McLeod at the July Birthday Games in London – "where we will start trying to achieve great performances" – is also in the paper.
While these races are jostling for space with technical sessions, language courses and continental mini-breaks, this year's announcement is long and loaded. As Pozzi had planned.
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