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guardian.co.uk|
Added on 08/24/08
"We are asking them to give up everything," admits Melanie Chowns, her soft voice rising above the hollow chatter of thundersticks at Beijing's National Indoor Stadium. "It's one thing chasing the Olympic dream, it's quite another moving to Denmark."...
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"We are asking them to give up everything," admits Melanie Chowns, her soft voice rising above the hollow chatter of thundersticks at Beijing's National Indoor Stadium. "It's one thing chasing the Olympic dream, it's quite another moving to Denmark." Chowns, the manager of Great Britain's women's handball squad, is outlining her sport's ambitious plans to create men and women's teams strong enough to reach the knockout stages in London 2012 - a huge task for a country that has never played in an Olympic handball tournament and has less than 1,000 registered players. It is, in effect, a great sporting engineering project, involving a nationwide hunt for tall sporty converts, £3.3m of lottery funding over three years and counting, jaw-dropping self sacrifice and, yes, Denmark. For the past 18 months, most of Britain's leading players have been living at the Aarhus Handball Academy, training six hours a day and playing in the national league, one of the strongest in Europe. "Each player... See less 
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