UK athletes to prepare for 2004 in Cyprus
NICOSIA (Reuters) – British athletes plan to train in Cyprus before the 2004 Olympics in a bid to acclimatize to the hot weather expected in Athens for the Games, a Cypriot sports official said on Monday. The two countries will sign a letter of intent this week in a deal which would take some 3,000 British athletes to the eastern Mediterranean island in the two years prior to the Games. Britain’s sports minister, Richard Caborn, will be on the island later this week to sign the letter, the Cypriot Olympic Committee said. The British Olympic Association, hoping to repeat the success of their athletes at the Sydney 2000 Olympics when they trained in Australia two months before the Games, sought a similar environment to that in Greece. «In practice the agreement has already started to come into effect. We had a team here two weeks ago and the British swimming federation is also due out soon,» said Nicos Kartakoulis, general manager of the Cyprus Olympic Committee. Cyprus fit the bill exactly since it boasts good sports facilities, an English-speaking population and is just 80 minutes by air southeast of Athens, British diplomats said.
