All the the ways lead to Rome but only a few of them lead to the throwing events . And even then , you may start on one way and finally decide to change your direction and objective . This is quite frequent and normal with young beginners . They usually have to ”taste” a bit of everything before making their choice. But some of them come with already something in their mind . They just want to do an event because , for different reasons, they have got a ”feeling” for it and they want to have a go at it . Sometimes with little consciousness of what the event demands or difficulty really are.

Young (at the time 13 years) Oliver CHUNG wanted to be a javelin thrower . Without a natural fast arm and an athletic body , it was quite challenging but Oliver was rather headstrong if not muscle strong . In fact he trained seriously and improved so well that he was indeed going to become a decent javelin thrower . Unfortunately his elbow betrayed him and it became obvious that it was a weak piece in the game which would always be like a ”Damocles sword” likely to annihilate at any time the search of performance . So there has to be a plan B to give Oliver the possibility to achieve something he could be proud of in the throwing events . With hardly 50kg body weight at the time and not being especially tall and strong ; shot put and discus were offering little potential . So , why not try hammer ? And Oliver agreed to try !

And we are now just one year after having made this ”forced” choice and the documents in this chapter will tell the rest of the story with Oliver now being completely ”contaminated” by the hammer virus. And progressing in such a way that he is now seriously thinking to compete at the end of this year in the New Zealand school champs with the objective to be a contender for a national podium , if possible with a 50m + throw !

A story in the making that we are going to follow very closely !

Available documents : 1-PDF 3 pages Oliver CHUNG progression and monitoring -2- Video Oliver CHUNG story ”How I became a hammer thrower”   PB throws and training exercises .