## (3) Enhancing Activities to Strengthen Top-Level Competitors

It is important to enhance activities to strengthen top-level competitors in order to improve Japan’s competitiveness in international athletics. To this end, MEXT substantially expanded the budget for improving the country’s competitiveness in athletics under the “Nippon Revival Project” in FY2003. As part of this project, activities to strengthen top-level competitors for some priority sports were launched, in addition to training camps for top-level competitors conducted by competitive sports organizations.

Also, MEXT extends support to the Japanese Olympic Committee in holding camps both within and outside Japan, assigning full-time trainers and other staff to help athletes hone their skills, and dispatching athletes to international competitions, such as the Olympic Games and Universiade.

## (4) Training/Securing Instructors

As a prerequisite for training and strengthening top-level competitors, it is essential to secure and train highly-skilled instructors who can give appropriate instruction to those athletes who have excellent potential.

To this end, MEXT supports the Japan Amateur Sports Association and other competitive sports organizations in training sports instructors and the Japanese Olympic Committee in assigning full-time, top-level instructors for each competitive sport.

Also, MEXT held a meeting named “Sports Coach Summit” for coaches, sports doctors, and scientific researchers engaged in training and strengthening top-level competitors to study and discuss problems in their respective areas and exchange information on these issues, thereby enhancing the system to promote mutual understanding and cooperation among stakeholders.

## (5) Developing a Consistent Instruction System

Traditionally in Japan, athletics competitors are trained and strengthened by instructors at the schools, companies, or other organizations that the competitors belong to, based on the instructors' own instruction methods. From among these competitors, those who have gained excellent results at national competitions are then chosen as competitors to be trained for international competitions.

This traditional system, however, does not necessarily help competitors appropriately improve their abilities for the future in many cases, because the instruction principles and the menus differ depending upon which organization the athlete belongs to. Accordingly, problems have been pointed out regarding instructions for junior athletes, who are at the most important stage in terms of capacity building. In order to solve these problems, a consistent instruction system needs to be established, under which optimal instructions will be given to competitors who have excellent potential according to their individual characteristics and stage of development based on consistent instruction principles regardless of where and by whom they are trained. In this way, they will be trained as top-level competitors who can perform well internationally.

In FY2001, MEXT launched model projects in cooperation with the Japanese Olympic Committee and competitive sports organizations. Specifically under these projects, instruction guidelines on training and strengthening athletics competitors were created and specific programs for training these competitors based on their stage of development were formulated; consortium meetings were held for instructors, and research and development activities were conducted on ways to find athletes with excellent potential. As a result, there are now programs for training athletics competitors prepared for 23 events in 19 competitive sports.

In the future, based on the model projects, all competitive sports organizations will create their own programs for each sport, and the organizations, the Japanese Olympic Committee, and MEXT will cooperate towards establishing a system to train and strengthen athletics competitors based on the training programs.

## (6) Supporting Company Sports

Many of Japan’s top-level competitors belong to sports teams in private companies and their daily activities are conducted as members of the team. Companies support their lives and enable them to exercise in a sta-