Swimming nations around the world frequently take advantage of high-altitude training, whether squads utilize in-house facilities or travel to outside countries seeking the best training grounds to test how their athletes do in thinner air. Flagstaff, Arizona and Colorado Springs, Colorado are just two of the locales stateside to which Brazil, Great Britain and Japan have sent athletes in recent history.
However, with Tokyo 2020 on the horizon, municipalities in Nagano Prefecture, Japan are making it known that they offer premier training sites as well.
“We want to promote the strengths of Nagano’s high altitudes and increase the number of people we have exchanges with,” said Ichiyo Kobayashi, a Nagano tourism official stated. (Beaumont Enterprise)
Public and private sectors within Komoro, for example, are collaborating on courses, indoor facilities and lodging accommodations on the Takamine highlands to attract would-be high-altitude-seeking athletes. And nations are taking notice, with the U.S. and German triathlon teams having already toured the new sites.
Aquatics-wise, the city of Tomi is constructing a pool at an elevation of 1750 meters (~5741 feet) on the Yunomaru highlands, which has a scheduled completion time frame of June 2019, plenty of time for pre-Tokyo high-altitude preparation.
