Welcome to the Skyrac Athletic Club, a sports club based in Leeds that forms part of the North of England Athletic Association. We pride ourselves in nurturing a community of athletes and enthusiasts with a variety of different sports, social events, and facilities. We are also a meeting point for people with a passion for this ancient tradition in sports, that we so proudly form a part of.
Part and parcel of our way to achieving this goal are to train keen and ambitious individuals to challenge themselves and their own strengths, and eventually take this on a more official level. To do this we have UKA qualified coaches.
So what is ‘a more official level’? Well, we like to believe that although it is not just about the winners, the beauty of sports is the competitive aspect and the challenge that comes with delivering all that you are trained to do and doing it with the conviction that you can conquer your own limits whilst staying in the spirit of fair play. That is sportsmanship, and perhaps that is an idea that goes back to the ancient Olympics.
The legacy of these ancient sports lives today in today’s Olympic games, and this is where we aim to end up with our members.
The process of joining our association is very simple, but very rewarding. We accept anyone above the age of 8 years old and we do our best to cater to everyone’s needs and abilities. New members, once subscribed to our club, also become affiliated with the largest athletic organization in the North of England and as a result will be covered by their third-party insurance, which is an obligatory criterion for anyone who wants to be directly involved in sport.
As evident in the name of sport itself, athletics is a multidisciplinary practice, and this means that there are several different events and competitions. Here are a few of these sporting disciplines.
Both an individualistic and a team sport, cross-country running is perhaps one of the most naturalistic of all the sports we focus on. It simply is a long-distance race from point A to point B, typically around the length of 3 km. Although it no longer features in the Olympic Games it still remains one of the purest running competitions both in its legacy but also in its physicality, as it is held in the great outdoors.
It is also interesting to note that as a sub-genre of cross country, we also offer Fell race competitions, which are essentially very close to cross country although it requires a level of navigation and for the most part the tracks chosen tend to be a bit more obstructive and challenging, in other words, it is less about the race and more about the resilience and the endurance during the race.
Track and Field is perhaps the most revered of the sports that fall under the athletics category, perhaps due to its connection to antiquity, but definitely also because of the variety of skills, the athlete himself or herself has to master. The contests generally are based on running, jumping, and throwing activities, which is also the reason why the physical context of the sport is a track and a field, one for running and the other for throwing and jumping.
The track sports generally include sprints, middle-distance, long-distance, hurdling and relay races. In some cases, the skills required are resilience and a certain control of energy so as to sustain oneself to the end, but in relay races and hurdling there are also elements of team work and even more physical strength due to the mid-course jumps that are involved.
On the other hand, the field sports of throwing and jumping can vary quite a bit. For instance, in throwing you have the shot put, the discus throw, the javelin throw, and the hammer throw, all of which require a lot of concentrated strength and a great sense of aim. In jumping, there too is a variety of sub-categories, such as the long jump, the triple jump, the high jump, and the pole vault. In some cases, this sport could be very dangerous if not done with care and proper professional supervision, but one that entails a great level of adrenaline once mastered.
In the end, the mission of the club is to strive towards training our members to eventually reach new heights in their sporting careers, and of course, the major global event where athletics is truly celebrated is the Olympic athletic programmes. In fact, one of the most coveted moments in Olympic sports tends to be a highlight of the athletic section, and that is the 100m race.
Here are some other Olympic sports:
As mentioned in the above section about track and field, the running usually takes place with tracks of different lengths, some called the sprint lengths, and some called the middle distance events.
Competitive swimming is a very popular Olympic sport, and it has a variety of events, from the backstroke to the freestyle, the individual medley, and a couple of others. There are also team events apart from these individual events.
A very awesome and elegant sport, fencing is normally categorized into a threefold event depending on the type of blade used. Essentially you have three blades; the foil, the épée and the saber, and with every different blade there are different techniques and scoring target areas.
Very surprisingly archery also has a variety of individual and team competitions. The recurve bow is the bow used in the Olympics therefore the only type of archery done is recurve archery. In the history of recurve archery in the Olympics, South Korean archers have outdone themselves, clearing most wins since 1984.
The hammer is one of the four sports that is actually held in the track and field section of the events in the Olympic games.
Although recognized and loved as a sport worldwide, squash is not exactly considered to be part of the Olympics, and even for the upcoming Olympic event, it was contested but it still was not included.
When we say ‘hockey’ here we’re referring to ice hockey, as we speak it is the only form of hockey that is held in the Olympic games.
There are a number of different disciplines in the world of cycling, but the only one featured in the Olympic games is racing.
It might surprise you to know but rugby union was part of the first Olympic games, making its debut in 1900. However, after the 1924 Olympics, it was dropped from the roster of Olympic sports. This was the case until 2009 when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) voted on including rugby sevens in the 2016 Summer Olympics—the sport, however, debuted in the 2014 Summer Youth Olympics.
Rugby sevens is a seven-a-side version of rugby union that was introduced to the Olympic Games in 2016. It is a fast-paced and physically demanding sport, with matches consisting of two seven-minute halves. Rugby sevens has gained popularity due to its high-scoring nature, with teams often scoring several tries in a single game. The sport also features a unique blend of physicality and finesse, as players must use their speed, strength, and skill to score tries and outmaneuver their opponents. The Olympic Games is one of the biggest stages for rugby sevens, with the best players from around the world competing for medals.
Special thanks goes to the team behind the talkrugbyunion website for helping us out with writing this section.
Olympic athletes needs to dedicate his or her life to the sport and be determined to engage with it as a journey. To do so we believe that the self-discipline required has to be instilled from a young age, and that is why we take pride in nurturing and assisting our young members to be determined in their dedication to the sport and to see this element of their lives as not just a healthy activity for their physical being but also a meditative activity that tames the mind and enables it to conquer any obstacles.
We’d also like to mention a very important contributor to our cause. The Yorkshire Sports Foundation is a very essential and helpful charity funded by the National Lottery that helps to support organizations in the districts of West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire. The organization’s aim is to help instill more awareness about the importance of active sporting activity in quotidian life, and to help do so by organizing sporting and social events to gather different communities together to have a better quality of life.
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