About Charles
Performance Director
Charles van Commenee is one of the world"s leading experts in managing performance. Initially as personal coach to a number of elite athletes who won medals at Olympic Games and World Championships, then as Technical Director for Dutch and British Athletics and finally as Performance Director for the Dutch Olympic Committee and later for British Athletics.
Coach
Charles started coaching at a young age (19) at a number of athletics clubs in Holland and later became national coach for the Dutch Athletics Federation (Atletiek Unie). He has coached international athletes from many countries, including Chinese world champion in shot put: Huang Zhihong and British heptathletes: Denise Lewis (Olympic champion Sydney 2000) and Kelly Sotherton (bronze in Athens 2004).
NOC*NSF and British Athletics
In the year 2000 he started working for the British athletics federation (British Athletics) in the capacity of Technical Director for Jumps and Combined Events. While in Britain his achievements were rewarded by being honoured as the first foreign coach to be inducted in the "British Coaching Hall of Fame"
Between 2004 and 2008 he held the position of Performance Director for the Dutch Olympic Committee responsible for all sports in the Netherlands. At the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008 he was named as Chef de Mission of the Dutch Olympic Team and as such was in charge of the complete team of 350 members across 28 sports resulting in the second best medal haul in Dutch history. Following the Beijing Games he returned to the UK to take up the role as Head Coach of the British Athletics Team for the 4 years leading into the home Games in London2012. Following record successes at European and World Championships in the intervening years, London2012 saw Athletics TeamGB win a formidable 4 gold medals including an incredible period that saw three Gold Medals won for the home team in 45 minutes on what has since gone down in history as "Super Saturday".
Vision
In his various high profile roles in international sport, Charles has successfully managed to mould and implement his vision of performance into large and complex sporting organisations. He has managed that through a very structured approach of Performance Management: The 5 Steps Approach.