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 |
 Canova in a 2018 Italian television interview | |
| Personal information | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | Italian |
| Born | 21 December 1944 Turin, Italy |
Renato Canova (born 21 December 1944) is an Italian athletics coach. He is known to have coached numerous athletes who have won medals in top international middle- and long-distance competitions, and who have set world records. [1]
Over 50 of Canova's athletes have won Olympic or World Championship medals. [2] [3]
Prior to becoming a coach, Canova used to be an active athlete, competing in various disciplines [1] , but realized he did not have the talent to become a professional athlete. [4]
From 1975 to 1985, Canova was the national Italian coach of multi-events. [4] [5]
In 1987, Canova began training Italian middle and long distance athletes. Here he trained, among others, Maria Curatolo and Ornella Ferrara. [4] [6] During this time, he worked with Luciano Gigliotti, who was responsible for the male middle and long distance athletes. [4] In 1996, in addition to coaching Italian runners, Canova also began training Kenyan athletes in Italy. He justified this by saying that at that time the level of Italian runners was falling because there weren't enough new athletes coming up. [4] In 1998 he traveled to Kenya for the first time. [7]
Beginning in 2003, Canova became the national coach of the Qatari national athletics team. [8] [9] [10] In 2004, one of Canova's athletes, Stephen Cherono, changed his citizenship from Kenyan to Qatari.[ citation needed ] This position enabled him to train more intensively with his athletes, who were of Qatari nationality but most of whom came from Kenya. He relocated to Iten, located at approximately 2,400 m (7,870 ft), for most of the year because he considered the training conditions there to be most suitable. [11] Due to disagreements with the association, he gave up this activity in 2011 [12] , which the year after the 2010 Asian Games, when he resigned and returned to Italy.[ citation needed ] After Canova rejected an offer from the Chinese Athletics Association in 2011 [13] , he trained athletes such as Anna and Lisa Hahner. [14] [15]
At the 2012 Summer Olympics, one of Canova's athletes won a silver medal (Abel Kirui in the marathon), and two of Canova's athletes won bronze medals (Wilson Kipsang in the marathon and Thomas Longosiwa in the 5000 m).[ citation needed ]
In September 2013, an agreement was reached with the Chinese Athletics Association, where Canova was appointed as the national head coach for middle- and long-distances. [13] [16] Canova agreed to work with the association until the 2016 Olympic Games. However, he did not manage to bring about the desired turnaround for the Chinese runners. He attributed this to China's poorly organized and overly regional system. [17] At the beginning of November 2015, he resigned from this position, in spite of having a contract until the end of 2016.
At the beginning of 2016, Canova returned to Kenya to create a new running group.[ citation needed ]
European record holder Julien Wanders has been trained by Canova since 2020. [18]
 | This section needs additional citations for verification .(December 2024) |
Canova's training system is based on increasing race-specific endurance. [19] His fundamental period begins with high volume and low-intensity running along with uphill sprints and technical exercises. During the special period, training sessions move toward speeds that are closer to the athlete's goal race pace but still relatively far away. In the final specific period, all sessions focus on speeds only slightly slower and faster than race pace but with a goal of performing more and more work in each session. Throughout the training cycle, more and more recovery sessions are included as hard sessions become longer and more fatiguing. Because of this, Canova has very rarely used weekly or bi-weekly training cycles in favor of adapting to the effect of each individual session.
Canova has lectured for World Athletics (formerly IAAF), speaking about training methodology.
Canova believes that a doping agent such as erythropoietin (EPO) would not work on his top athletes because pure aerobic training could increase the capacity of blood in their cardiovascular system to such an extent that EPO would no longer would be beneficial. [1] [20] If this were not the case, EPO could have an effect, but this would not be the case in its athletes. [1] [4] Canova attributes this to the fact that these athletes spend their entire lives at high altitudes.
Canova sees the reason for the success of his athletes in their training and in their talent and motivation. [1] [20] He maintains that all the athletes he knows and trains are clean. [1] He attributes the fact that the Europeans and Americans fall in level compared to the East African runners to the different approaches to training. [10] Non-African athletes would not train intensively enough. [21]
Canova is often confronted with criticism that his athletes are doped. [1] [4] These claims are often attributed to doping bans for individual athletes who were trained by him [22] [23] , along with reports of widespread doping in relation to running in Kenya. [24] [25] Canova commented that no fewer than ten doping tests were carried out on his athletes every week. [1]
Canova was married to Daniela Gregorutti, who was a middle-distance runner and was trained by him. Gregorutti died in February 2021. [26]
Mubarak Hassan Shami is a Kenyan-born Qatari long-distance runner. He specializes in half marathon and marathon races.
Iten is a town in Elgeyo-Marakwet County in the Republic of Kenya and serves as the capital and is the largest town in the county.
Paul Malakwen Kosgei is a Kenyan long-distance and marathon runner. He first came to prominence in athletics by taking the World Junior Record of 3000m steeple in 1997, and later with consecutive medals at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships from 1998 to 2000.
Rita Jeptoo is a Kenyan marathon runner. Along with winning the Boston Marathon on two occasions, she has also won marathons in Chicago, Stockholm, and Milan. Jeptoo. Jeptoo was the bronze medalist at the 2006 IAAF World Road Running Championships representing Kenya.
Gamal Belal Salem is a Qatari runner who specializes in the 3000 metres steeplechase, training with the world record holder Saif Saaeed Shaheen under the Italian coach Renato Canova.
Valeriy Viktorovich Borchin is a race walker from Russia who won the 2008 Olympic gold medal and was World champion over the 20 km distance. His World Championship was retroactively stripped in 2015 due to doping.
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Florence Jebet Kiplagat is a Kenyan professional long-distance runner. She is a two-time world champion, having won at the 2009 IAAF World Cross Country Championships and the 2010 IAAF World Half Marathon Championships. She was the world record holder for the women's half marathon with a time of 1:05:09 hours until it was broken by Peres Jepchirchir on 10 February 2017 at the RAK Half Marathon.
Abel Kirui is a long-distance runner from Kenya who competes in marathons. He had back-to-back wins in the World Championship marathon in 2009 and 2011. Kirui won in 2009 with a time of 2:06:54, then defended his title with a winning margin of two minutes and 28 seconds – the largest ever margin at the World Championship event. He earned the silver medal in the 2012 London Olympic marathon.
Roberto Barbi, born in Switzerland but Tuscan of Bagni di Lucca, is a former Italian long-distance runner who specialized in the marathon.
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Ronald Chebolei Kwemoi is a Kenyan long-distance runner who competes in cross country running and track running events. He specialises in the 1500 metres and holds a personal best of 3:28.81 minutes set at Herculis on July 18, 2014. The time is a world junior record. He was the 2014 Kenyan champion in the event. He was a team silver medallist at the 2013 IAAF World Cross Country Championships.
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Jama Mohamed Aden is a Somali former middle-distance runner and coach who ran for Fairleigh Dickinson University as well as representing Somalia throughout the 1980s. He would go on to pursue a career in coaching world-class middle-distance athletes. He is the older brother of former competitive runner Ibrahim Mohamed Aden.
Abraham Kiptum is a Kenyan long-distance runner and former half marathon world record holder. On 28 October 2018 Kiptum ran the Valencia Half Marathon in Valencia, Spain in a time of 58:18, which would have been a world record, but in 2019 this world record was nullified, because of a doping violation verdict in 2019. The half marathon world record was then improved by Geoffrey Kipsang Kamworor on 15 September 2019, to a time of 58:01.
Daniel Simiu Ebenyo is a Kenyan middle-distance and long-distance runner.
Michael Kibet is a Kenyan middle- and long-distance runner. He won the 5000 m at the Kenyan Trials for the 2019 World Athletics Championships, but was barred from competing at the meet by the Athletics Integrity Unit for not having had enough drug tests. In 2023, it was announced that Kibet was banned for four years from all high-level competitions due to a positive test from 20 September 2022.
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