Alumni News At the Olympics with Tim Pelot ’97 B rats, is still meticulously refi ning techniques, Above: Pelot at the Rio volleyball venue Right: Pelot in the 1997 yearbook Pelot captures a selfi e above the beach during the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro ack in graduate school, Tim Pelot ’97 used his cycling pals as guinea pigs. “I’d bring my buddies into the lab like lab rats,” said Pelot, who was earning his Master’s in Sports Physiology at West Florida at the time. “VO2 max testing, blood testing. I fi lled the lab full of heaters and tested sweat rates on performance.” Fast forward a decade, to the summer of 2012, and Pelot is still fi xated on optimizing human performance. Only now he’s in London, with the U.S. Olympic team, at the Olympic Games. With gold medals and glory – or agony – at stake. “I had always been getting athletes ready, but I never had been to the big show,” Pelot said. “It was exhausting. To care, to be with, to support and serve. But the thrill of the Olympic Games is exhilarating. It is intense.” The student who was fascinated with how athletes work, who made his buddies into lab Pelot at the Rio water polo venue 20 JESUIT PERSPECTIVES • WINTER 2016-17 calculating physiological effects, improving training regimens, and seeking to create optimum athletic performance as a Sport Physiologist with the U.S. Olympic program. This past summer, Pelot was in Rio de Janeiro for his second Olympics, once again immersed in the heart of human performance at the world’s greatest athletic showcase. “It was very different from London – 1st World country to 3rd World country, “ Pelot said. “And the competitive venues were much more spread out. But it was safe, and we had a very good experience. We were very well taken care of.” From such humble beginnings in the science classrooms at Jesuit and labs at West Florida, Pelot has forged a career in human performance, working with some of the best athletes on the planet as they strive for maximum performance. “I have been super-blessed and superfortunate,” Pelot said. “It is a very unique position, an amazing opportunity.” Pelot has taken the road less traveled to get there. His professional career path, beginning at Jesuit in the mid-90s (from Seminole in Pinellas County, Pelot trekked across the Howard Frankland and back every day for school), led to outposts such as Pensacola, Lake Placid (“it was -20 degrees once for an entire week”), Colorado Springs, Denver, Minnesota, and fi nally, in 2010, southern California. He initially wanted to be a mechanical engineer – “I like to take things apart and put them back together” – but a kinesiology course at UWF steered him from mechanical performance to human performance. He interned and/or worked for some of the biggest names in elite athlete performance, such as Chris Carmichael, who gained fame and then notoriety for his long affi liation with Lance Armstrong, and high profi le track & fi eld coach Loren Seagrave. In 2010, Pelot landed with the U.S. Olympic program, with which he had interned in Lake Placid straight out of grad school, as a sports physiologist and strength and conditioning specialist. He works with hundreds of athletes in dozens of sports, but volleyball and water polo are where he’s been most concentrated the past six years. Pelot views his role as a critical part of a “high performance team.” There are the athletes, the head coaches and assistant coaches, the psychologists, and dieticians, and also there is Pelot and his cohorts, who serve as physiologists, the strength and conditioning component. Together, as a high performance team, they seek to maximize performance. Having helped numerous teams and athletes earn medal at the last two Summer Olympics – the U.S. women’s water polo team has captured back-to-back gold medals – Pelot continues to strive to help make the U.S. athletes the best in the world. “We’ve got to be great leaders, people of good character and integrity, good role models,” Pelot said. “That’s part of our mission, which was part of what I learned (at Jesuit), to have good core values, and to serve others.”
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