SHE was known in the Pacific as the “sprint queen”, has represented Fiji in several international competitions including the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens.

While taking part in the 2007 World Athletics Championships, Makelesi Batimala, represented Fiji at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

She was Fiji’s flag bearer at the Games’ opening ceremony.

She won four gold medals at the 2003 South Pacific Games, in the 100m, 200m, 400m and 4×100m relay events.

As of 2007, Batimala held Fiji’s national record for the women’s 100-metre sprint, at 11.66 seconds

In her new adventure, she has mapped out a strategic plan to develop local athletes.

After graduating from International Coaching Enrichment Certification Program (ICECP) in Lausanne, Switzerland last week she came back to implement her project she calls the “long-term athletic development” to determine what career is in place for athletics.

“My project is an eight years high performance on Athletics Fiji and also on operational reason.

“I did some research while doing that and I saw that our performance has deteriorated compared with the 90s.

“It went down in 2003 and I think it was based on a lot of things as I looked at the governance side the athlete’s pathway and the support system and the coaches on their capacity building the types of competition and their daily training environment.

“All of these things were my pillars of strength on how to develop an athlete from grassroots level to the international stage.

“This is all part of my training project when I graduated in Switzerland,” Batimala said.

She said they needed to rebuild their support system and make it strong for athletes and coaches.

“The different stages and what needs to be done by the coaches at those different age groups.

“Improve on our coaching capacity especially our past athletes who have trained in the past years but inactive and we need to get them in to help out while we focus on our upcoming young athletes.

“So we have set a pathway for these young ones to follow,” she said.

Batimala said the main focus was to change the athletes’ mind-set and try to regroup them not to only focus on Olympic games but what lies after the games.