2008 Olympics Updates

A rainstorm in Macau is something to behold. From nowhere, the sky turns a deathly black, an almighty downpour ensues.

Then as quickly as it started the deluge relents, the sun reappears and dries the ground so quickly you’d have a hard time convincing anyone there had ever been any rain in the first place.

And if you’re looking for more extremes, how about comparing taekwondo and synchronized swimming?

Roughly translated as “the way of the fist and the foot”, taekwondo is mainly about the kicking , specifically to the body and the head, and shouting - which not only helps to nurture aggression, team leader Gary Hall tells me, it could sway a judge to award a point.

Tactical hollering - great stuff!

Taekwondo is the national sport of South Korea and Britain are pretty good at it too.

Sarah Stevenson, now a 25-year-old veteran pondering her third Olympics (”Less of the old!” she warns me, “I’m experienced!”) is a former world champion and reached the Olympic semis in Sydney, when the sport first entered the games.

Athens wasn’t so successful. “I was too anxious about my goals and forgot to just concentrate on doing the best I could,” she explains

Concentration is paramount as you’re only a knockout kick away from seeing your Olympic dream reduced to tatters, so psychologists are used to help with mental fortitude.

Seventeen-year-old Aaron Cook is the new kid on the block and he’s oozing confidence having just claimed the world junior title.

He took up the martial art at the tender age of five. The reason? “I wanted to be a Power Ranger!” Don’t we all?

Hopes are high in the camp that the team might just bring back a medal. Hall declares them “streets ahead of where we were in Athens” and that’s largely due to a top-notch training facility (formerly a factory) in Manchester.

“It doesn’t look great from the outside” says Sarah, friendly but menacing in her black belt. “But it’s one of the best [facilities] I’ve used.

“We can now train together all the time. It’s much more professional. I know I can win a medal, I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

Medals aren’t necessarily on the minds of teenagers Olivia Allison and Jenna Randall as they get excited about their first ever Olympic experience as synchronised swimmers.

Podium plans are more for London 2012 but they can’t wait to strut their stuff in Beijing.

Artistic underwater dance it may be, but this sport is as demanding as any.

You need strength endurance and flexibility which means plenty of weight-lifting and power swimming; you have to be able to count to music; you have to learn how to stay underwater for what Olivia describes ominously as “a very long time” and most importantly of course, you must do it all in perfect harmony, and that level of synchronicity takes years to master.

This pair are clearly having a ball, and they’re blazing a trail for the sport in Britain. You have to go back to Barcelona in ‘92 for the last time we had anyone competing in this event.

And their choice of music?

“Our tech event is quite bubbly backbeat stuff,” says Jenna, “but the free dance features something angry and heavy.”

Olivia reveals with a beaming smile: “We want to show our power and strength!”

One thing’s for sure, they won’t be fazed by a bit of Macau rain.

Go girls!

We went out for a meal on Wednesday evening and had to get back to the Broadcast Centre on Olympic Green afterwards - a 25-minute walk, according to those in the know.

But they hadn’t reckoned on my legendary sense of direction, or indeed that of my esteemed colleague Vassos Alexander, about whom it is said, could get lost on his way back from the canteen to his desk at Television Centre.

Full of duck, and needing the exercise, we set off, with the distant lights from the TV tower by the main stadium to guide us. Snag is, there’s a fence of Olympic proportions. Its purpose is to thwart unwelcome visitors and, boy, were we thwarted.

After fully an hour of detours, false starts, dead ends and bum steers, we finally found the one way in through the perimeter, which we would have discovered almost immediately had we ignored my instincts in the first place.

Why am I telling you this? Well, en route, I learned something of the two faces of China. At regular intervals along said fence there are guard posts. Standing on those post are (I don’t think I’m giving too much away here) guards.

At 11pm they perch, inscrutable, erect, to attention, motionless in the darkness like the Household Cavalry on Horse Guards Parade, without the shiny breast-plates - or horses, come to think of it.

In common with Her Majesty’s finest, they decline to respond to my cheery “ni hao” and request for directions. They do what they’re told - say nowt.

I was ruminating on this after finally making it back through the security cordon and onto the spectacular boulevard between the pile of steel spaghetti that is the, Birds Nest stadium and eerily luminescent Water Cube.

The place was deserted, apart from the bats flying round the designer streetlights, and the occasional solemn-faced passer by.

But then, distant movement, camera flashes, laughter floating towards us. Twenty or 30 young blokes (Vassos says 50, but then he thinks left is right) are mucking about with their rubbish collection trolleys.

They’re racing each other, pushing these carts flat-out along the broad pavement, surfing them at speed, shrieking, snapping away with their cameras, having a whale of a time, oblivious to us watching.

Unfettered joy, boisterous horseplay took place just a few metres from disciplined obligation and unsmiling authority. China, I’m discovering, is full of these contradictions.

I’m in a good mood. I’ve just finished a tough couple of days at the velodrome, and it’s all been excellent news - two personal bests on the flying 200 metres.

At the same time, I’m hurting. On Tuesday I did the last part of my interval session at my lactic tolerance threshold, and if I’m honest it felt pretty grim.

My numbers were great - my power readings are up - but it still felt horrible. There’s nothing pleasant about those sorts of sessions.

PBs do wonders for your morale, though. To be at the absolute top of my form just days before Beijing is a wonderful feeling.

And we’re all doing it, too. I can’t say that one member of the GB squad is looking better than anyone else because every one of us - the team pursuiters, the women, the sprinters - is at such a high level.

The strange thing is how used to success we are now.

On Tuesday I went under 10 seconds for a 200m sprint for the first time in my life, but it just felt like a normal day. The standards in the squad are so high that it didn’t feel like I’d done anything remarkable.

In some ways you’d expect to be at your best right now. The training load has changed - we’re now getting more rest than at other times of the year, and with the Olympics so close motivation is at its absolute peak.

The quality of every single effort I put in on the track is now vital. You have to be hitting the right numbers of every lap - there’s simply no room for cruising.

We’ve been working towards this for four years, and we’re right at the sharp end of things now - you just give it everything in training.

We’ve also brought in a dress rehearsal feel to training, using our race wheels in training, silk tyres on the track, wearing the race kit.

That feels good in many ways - you know you’re so close to the big day - but at the same time it piles on the pressure.

If you’re not hitting your marks, not making the times you should be making, you’ve got almost no time to try to sort things out.

Everything we’ve achieved in the last four years - those PBs, World Championship gold medals - now feels like a stepping-stone to this moment.

This is the top of the mountain for us. And if we’re as strong in Beijing as we should be, it’ll take an outstanding performance to beat us.

Chris Hoy was speaking to BBC Sport’s Tom Fordyce

In Britain we quite rightly get excited when any of our Olympic athletes wins a medal, be that gold, silver or bronze.

Remember the hysteria surrounding Dame Kelly Holmes, as she would later be titled, following her double gold success in Athens?

Imagine the level to which that hysteria would jump if we ever produced an athlete of the calibre of Alexander Dityatin (pictured top left) or Michael Phelps (top right).

The Soviet gymnast and American swimmer are members of one of the most exclusive Olympic clubs after winning eight medals at one Games.

Dityatin set up the club at the 1980 Moscow Games, when he won three gold, four silver and one bronze, also becoming the first athlete to medal in all eight gymnastic disciplines at one Olympics.

He was also the first male gymnast to be awarded a perfect 10 in the vault, matching Nadia Comaneci’s feat four years earlier in Montreal.

Phelps joined after an astonishing display in the pool in Athens four years ago. Then 19 years old, he picked up six golds, including four individual titles, and two bronzes.

His haul covered a mutlitude of disciplines. Golds came in the 100m and 200m butterfly, 200m and 400m individual medley, 200m freestyle relay and 100m medley relay, while third place finishes came in the 200m freestyle and 100m freestyle relay.

Phelps has broken an amazing 25 world records in his career to date and is going for eight golds in Beijing.

Just four would lift him above Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina, Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi, US swimmer Mark Spitz and US athlete Carl Lewis, who all won nine golds in their Olympic careers.

Will there be a new name at the top of the all-time Olympic gold medallists list come the end of the Beijing Games?

The British Olympic squad lost the limelight in Macau on Wednesday as the American basketball team were in town!

Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, et al tuned up for their assault on Olympic gold with a couple of matches here against Turkey and Lithuania, so down I rushed to the ludicrously massive Venetian Hotel - twice the size of the Vegas version on which it’s based and capable of holding a staggering 20,000 people - to join the media scrum.

Not that the US squad were shunning the cameras and microphones - James, at a towering 6ft 8ins, and, with an annual salary of $40m, the best paid player in the NBA took time out from grooving to the tunes on his headphones to tell us that representing the USA is “10 times better than anything else.”

As for his “guarantee” that they’ll walk off with the gold, he says the players deserve to feel pressure, after they could only take bronze in Athens: “We believe we are the best team in the world, we have to play like it.”

They face the hosts in their opening game on 10 August and it is definitely one for the diary.

The confidence of the basketball stars contrasted with that of a group of past champions facing a sterner test in their group games - the British men’s hockey team.

Since the abiding memory of their stunning Olympic gold at the 1988 games they’ve failed to improve on sixth place and, 20 years on from Seoul, expectations remain rather modest.

In the group stages in Beijing they’ll face Holland, standard-bearers of hockey exellence for many years and defending champions Australia.

British head coach Jason Lee told me, with brutal honesty, Australia are “largely untouchable” while British captain Ben Hawes assured me they’ve made big strides since a ninth placed finish in Athens, if they don’t get anything from the Dutch or the Aussies, a medal will once again prove elusive.

“If we play at the top of our game and if we get lucky,” explained Lee, “we could win a medal.

“That will also apply to London 2012. There’s nothing to suggest we wouldn’t need luck.”

Defeatism or harsh realism?

Well first up, the coach thinks the heroics of the class of ‘88 have become a rather unfortunate hockey stick with which to beat the rest.

“The physical side of the game has changed so much since then” he explains, “I doubt whether some of them could have coped with the pace of the game now.”

So, if medal chances are slim or worse for this Games and the next, is the longer term picture just as bleak?

Inevitably, money plays its part. With a rather resigned look the coach informs me that even the nations ranked below the UK get more funding, but he’s quick to add that it’s not just about cash, it’s about developing a sporting culture that will nurture skills at an early age.

“By the time they become adults,” says Lee, “the danger is that we can’t help them.”