2008 Olympics Updates

Andy Hodge has a neat way of summing his next mission up. “It’s all about building on this,” he says pointing to his pocket. In it is his first Olympic gold medal.

Hodge isn’t just talking about a plan to aim to repeat the feats of the Great Britain coxless four in London in four years’ time. He’s also alluding to the plans the wider rowing world has in place to build on the success of Beijing. But more of that later.

Many of the rest of the 23 British rowers who came back from Beijing with medals have got some thinking to do over the next few months. Do they want to go through another punishing four years to compete in front of a home crowd in 2012?

Hodge’s crew-mate Steve Williams is clearly already sick of answering the question, saying: “For me now is the time to put the feet up, recharge the batteries and enjoy the moment. The answer will come to me.”

Williams was the only rower to fly home from Beijing business class as a double Olympic gold-medallist, he is 32 and admits he considered retiring four years ago so the fact his decision is still up in the air is a bit of a shock.

Asked if he has achieved everything he wants to, he replies: “That will be the question that makes up my mind and I’m not really thinking about it at the moment.”

Katherine Grainger clearly hasn’t achieved what she wanted to. When the request comes for photographs of the GB medallists at their post-Games media day, she smiles ruefully at a crew-mate.

The mission of the women’s quadruple scull was to win Great Britain’s first women’s rowing gold. Their tears and exhaustion on the podium as they accepted silver told the whole story.

“There’s still disappointment and that won’t go away. There’s always a bit of a what-if about it,” she tells me.

With two silvers already to her name, there was an assumption that Grainger’s third Olympics would be her last but she explains: “You need perspective and distance. Everyone wants to go to the Olympics and if you could do 10 more you would because it’s so special just to be there.

“But for what it would take for 2012, it’s about what I would feel like on a wet, wintry morning in December.

“If the passion and desire is still there then of course it’s possible but a rather large and enjoyable holiday must come first.

“You need the physical break but you need the mental and emotional break more than anything else and then you can see more clearly which way to go.”

My barely-informed hunch - after a three-minute chat with Kath - is that she will be back for more (although she is clearly a good way from making her mind up) while Williams will decide to spend more time building a career as a motivational speaker.

Also from the quad, Debbie Flood will become a fully qualified prison officerr in the next few months while Frances Houghton - a former crew-mate of Rebecca Romero - plans to do some cycling, “but only between vineyards”.

Matt Langridge, silver medallist in the men’s eight, is still suffering shell-shock after the Games (and the week of partying in the Olympic Village that followed).

“We’ve had weeks of being told what to do, when to eat, when to go to bed. Now we can do what we want,” he says.

Men’s head coach Jurgen Grobler expects the squad to give him some sort of idea about what they want to do by mid-October, still more than six months before the first international event of the 2009 season.

Meanwhile, GB Rowing performance director David Tanner - a man so meticulous he visited Shunyi six times before the Games to make sure everything was in place - is already thinking about the new faces the squad will need for 2012.

“We need to accept some retirements. I think the biggest challenge is to blood some new rowers,” he tells me.

“By 2010 we need to have the 2012 team. There will be some new faces and that’s the biggest challenge.

“There will be some changes - I hope there will be changes. Nobody had heard of Tom Lucy in the men’s eight until a year ago. Zac Purchase was a junior in 2004.”

Purchase - gold medallist in the lightweight double scull in Beijing - is likely to be one of the faces of 2012 and he has high hopes of British success in the rowing regatta.

But the effects of his success are already being felt at grass-roots level. The club where he learned to row, in Upton-on-Severn, Worcestershire, is reporting that all of their summer sculling courses are full.

Hodge, meanwhile, will spend next season as captain of Molesey Boat Club in Surrey, a club that also provided his crew-mate Tom James and Acer Nethercott, cox of the eight, to the GB squad.

Two of the programmes he is particularly keen on getting more involved in are the Sporting Giants initiative and World Class Start - both designed to identify potential Olympians based on their size and to fast-track them into the national squad.

Rowing clubs around the country will be braced for an influx of wannabe Hodges and potential Purchases but while those novices take to the water for the first time, the current crop of stars will be taking a well-earned break.

Now the Olympics are over it is full steam ahead for the Paralympics and the nerves are starting to kick in a bit more.

We headed off to Macau on Saturday for our pre-Games training camp which is an important part of our final preparations and will help us to adjust to the conditions we will experience in Beijing.

It takes a lot of time for me to acclimatise, as it does for a lot of cerebral palsy athletes, so it is nice to get over there early and not feel tired when it comes to the competition.

When we were building up to Athens four years ago we spent some time at a holding camp in Cyprus but it wasn’t for too long because we didn’t have to get used to a time difference.

Going first to Macau and then to Beijing means we will be away from home for about a month and it gives you a good chance to get used to everyone on the team.

For some of the others on the team it will be their first big trip abroad. Some are very young and it will be a new experience for them. I know what I was like when I went to Sydney in 2000. I was 15 and I was used to my mum doing everything and it took me a while to get used to the team set-up.

It helps us that we have a good support team behind us, not only our coaches but also people like our nurse Lynne, who is there when you need a hug!

To be honest, I don’t really like being away for so long, but the hotel in Macau is so nice with lovely big beds and that it makes it easier. When it comes to leaving and going to the athletes’ village, it will be hard to drag myself away from the luxury!

In Macau I’m sharing with another swimmer Rachael Latham. We sometimes train together in Manchester and although Beijing will be her first Games, she will hold her own!

We will then be sharing an apartment in the village with two of our coaches Lars (our head coach) and Billy.

Rachael and I are both a bit messy and I know at home my fiancé Rik despairs of me and is always tidying up behind me, but I prefer to think of it as organised chaos.

My packing went surprisingly well. It doesn’t get better the more often you do it and I always hope I won’t forget anything but Rik flies out to Beijing a week later to take part in the cycling competition so he can always take it over.

We have our team kit, so that’s easy to remember, but I have taken some of my own clothes for our last night party and I also have a couple of pairs of my own shorts and some t-shirts if I have a day off.

My allowance was split between two bags so if one goes missing it isn’t too bad, but I did take some spare underwear and a toothbrush and a hairbrush in my hand luggage in case of emergencies! Last year we went to Macau and five of the team’s suitcases went missing on the Manchester to London leg, so those whose bags weren’t there had to go for a week without clothes.

Over the last couple of weeks all of us on the swimming team have been getting really excited watching the Olympic swimming events at the Water Cube.

For Michael Phelps to win eight golds was amazing, but I didn’t like the fact that the swim programme was changed to suit American television.

I’m not a morning swimmer and I’m glad that our heats will be in the morning and the finals in the evening, which is what we are used to.

Natalie Jones was speaking to Elizabeth Hudson

There’s a temptation (a very British temptation) when looking at the Beijing medal table to ask how on earth are we going to do better than that in London.

It’s a fair question. This has, after all, been Great Britain’s most successful Olympics since our croquet-inspired domination of the 1908 Games.

What’s not fair, however, is to just give up after asking the question and wait for the inevitable disappointment to arrive. As Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can’t, you’re right.”

So it is to the British Olympic Association’s credit that it has asked the question and come up with an answer.

Its “Ambition 2012” programme is perhaps the most impressive initiative the often-maligned organisation has undertaken since ignoring Margaret Thatcher’s call to boycott the Moscow Games in 1980.

Adding to our haul of 19 golds, 13 silvers and 15 bronzes will not be easy in London, but by giving 152 young hopefuls and their coaches a taste of the Olympics here, the BOA has made it that bit easier.

Speak to any Olympian, past or present, and they will tell you the same thing: the size and scale of the Games blow you away at first and how you deal with that can determine your entire Olympic experience - any way of diminishing that jolt to the system can only help.

The anecdotal evidence is supported by BOA research - 70% of Team GB’s gold medallists have competed at an Olympics before, 55% of our total medallists have already experienced an Olympics.

The BOA has often been criticised in the past for being little more than a glorified travel agent, so it is ironic that Ambition 2012 is the best summer holiday our next crop of Chris Hoys and Rebecca Adlingtons could ever hope for.

The 127 athletes and 25 coaches - representing 33 of the 38 Olympic disciplines - have made the trip east in five waves, each spending a week visiting Team GB’s holding camp in Macau, touring the Olympic Village in Beijing and watching the sports they hope to compete in come 2012.

Craig Hunter, the project’s manager, said the idea was hatched soon after London won the bid in 2005 and is proud to be associated with a scheme that has already attracted “why didn’t we think of that?” glances from other countries, the United States in particular.

“We think it’s a superb opportunity for the athletes and will enhance our medal potential in 2012,” said Hunter.

“One of the greatest experiences we could give them was a trip to the Olympic Village. With 16,500 living in there and a dining area that seats 5,000 it can be fairly daunting for a lot of young athletes.”

Integral to the programme has been the involvement of former Olympians as mentors. One of those is Denise Lewis, who earned a bronze in the heptathlon in Atlanta in 1996 before striking gold in Sydney four years later.

“I became involved because of my own Olympic experience,” said Lewis. “I remember what it was like for my first Olympics - I was completely terrified and quite overwhelmed.

“Luckily I did OK in Atlanta but if I can impart some of my knowledge or offer any advice to these young athletes then I think it’s a job well done.

“You need to almost demystify the Olympics. You need to treat it as just another competition. These guys are good enough - there are some athletes here (on the programme) who were painfully close to making the team.

“If you can allow them to see what it’s like so they are not completely blown away by the experience then hopefully they’ll be the best prepared athletes going into the London Games.”

One of those athletes painfully close to getting a ticket to the main gig was Perri Shakes-Drayton: some might say the 19-year-old was painfully unlucky not to get the nod.

But Shakes-Drayton, the top-ranked 400m hurdler in her age group at the 2006 World Juniors, isn’t the type to dwell on what might have been - she is too busy looking forward to what promises to be a glittering career in a GB vest.

“Getting the chance to come here and experience the atmosphere was amazing,” said Shakes-Drayton, who attended the athletics the night fellow east Londoner Phillips Idowu went so close to triple jump gold.

“I was looking at the track and thinking what it would be like to be down there with all those people in the stands looking at me. I tried to imagine what it would it be like if they were all there to see me.”

She should get the chance to experience that for real in 2012. Born and raised in Poplar, she won’t be short of encouragement in Stratford.

But Shakes-Drayton, who won silver at the European Juniors last year, is an old hand at this big stage stuff compared to others on the trip. She has been mixing with some of her sport’s biggest names for a while and seemed to be taking the entire Beijing experience in her leggy stride.

Where the programme could and should pay real dividends is with the likes of taekwondo player Jordan Gayle. A silver medallist at the Youth Olympics in Sydney last year, the 16-year-old Mancunian has been in superb form on the European circuit this year. But an Olympics is a very different proposition, isn’t it?

“I think the best thing about coming here is that I’ve now seen for myself that the Olympics are just another tournament,” said Gayle, with all the cool a teenage martial artist can muster.

Consider the Olympics demystified, Denise. I don’t think Jordan will be tiring himself out chasing autographs in London either. He was far more impressed with seeing three taekwondo players I had never heard of than his encounter with Asafa Powell in the queue for lunch.

Open water swimmer Daniel Fogg was another to impress me with his infectious enthusiasm for what he does and his belief that he belongs here.

“Despite sitting in the rain for two hours [at Thursday's open water race] I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else,” said Fogg. “It was brilliant to watch the best athletes in the world and it just filled me with a load of emotions that I want to be there next time.”

Like Shakes-Drayton, the 20-year-old Loughborough student was probably unlucky to miss out this time. His time will come, though, as I hope it will for all those who made this Olympic recce.

Of course, four years is a long time and a few who came to Beijing will not get the chance to experience Village life for real in London.

But those who do make it will be better off for the taste they got here, and those who don’t have an amazing story to tell their mates when they’re asked “What did you do for your summer holidays?”

It has been a fantastically successful Olympics for Team GB, and as I’ve watched the cyclists and the sailors enjoying the limelight, I suppose I cannot help reflect on the disappointment that GB’s six archers will be returning home empty-handed.

I think the reason Archery GB has been so flat is that expectations were so high, and it is to the credit of our archers that that was so. Alison Williamson, Alan Wills et al have all performed so well on the international stage over the past four years that observers such as myself started to become too confident.

It all started with a bronze for Alison at Athens in 2004, and a fourth place finish for Larry Godfrey. Since then, they have won a number of medals at various international competitions, ranging from world and European championships, to World Cup tournaments. And not for nothing are our women’s team ranked second in the world, and the men fifth.

Last year, British archers won a silver medal and two bronze at the World Championships in Leipzig, but alas, it wasn’t the Olympic Games, and therefore that fantastic achievement went relatively unreported. Win a medal at the Olympics and suddenly a cascade of journalists are battering the door down for interviews, and for a minority sport like archery, publicity of that kind is a wonderful chance to further raise the profile of the sport.

But the Olympic Games is the gauge by which the success of the sport is measured, and the archers missed their opportunity - though the trio of Alison, Naomi Folkard and Charlotte Burgess provided tremendous theatre in the team tournament when they came so agonisingly close to a medal on the first Sunday. After that, we faded from the scene, and that was a disappointment, of course.

So where do we go from here? Well, as I said, British archery has had a tremendous three years, and looking ahead, there are a good crop of youngsters waiting to break through, and snapping at the heels of the seniors in the countdown to London 2012.

First things first, though, and we will all be cheering on our Paralympic archers in Beijing, and while I should learn the lesson of being too optimistic, I cannot help myself by reporting that we have a great squad and every chance of winning medals.

In the first week of September, the World Field Archery Championship takes place at Llwynypia, near Cardiff, with hundreds of archers from all over the world descending on South Wales for a week long tournament.

We also have one of our compound archers - Nichola Simpson - taking part in the Fita World Cup Grand Final in Lausanne in October, which everyone is looking forward to. It is the third year running (and the World Cup only began in 2006) that a GB archer has made it to the Grand Final (Alan Wills won a bronze medal last year, Alison Williamson finished fourth the year before).

After that, there will be a review of the Olympic experience in October, with officials, coaches and, of course, the archers themselves, all contributing to a far-reaching assessment and analysis of the good and the bad of Beijing. I have little doubt there will be plenty of straight-talking, but constructive, rather than destructive.

Oh, and there is the question of funding. It is extremely premature to speculate one way or t’other about this, because the simple fact is that nobody knows at this stage - though I accept that the lack of medal success makes it an inevitable question.

I don’t know the politics of funding, but what I do know is that the setting up of a Performance Unit by Archery GB three years ago, and the consistently improving performances at international level since Athens four years ago, suggests that the long term strategy is on the right lines.

I’m writing this on a grey Monday morning in London and there’s nothing live from China on TV. No, not even the bronze medal match in the Taekwondo.

But on the radio Victoria Derbyshire’s talking about whether London 2012 can live up to the Olympic ideals - and even though we’ve left behind the stunning spectacle of Beijing, we know for certain that the Olympics will be one of the biggest themes in British life for the next four years and beyond.

The final day’s audience figures are in, and they confirm the nation was hooked.

Up until last Thursday night, a total of 40 million people in the UK had watched at least 15 minutes of the Games on television. That number, which we’ll update tomorrow, will certainly have risen further over the weekend.

Yesterday we had the biggest peak audience for the live broadcasts with 6.8m (or 47% of the viewing audience) for the segment of the closing ceremony featuring David Beckham, Leona Lewis, Jimmy Page and the London bus.

We’re enormously grateful for all the comments and questions we’ve received from viewers, listeners and online users.

I’ve said before that experience confirms the line that you can never please all the people all the time, but these Games have had the most positive response of any major event during my time in BBC Sport - and I particularly liked comment 85 in my previous blog, which summed things up perfectly.

One interesting issue, though, is how much the BBC should be a cheerleader for British sportsmen and women - and how we balance patriotism with objectivity. We had a number of comments saying we’d given too much coverage to the Brits and not enough to brilliant performances from other competitors from around the world.

I’ve no doubt that we should celebrate British sporting success on the biggest of all international stages.

These Games were unusual precisely because they had so much achievement by Team GB - so if you compare our one solitary Gold medal in Atlanta with the fantastic 19 in Beijing, then inevitably more of our airtime is going to be taken up by UK competitors.

For all that, I don’t believe we underplayed the successes of other nations. Indeed, some people thought we devoted too much attention to Michael Phelps; and it would be hard to argue we didn’t give due credit to Usain Bolt or other phenomena like the Chinese gymnasts.

The challenge will, of course, be greater as we head towards London 2012.

The BBC will be the UK broadcaster of the Games of 2012, and for an event supported by millions of people across the country, by every mainstream British political party and by the international community we want the London Olympics to be a brilliant success.

We want to support our competitors as they work day-in and day-out for their sport. It will, quite simply, be the biggest logistical operation - and the largest scale event - that the BBC has ever undertaken.

But we will also continue to report honestly and vigorously on the controversies: the budget debate, the question of legacy, the many different views on what these Olympics mean and how they should be run.

We pulled no punches on China, as our Panorama programmes before the Games [Hilary Andersson on Darfur and John Sweeney on reporting freedom] and our more general news and sport reporting have shown.

We therefore have a task that’s both tough and incredibly exciting. As the British Broadcasting Corporation, the next Olympiad sees the Games coming to our country as one of the defining moments of the 21st century for Britain.

As the BBC, we have to live up to all our values of objectivity and fairness - including representing every shade of opinion across the UK. That job begins in earnest today.