2008 Olympics Updates

Olympic Green Archery Field

A bit like the sailors at currently windless Qingdao, Britain’s medal tally has hit the doldrums over the last couple of days.

There was concern this first week was going to be slow, and to be honest, so it has proved.

Apart from the swimmers, who’ve had a great Olympics, and the cycling team who will undoubtedly be Britain’s biggest providers, there’s been disappointment elsewhere.

Nothing out of judo, diving, badminton, tennis, shooting - and now archery, where I’ve been spending my time over the last few days.

Archery had a target of two medals, and managed only a 4th place in the women’s team event.

Let’s add some context to that.

Last year was a particularly good one for the British archers, winning three medals at the World Championships, but it’s here in Beijing where it really counts, where the fruits of their labours, and the £2.8m investment the sport’s had in the past four years should be reaped.

What’s gone wrong?

Alan Wills offered me an insight straight after bowing out in the last 16 this morning.

He told me the head coach, Peter Suk, wasn’t letting him “be himself” out on the target field.

He wanted to feel more aggression, but felt that his personality was being subdued, because Suk wanted a calmer approach.

Team-mate Simon Terry mentioned “issues around the team” the other day, and clearly that’s what he was alluding to.

I’m left to question why wasn’t this resolved before the games?

If Wills wasn’t getting what he personally needed, then why?

After all he’s the bloke out there drawing the bow.

Whether this is a management or a communication issue, I don’t know, but the net result is a flat team, flat performances and a zero in the medals column.

Team leader, Hilda Gibson, said that there’d be a chance to get all this out into the open at a big de-brief post games.

Fine, but forgive me, too late for Terry, who said he’d not got his head around the one-on-one contests yet, or Naomi Folkard who let nervousness get in the way of her talent.

If ever a sport needed a good psychologist to give them strategies for dealing with those things, it’s archery.

Like target shooting, it’s a sport you play as much against yourself as the person standing next to you.

The Grand National Archery Society has some thinking to do, as do the other sports who’ve missed their medal targets here.

UK Sport has a much publicised “no compromise” policy when it comes to funding sport.

Archery will be among those nervously awaiting the outcome of the divvy-up of cash for London 2012.

After four days of being in the Olympic Village, I’m finally starting to get to know my way around.

This place is massive, it’s like a small town and it’s bigger than the village I come from in Cumbria.

It’s been a good few days though mingling with the other athletes and being recognised by Lleyton Hewitt.

But with my competition starting tomorrow, it’s time for final preparations.

That means not going to the opening ceremony for starters.

I’m not that bothered as I’ll chill out and watch a bit of it on the television back at the flat with the other five archers.

We are all in the same apartment - the boys are one side, the girls the other and I’m the tidy one of the men, while Larry Godfrey’s room is like a pigsty.

All the Brits are in the same area of the village and we are in four tower blocks - the cyclists are close by and I get a hello from Chris Hoy in the mornings - he seems like a lovely bloke.

I’ve also seen Hewitt, who I met while training at the Australian Institute of Sport earlier in the year - he nodded and said “g’day”, which was nice.

I started out at the GB training camp in Macau which was a good few days getting over the jet lag, doing a bit of training and meeting some of the hockey players and boxers, but thankfully we left before the typhoon struck.

And since we’ve been in Beijing, there’s been a couple of functions we’ve had to attend, which were great.

Last night we were all suited and booted to go the British Embassy - it was great to be in the same room as people like Sir Matthew Pinsent and Princess Anne.

And we’ve had a motivational meeting with Simon Clegg, the British Olympic Association chief executive, and elite performance director Sir Clive Woodward, who talked about focusing on what we want to be remembered for at the Olympics.

And I’m as ready as I possibly can be - there is nothing different I could’ve done in my preparations to improve myself and the same goes for Larry and Simon Terry - the team is stronger than it has ever been.

The women’s team event gets underway first and we follow straight after.

I’ll get up in the morning, have a late breakfast and a bit of dinner before heading off to the archery field - which is looking in great condition. We were here a year ago for an event and I swear the grass is looking greener than back then.

We had a quiet practice session there this morning and there are obviously a few more banners up and security is a bit tighter, but it looks in great nick.

After dinner, we’ll head down to the field where we get a 45-minute warm-up session on the targets and a 15-minute breather before the competition starts.

The first round is the ranking one where we get to shoot 72 arrows and that will take a couple of hours.

The women are back on the Sunday for their knockout rounds and their medals will be decided then, whereas we get the day off and are back on Monday.

I doubt we’ll go see the women on the Sunday - if needed we will, but I’ll probably relax in the morning and then go see my mum and dad in the afternoon.

Actually, I need to phone my dad to see if he’s coming to the qualifying round tomorrow - he and my mum have tickets for the finals days - but I need to tell him to keep out the way if he does come tomorrow as the last thing I need is him popping his head up to say hello and suprising me!

Tuesday is a day off before Wednesday’s qualifying for the individual event - the finals day for that is Friday, so I’m doing nothing for the next week but focussing on my performance.

You can watch the action from 0500 BST on Saturday and I’ll hopefully be back next Friday to let you know how the week went from my perspective.

Alan Wills was talking to BBC Sport’s Peter Scrivener.

When people failed to make a team at my school they would normally wait until the bus home before they started a whispering campaign.

The letters page of Athletics Weekly has served the same purpose over the years for athletes who have just missed out on a major event. The week after the announcement of a GB team would usually witness a lively debate about bias, favouritism and plain incompetence at the top.

But not this time - and it’s not because there aren’t any eyebrow-raising selections or athletes with gripes. There are still plenty of those.

It’s just now you don’t start whispering or writing letters, you set up a Facebook group instead.

While the rest of us were distracted by the word from chambers about a certain sprinter with a restraint of trade issue, there were controversies of a more everyday variety elsewhere in Team GB’s line-up for Beijing.

As highly-paid QCs debated the difference between a right and a privilege, other athletes were left wondering why they’re not in the team when a slower bloke is.

What started on Sunday with a 168-word rant on every student’s favourite waste of time about two mildly controversial calls by the selectors has quickly become a forum for dissent aimed at the sport’s governing body.

And with UK Athletics looking forward to the London Grand Prix, not to mention next month’s little event in China, it could probably do without a group called “UK ATHLETICS VOTE NO CONFIDENCE” talking about boycotts and protests at Crystal Palace this weekend.

There are now 467 members in this group (many of them athletes, a few of them of international quality, a couple of them former Olympians) and it is growing fast.

So just how did this all start? What are these causes celebres which have so incensed Britain’s grass-roots scene? Who made the team and who hasn’t?

The easiest of those questions to answer is the last. Dale Garland has made the team and Richard Yates (among others) has not.

Dale who? Richard what? You’re right, we’re not talking Dwain and Paula here.

The 27-year-old Garland is the Guernsey record holder for 100m, 200m, 400m, 110m hurdles, 400m hurdles, pole vault, long jump, triple jump and decathlon. He must be the best athlete Guernsey has ever produced.

He is also a lottery-funded athlete now concentrating on the 400m hurdles.

He is not, however, our fastest 400m hurdler this year. Hamstring niggles have hampered Garland all season to leave him only our fourth fastest.

Our fastest is Yates, a 22-year-old Leeds University student.

Having decided to put his law degree on hold for a year of full-time training, Yates has been taking chunks out of his personal best all season. He went under 51 seconds for the first time in June and then sub-50 two weeks later.

That was just a preamble to a startling display at the trials in July. Yates won in 49.50, an Olympic “B” qualifying time. He was now eligible for Beijing - eligible, but not going.

Not that Garland has taken his place, no, not all: Garland is going as the sixth man in our 4×400m relay squad.

The problem there, however, is Garland is only the 17th fastest man in Britain over 400m this year, 0.78 seconds slower than the man with the sixth fastest time, the 21-year-old Richard Strachan.

So, to recap, you’ve got two young, improving runners with credible claims for a place not going to Beijing, and one older runner going despite being showing no form whatsoever and possibly carrying an injury.

This is just the start of the Facebook furore. Delve a little deeper and you start to find lots of other axes which need grinding.

Why isn’t Jo Ankier (third in the steeplechase at the trials) going? Why isn’t sprinter Emma Ania worth an individual spot? Where is 1500m man Mike East? And what of high jumper Samson Oni?

And so on, and so on, and so on.

The problem here, of course, is that not everybody can or should go to Beijing. It isn’t a nice thing to have to write, and it must be an even harder thing to judge, but the Olympics are a privilege, not a right.

The days when we would pad out our ranks with good eggs, long shots and loyal servants have passed. Quite simply, elite sport costs too much for that now.

Yates is a solid prospect and a wonderful example of what can be achieved with a new sense of purpose. But he has only run the “B” standard once. UKA’s selection criteria ask for more than that. It has found to its cost that athletes who scrape into the biggest show on earth often get stage fright.

The same tough rationale can be used to explain almost every other 50/50 call the selectors have had to make.

The relay case is a stranger one.

Garland has been picked because he represents a “safe pair of hands”, something he has proved when it mattered. But just how important are a safe pair of hands in the 4×400m?

There is no question this is a huge factor in the 4×100m (our sprint quartet had no business winning gold in Athens if you just look at their individual times), but do quick starts, slick changes and the ability to run bends really play such a significant part in a 1,600m race with three scruffy handovers?

There is clearly something about British one-lappers and a baton. The event (a rich source of medals for us over the years) has a Ryder Cup-like capacity to turn mediocre individuals into heroic team players. But the 17th fastest man this year?!?

Garland is, by all accounts, a good bloke who works hard but I can’t help wondering if one of the group’s members Matt Elias, a member of the 4×400m squad in Athens, had a point when he told me the selectors are just opening themselves up to accusations of favouritism with picks like this.

“Athletics shouldn’t be about interpretation. It’s not like football. If you run the time you should get in the team,” Elias said.

Is he right? Can athletics be boiled down to brass-tack objectivity like that? Is it time to scrap the selection panel and pick from the rankings? Or is a US-style, last-man-standing contest at the trials what we need?

Answers on a postcard please…or you could get with the zeitgeist and post below (or on facebook, it’s up to you).