2008 Olympics Updates

I spoke out against GB head coach Peter Suk immediately after my quarter-final defeat at the Olympic Games and then retracted it on reflection in my blog later that day.

Since then, I’ve had more time to reflect and I stand by what I originally said and if a lot of things don’t get better, I will pack it in and that’s not me being a sore loser.

Concerns need to be raised for the benefit of the whole of GB archery - if we can push on, the funding will get there, if not, the sport goes back to no funding and fewer competitors.

The next three or four years are going to be interesting with London 2012 coming up - we should get more input into what we need to become world and Olympic champions.

I know I’m capable of winning Olympic medals, but I need to have the right support.

This is the first year since I turned senior in 2002 that I’ve not won a medal in target or field archery despite shooting better than ever.

That has been down to a lack of confidence and the mental side of things and things going on behind the scenes.

This year, everything was wrong in the build-up to the Olympics with the selections for the World Cup circuit.

If we bombed out in the first round of a competition, Peter would say don’t worry - but confidence gets knocked if you’re not doing well.

We need a do-or-die mentality - put everything in until your fingers bleed.

We weren’t prepared properly.

I have no problem with Peter away from archery, but we have different methods within the sport.

Team morale was low at the Team GB holding camp in Macau but Peter said he expected that because of nerves and that it would be alright when we got to Beijing. But it wasn’t and it was down to the team to try and lift ourselves when we should have been focusing on competing.

Since my quarter-final defeat at the Olympics, I have not spoken to Peter. He left for Korea straight after the competition; there was no de-brief as we have always had after every other event, which was a bit strange.

I have always worked with my own personal coach at home and things have always gone perfectly - I have always been in charge and every medal I’ve ever won I’ve done by learning how to approach different matches mentally.

This year, the confidence has been non-existant and by the time I was knocked out at the Olympics, it was the first time I had lost control in a match situation.

I want to emphasise though that I really enjoyed my first Olympics experience despite the problems.

We’ve got a meeting in October with all the British archers who competed at the Olympics and Paralympics which will hopefully sort some things out.

Before that I’m off to meet the Queen at Buckingham Palace as part of the big parade through London with all the other British Olympians on 16 October, which I’m really looking forward to.

Away from the competition, I had a great time in Beijing, spending time with my mates and going to watch other sports.

The best was watching Beth Tweddle in the gymnastics - we went because we know a few of the gymnasts from training at Lilleshall - I’ve never been to a gymnasium hall, it was massive and the atmosphere was great, particularly when the Chinese were competing.

Beth was unlucky and, even though we didn’t know much about the technical side, we thought her performance deserved third!

The athlete’s village is not as mad as everyone makes out - there were a lot of people there who still hadn’t competed when we had finished, so there is respect for everyone else.

It’s a different story in the city though - the bars were rammed, mainly with Australians! I tended to stick with the archery lads and lasses from Australia, America and Canada as we all know each other through competing across the world - it was a brilliant experience.

Me and Larry Godfrey had a few good days enjoying ourselves but we had the option to come home a day early before the closing ceremony, so we did.

When I got home and saw the closing ceremony and the plane carrying the rest of the team, I thought it would have been nice to be on it, but then it was nice to arrive at Heathrow and slip through unnoticed.

Since I got back to Cumbria, I’ve had a bit of post-Olympics blues - out in Beijing we were living in a bubble and everything was done for you so we could enjoy ourselves and focus on our event.

But when we got back, nobody told us how hard it is to get back to reality.

I was back a couple of days before I resumed training and my next aim is to qualify for the British field archery team for the World Games next year.

Field archery is extreme archery - there is a course with 24 targets which can be up a cliff, down a cliff, or across a ravine and you shoot three arrows at each target. They are all different sizes and on day one you have to guess how far away they are. On day two, the distances are marked.

I use the same bow as for the target archery, just with lighter arrows - field archery has always been at my heart, I was number one in the world a few years back and I’ve won many medals including a World Games silver and World Team silver and I was also European junior champion.

I was hoping to be given a wildcard into the British team for the World Games as I used to dominate the sport, but they wouldn’t accept me, so I’m training hard and I want to bang in some big scores at the first of two qualifiers next weekend in the north-east and prove a point.

Click here for GB team manager Hilda Gibson’s response.

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

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.

Neither Tom Daley or I ever talked about winning a medal in the 10m individual platform competition and I’m very proud of the way he dived in the final.

He raised his game from the preliminaries to the semi-final and then raised his game again.

He’ll be the first to admit that he was not on top of his game in the final, but he finished seventh and there are good things to take away from the Olympics.

Obviously there are things to improve on as well, but most importantly, he competed with a smile on his face and he goes away smiling.

He has enjoyed the whole Olympic experience and that has given him the best preparation for London 2012.

Let’s not forget he’s only 14 - he starts his GCSEs in September - but he has shown he can hold his nerve and perform on the greatest stage in the world and he has dealt with massive media interest like a true professional.

He knows he could have performed better in the final, but every diver will analyse their performances and even Olympic champion Matthew Mitcham will look at his third dive and say it’s not as good as it could have been.

But overall, Mitcham dived out of his skin and there were crazy scenes in the final round - you couldn’t have scripted a more dramatic finale.

He finished with back 2.5 somersaults with 2.5 twists, a dive I invented 10 years ago when the governing body changed the rules and you could calculate a formula to give you high tariff dives.

I used it in the Olympics four years ago to get into the final and scored straight nines, but Mitcham improved on that.

It was a dramatic final dive and stopped the Chinese winning all eight competitions as happened when Russia’s Gleb Galperin won world championship gold in Melbourne last year.

Tom will go and enjoy the closing ceremony now before going home and having a couple of days off before he starts preparations for the World Junior Championships, which are in Germany from 16-12 September.

And then it’s a tough four years ahead - Tom will be 18 by the time London 2012 comes around and his body will have gone through many physical changes, and he faces many mental challenges as well, as the pressure increases further.

As his mentor, I’ll be there to offer advice and guide, but I’ll be placing no expectations on him.

Leon Taylor was talking to BBC Sport’s Peter Scrivener.

International Broadcast Centre, Beijing

On Sunday afternoon a global audience of many billions will watch the Olympics closing ceremony in Beijing’s Bird’s Nest.

A chance for China to bid farewell to the Games - probably with a huge collective sigh of relief at pulling off such a magnificent sporting show, without (so far) the feared protests, pollution and positive drug test fest, talk of which dogged the build up.

Normally, that would be it, the British media would pack up and go home along with the athletes and we’d all remind ourselves what a football looks like.

Just in case you’d forgotten, this time round it’s different as for Britain it’s the start of our four-year journey to host the greatest show on earth.

There will be an eight-minute segment in Sunday’s ceremony (starts 1300 BST) when the Olympic flag is handed to London mayor Boris Johnson (let’s hope he combs his hair), and 2012 organisers get the chance to give a little foretaste of what is to come.

On paper, the signs are not great - it’s an open secret that we’ll see David Beckham and Leona Lewis on top of a London bus.

But a colleague (a hard-bitten hack not prone to letting sporting authorities of the hook) who is privy to the details but has been sworn to secrecy, says the soundtrack is “fantastic” and that we’ll all be pleasantly surprised.

The ceremony will be relayed live in the UK on all BBC outlets - and also shown on the network of big screens up and down the country - and organisers hope it will spark a similar sense of excitement we saw back in 2005 when the Games were awarded.

They want people to film themselves celebrating - and post the video on their 2012 You Tube site, with the best ones shown on the big screens.

Check it out - it certainly got me in the mood.

So anyway - as the focus switches to London - I’m interested to know what you’d like to know about Britain’s preparations for 2012.

If you have any burning questions - about the organisation, the building, the funding, the likely stars, let me know and we’ll get the answers for you.

The Games are (nearly) over; let the Games begin.

Britain has its best Olympics for a century while the England football team give yet another unconvincing performance at Wembley.

So will the nation begin to lose some of its obsession with why the golden generation of Beckham and company failed to deliver and turn to the real golden generation of British sportsmen and women that have flowered so extraordinarily here in Beijing?

Not even London 2012 chief Lord Coe believes the nation is ready to turn away from football. As a season ticket holder at Chelsea, Coe himself worships football, and he rightly sees it as the nation’s religion.

But in a sense this is a false question - the Olympics are not meant to rival football. But where they can succeed is in providing a shift in the nation’s sporting landscape.

Over the last two decades, football has completely taken over as the abiding focus of sporting attention throughout the year.

It never stops. Other sports hardly ever replace it at the head of the sports pages in the newspapers.

Twenty years ago, football did not exercise such dominance.

Then after the FA Cup final, and perhaps a couple of England internationals, cricket would take over for the summer, with other sports such as athletics also getting a fair bit of attention.

Many factors have contributed to the change, but we in the media have also played a part.

The expansion of the written press, following the arrival of new technology in the late ’80s, meant that as the papers grew they began to devote more pages to football.

When I did my first football reports for the Sunday Times in the late ’70s, there were barely four pages for sports and the paper never carried more than four match reports.

Reporters always wanted to get a north-south match, because that would make the final edition that circulated in London and the south. If I reported a Leeds v Nottingham Forest or some such encounter between teams from the north and the midlands, I never saw what I had written in print.

Now papers have separate sports sections, acres are given over to every Premiership match.

The broadcast media has also played a part. Back then, there was more cricket on the box and live football was confined to the FA Cup final and England matches. Satellite television has changed all that.

And of course, we have since had the explosion of the internet and online coverage.

The astonishing success of the Premier League, a rare British world market leader in sports, has also contributed.

But this is where the Beijing Olympics comes in.

The success of the British athletes has meant that for the first time anyone can remember, people are interested in the country’s position in the medals table.

True, Britain cannot catch China or USA but Britain’s contest with Russia for third place in the table race is the Olympics equivalent of a totally unfancied Premiership team breaking into the top four.

It is, then, hardly surprising that the Beijing Games have taken over from football as the nation’s primary sporting focus.

Of course, this is not the first time people have talked about other sports becoming serious rivals for football.

Recall that rugby was meant to do so after England won the World Cup in 2003, or cricket after the Ashes victory in 2005.

But the Olympics could be different. The fact that London will follow Beijing as host city should mean that the triumphs in China will not just vanish once the summer is over.

At the same time, the church of football will not be suddenly deserted, and nor should it be.

But for the first time in a generation football may have to look over its shoulders at some Olympic sports.

And that will be good for football and sport in general.