2008 Olympics Updates

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.

Iain Percy and Andrew Simpson’s gold medal was the perfect prize to handover to the next Olympic sailing regatta in Weymouth 2012.

Great Britain’s medal target in sailing was four – to achieve that in golds with an additional silver and bronze was beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Percy and Simpson’s victory in the Star class was pure gold in every sense of the word. The lifelong friends showed great resilience to squeeze through an extremely testing medal race to secure first place.

“We had to fight every inch of the way” said Percy, who’s now a double Olympic gold medallist.

For Andrew “Bart” Simpson this was also the culmination of a long and winding Olympic campaign. He was Percy’s training partner in Sydney, and again for Ben Ainslie in Athens. Bart is now an Olympic champion in his own right.

Paul Goodison’s gold medal drew to a close a stunning campaign – unbeaten over three years at the Olympic venue, and in his mind there was only going to be one winner.

The Sheffield United fan had focused his training towards winning this event, after missing out on a medal four years ago in Athens by a solitary point.

The Laser class has a history of mishap and upset – you can be the best in the world ahead of the regatta, but still go home empty handed. That was never an option for Goody.

Great Britain’s Yngling gold medal was the result of a perfectly executed four-year plan by three girls and their coach. Sarah Ayton, Sarah Webb and Pippa Wilson developed themselves into an invincible unit and their victory came as a surprise to no-one, least of all themselves.

There’s little more than can be said about Ben Ainslie. At 31, he’s already a sailing great who can go on to achieve immortal status.

Nick Rogers and Joe Glanfield’s silver medal was won from almost nowhere. In reality it was their gold.

The pair started their series slowly and a medal of any colour looked out of reach, but these two are seasoned campaigners and best of friends. They know how to dig themselves out a hole.

Rogers and Glanfield are disparate characters who spark off one another to produce a superbly strong team, one of the strongest in the sport.

Bryony Shaw’s bronze medal was a superb effort in the ultimately physical class. She was one girl who wanted her medal more than anything – her post race reaction said it all.

Her diminutive frame was required to perform the equivalent of two 10,000m races each day. Physical preparation and psychological strength allowed her compete to the very end of the regatta ensuring a valuable medal for the team.

“What’s Tianjin famous for?” we asked our local driver as we flew along the highway between Beijing and the coastal city to the east of China’s capital.

“Lazy people and good restaurants,” replied Tony.

That may well be the case, indeed the pace of life is definitely slower in Tianjin than Beijing and we enjoyed a decent lunch but the city has more to boast about than leisurely lunches.

It is also the birthplace of Eric Liddell, Britain’s1924 400m Olympic Champion who was immortalised in David Putnam’s film “Chariots of Fire“.

It’s a wonderful movie but it ends without telling the even more remarkable story of Liddell’s life after the Paris Olympics.

A devout Christian, he returned to China to serve as a missionary and died in 1945 in a Japanese internment camp.

We found the street where he spent the first five years of his life and while I’m sure it has changed a great deal since 1902, there are still more bicycles than cars on the roads and many beautiful old colonial buildings now often used as local government offices.

The Chinese have erected a plaque at the Liddell home at 38 Chongqing Dao (formerly Cambridge Road) and it is a site of special architectural and historic importance.

Known in the East as Li Airui, the Chinese have claimed Liddell as one of their own and he is revered as their first true Olympic Champion.

But they also recognise his actions after the Japanese invasion in 1937 and his remains lie in the Mausoleum of Martyrs at Shih-Chia-Chuang where China honours those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the liberation of China from the Japanese.

After a white knuckle drive round the back streets of the old European district of the city we eventually found 17 Middle school, formerly the Angle/Chinese Mission school where the missionary went on to teach after his Olympic triumph.

Tony, our driver and translator, introduced me to the school’s caretaker who showed us round the school and proudly showed off a wall panel that celebrates Liddell’s life. The children are still taught about the Scottish missionary who became an Olympic champion and a national hero.

Our evening was spent watching China launch their campaign for Olympic domination.

Two days before the opening ceremony, the pool matches of the women’s football began and 40,000 people packed into the Tianjn stadium to watch China beat Sweden 2-1. The Chinese scored in only the sixth minute and the place erupted! T

he chanting and flag waving didn’t ease until the full-time whistle and judging by the crowd’s reaction when Sweden equalised just before half-time, there weren’t too many Swedes in the ground.

Han Duan was the heroine of the night, scoring the winning goal and giving us a lovely interview after the match: “We fight for every game, we fight for every Gold,” she said.

We have been warned.

Bird’s Nest Stadium, Beijing

On Wednesday evening Beijing time, Phillips Idowu will walk out into the Bird’s Nest stadium as hot favourite for triple jump gold.

It’s an unfamiliar feeling for Phillips. After jumping to sixth in Sydney eight years ago as a fresh-faced 21-year-old, he’s struggled to convert that talent into big medals.

This season, however, he’s dominated from the World Indoors onwards, cementing his world number one ranking with a first round jump of 17.44m in qualifying on Monday.

Idowu has been almost scarily confident this summer, going as far as describing himself as “bullet-proof” last month.

But former Olympic triple jump champion Jonathan Edwards, says self-belief was never the problem for the the 29-year-old from Hackney.

“Phillips has always been very good at talking himself up, but he hasn’t always backed it up,” he says. “That’s the harsh reality.

“He’s hugely physically talented, but there’s always been a question-mark over his mental capabilities.

“He’s never won a global outdoors title. He’s won a World Indoors, he’s won a Commonwealths, but he’s never performed at a Worlds, and only finished sixth at one Olympics.

“As he’s come through with an expectation from the outside that he can win a medal, he hasn’t done so, even at Osaka last year.

“The difference this year is that he’s jumped consistently far all summer, and I’ve never seen him do that before.

“He’s always had the confidence. What I look at is how he’s performed – that’s all that matters. And this season outdoors he’s looked fantastic.”

Edwards went to two Olympic Games as favourite for gold, in Atlanta the year after smashing the world record and then again in Sydney, as a 34-year-old veteran.

By his own admission he struggled to cope in 1996, to the extent that he could “barely put one foot in front of the other, let alone triple jump”.

That year he ended up with silver, only becoming Olympic champion as an older, wiser and more philosophical athlete.

The absence of reigning Olympic champion Christian Olsson means Idowu is now under the same sort of pressure.

“I would sit here and say it’s really hard being favourite – there’s a fear of failure,” says Edwards, who was Idowu’s GB team-mate from 2000 to 2003.

“Phillips wouldn’t do that – we’re very different personalities. On the surface, he’ll love being favourite, with the eyes of the world on him.

“In terms of his conscious thought processes, he really likes being the centre of attention. He’s got red hair and piercings. This is a man saying – look at me, I’m the real deal.

“But it’s got to have an effect, knowing that a silver medal will be seen as a failure, and Phillips has shown himself to be susceptible under pressure in the past.”

Idowu looked untroubled in qualifying, but it was the same in Athens four years ago – and he followed that up with three no-jumps in the final.

“I’ve always said with Phillips that if he doesn’t do it in the first two jumps then he’s not going to do it,” says Edwards.

“That’s been true until this summer. At the European Cup he went poor first jump, okay second jump, great third jump. After a bad start at Crystal Palace, he produced big jumps in both round four and five.

“The Phillips Idowu of previous years wouldn’t have done that. He would have kept on going downhill and downhill.

“I would still be nervous if we got to round three of the final here and Phillips had only jumped 17.20 and the lead was 17.60.

“I still believe that if he’s going to jump really big, he’ll do it in the first few rounds. That’s the kind of athlete he is.

“We shouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t win it, because he’s never won a major title outdoors. It would be a huge disappointment, but it wouldn’t be the massive shock it was when I lost in Atlanta.

“But the way he’s looked this summer, with the technical consistency, I wouldn’t be in the last bit surprised if he opened up with 17.80m.”

There are heroes and then there are heroes, but Natalie du Toit is a superhero.

She’s not an Olympic champion – yet – but her story is the best kind, one of triumph over adversity, one of beating the odds, and one of pursuing your dreams at all costs.

For me, what makes sport so special is its humanity, and South Africa’s Natalie Du Toit has plenty of that. As many of you will already know Natalie is the first athlete to qualify for both the Paralympic, and the Olympic Games.

Competing internationally since the age of 14, in February 2001, when she was 17, her left leg was amputated at the knee after she was involved in a scooter accident on her way back to school after swimming practice.

Three months later, even before she’d started walking again, she was back in the pool. In 2002, swimming with a prosthetic limb, she won two gold medals in multi-disability events at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester.

She also made sporting history by qualifying for the 800 metre able-bodied freestyle final – the first time that an athlete with a disability had qualified for the final of an able-bodied event.

Already a multiple gold medallist at the 2004 Paralympics, Natalie is here in Beijing to take part in the women’s 10 km open water event, having qualified by finishing 4th at the this year’s World Championships.

This is your chance to talk to her via webcam and put your questions to her with your e-mails.

Natalie will be with us live on My Games on BBC World News this Saturday to tell us her story, so if you want to be a part of the programme, e-mail us at mygames@bbc.co.uk.

It’s going to be a great honour to meet her, because hers is a story of courage, spirit and determination. The best kind. An inspiration to so many, she has used her sporting achievements to show the world that anything is possible if you want it badly enough.

In other words, hers is so much more than a sporting story. To transcend one’s chosen arena is the most anyone can ever hope for and Natalie has certainly done that, even before her Olympics have begun. I hope you’ll join us for My Games at 12:40 GMT this Saturday.