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.

All day, the omens had looked so good for Phillips Idowu.

The rain had fallen so heavily in Beijing that he could have been at home in London. His hair was dyed red, the same tone as the Chinese flag. He even had the same bib number, 1809, as Kelly Holmes had worn when she won 1500m gold in Athens - the same number, spookily, as the Olympic triple jump record.

But in the end, even for a man who had said a few weeks ago that he felt “bullet-proof”, who had gone all year unbeaten and who produced his season’s best in the Olympic final, it wasn’t quite enough.

This was one of those strange evenings where the disappointments almost overshadowed the gold medals.

Thursday night was meant to be the evening that Liu Xiang lifted the roof off the Bird’s Nest by retaining his 110m hurdles crown, the set-piece moment where the whole of China gathered round their television sets and celebrated victory for their favourite son.

Instead, with Liu’s Achilles injury forcing him out of Monday’s heats before he’d cleared a single hurdle, Dayron Robles’ fine win was greeted with generous applause but little more. It didn’t matter how beautifully Robles hurdled. In Liu’s absence, it could never be the same for the home crowd.

For Britain, Idowu’s near-miss was preceded by Goldie Sayers losing out on a javelin bronze by a single place, even after throwing a new British record - and declaring herself “sick as a dog” afterwards.

The highly-promising Michael Rimmer failed to get through his 800m semi, stricken by food poisoning, and Martyn Rooney ran more than half a second slower in the 400m final than he had in his semi, when a time even two tenths of a second slower would have won him an unexpected bronze.

The women’s 4×100m qualified for their final, but their male counterparts - the reigning Olympic champions - made a terrible mess of their last changeover and found themselves, correctly, disqualified.

For the American team it was even worse. First Jamaica completed its sweep of the individual sprint titles as Veronica Campbell-Brown blew away Allyson Felix in the 200m final.Then Darvis Patton and Tyson Gay dropped the relay baton with the race at their mercy, repeating the error which cost the US gold four years ago.

Just when they thought it couldn’t get any worse, Torri Edwards and Lauryn Williams then did exactly the same.

Against that, the solitary victory for LaShawn Merritt in the 400m didn’t really balance things up, particularly when reigning champion Jeremy Wariner ran so poorly behind him.

Unlike those relay teams, however, Idowu doesn’t deserve any opprobrium.

Two nights after another east London-born Brit won gold in the Bird’s Nest, he almost repeated Christine Ohuruogu’s trick of coming from behind to snatch an Olympic title.

Idowu had sought to brush away the pressure of being gold medal favourite by telling himself beforehand that he was dealing with “just another sandpit in another country”.

For the first three rounds, it looked to have worked. When Leevan Sands nailed a 17.59m to snatch the lead off Phillips, the Briton replied with 17.62m with his very next jump - the sort of response that his critics have often claimed is beyond him.

What none of us had counted on was that Portugal’s Nelson Evora would in turn respond to Idowu’s leap by producing a jump of 17.67m - his longest of the season by over 30cm - with just two rounds to go.

Four years ago in Athens, Idowu failed to land a single clean jump, exiting the biggest stage of all with three successive fouls.

This was different. He would have needed a personal best at the death to deny Evora, who hasn’t been in the world’s top 10 all summer, and PBs almost never happen in the last two rounds of a triple jump competition.

Five centimetres was all that stood between Idowu and gold in the final reckoning. Arguably, his rivals raised their game by a slightly larger percentage tonight than he did - but with margins that fine, it would be a harsh man who criticised him for that.

Beijing

GB’s men have eased off the gas as D-Day approaches, confident that the hard work is done

Their coach Jason Lee told me the time at the training base in Macau was invaluable for the acclimatisation process, and he expects to reap the dividends here in China.

The stifling heat in Beijing will ask questions of every athlete - but Lee insists it was hotter in Macau, and his men will be ready for anything.

As for the smog: “Everyone has to breathe the same air” he said.

It’s a fair point.

Many of the team are already familiar with these problems anyway.

Two years ago England played a World Cup qualifying tournament in Changzhou where Lee told me the pollution was even worse than here.

They beat Pakistan 3-1 to take bronze there - will the result be repeated when the two sides meet on Monday?

In the women’s competition, GB looked chipper as they went through a light training session at the Olympic Hockey venue. Jenny Bimson was bouncing around like a jack-in-the-box.

Alex Danson had every right to look happy after receiving the all-clear on her troublesome ankle.

We’re told she might change her footwear to provide some extra support.

Christa Cullen and Kate Walsh were firing in the goals from the penalty corners; all seemed well.

Coach Danny Kerry is in confident mood - a medal is there for the taking he feels, providing they find some consistency through the pool stages.

And Olympic champions Germany first up? “I’m glad we’ve got them first” he said. Predictions anyone?

From Macau

The first thing that strikes one about Macau is the heat.

And “strikes” is the operative word. A thermal wave hit me like a wall as I emerged from my air-conditioned ferry.

The women’s hockey team, desperate to atone for their calamitous failure to even make the Games in Athens, are the first members of the British squad to taste Macau and its climate.

“It’s something else,” admitted coach Danny Kerry as I watched him oversee training. “It’s like running through treacle.”

Team captain Katie Walsh is trying to take the heat off her team concerned only about erasing the memory of four years ago.

“The worst moment of our careers,” she told me.

And as they limbered up with a light-hearted game of Frisbee, Walsh sounded upbeat about their chances of even being in the medal mix. First up are Olympic champions Germany on 10 August.

“We hope to catch them cold, that’s our Baldrick-style cunning plan!” says Kate.

The humidity clearly is not dampening her sense of humour.

Beth Tweddle could be forgiven for feeling hot and bothered even though her expertise takes her indoors away from the challenging climate.

GB’s finest-ever gymnast by a distance, has endured a frustrating year hampered by ankle problems.

Now affable team coach Adrian Stan tells me she’s getting over a rib muscle injury which he describes as “‘minor but unsettling”.

It’s clearly hampering her preparations; the former World and European uneven bars champion moved rather gingerly about her training today.

And Mr Stan tells me she will spend an extra three days on the island where she can use softer mats before she rejoins the rest of her colleagues in Beijing on Monday.

Oh yes, the heat is definitely on.