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.

What an incredible Olympics for our modern pentathlon team. Heather Fell and I were excited from the moment we set foot in the athletes’ village to the moment we left - and that moment came far too soon.

All five of our pentathlon events took place on one day, the last Friday of the Games, so we only had Saturday and Sunday to enjoy ourselves properly.

But the advantage of competing so late was that the more medals Team GB won, the less nervous I felt. It took the pressure off because suddenly nobody was looking to the final few events in desperation for medals.

Heather’s silver medal is a brilliant result for her, and for our sport.

We’ve had a great last two years now - qualifying two boys for Beijing beat our initial target of one, and a medal is what we had to produce from the girls’ point of view. My seventh place shows we’ve got strength in depth in the team.

I’m 90% pleased with my result. Seventh is a good result in pentathlon, especially at an Olympic Games, but I know my fencing was a bit below par and that was the difference between seventh and a place on the podium.

You’ve probably seen the disaster that was the men’s modern pentathlon show jumping. I was there and it wasn’t pretty to watch.

But it helped to take some of the stress out of the event for me - I thought that if it was going to be that bad for everyone, then maybe I could take advantage and move up from 20th into a medal position.

The organisers made some changes for the women’s event - for a start they took the worst horses out, and in the end I really got on with my horse. The other two girls who rode it didn’t have very good rounds at all, so I obviously rode it well and I’m pleased with that.

The conditions were much nicer, too. There was a lot of talk beforehand about heat and humidity but I didn’t notice any difference - we did our running event in the evening, and I’ve ridden horses in much stuffier conditions than that too.

Things will be a bit subdued next year without an Olympics, but I’m used to that - it’s what my sport is like, and it means I have to set my sights on London 2012. After my experience in Beijing I am so keen to compete there, but I know four years is a long time and I’ve got to train hard to stay in the mix.

It’s just a shame I didn’t get to see the Beijing shops but, to be honest, being around our gold medallists in the village was too exciting.

I met Chris Hoy, some of the rowers and Rebecca Adlington. Heather and I wanted our picture taken with everybody! Rebecca Adlington’s lovely, we got on with the rowers really well, and Chris Hoy even let me hold his medals to have my picture taken.

Being part of Team GB and mixing with athletes from other sports was a large part of what made the week so special.

I’m not sure what’s next for me now. I’m enjoying a rest at the minute, then it’s the last competition of the season, the World Cup final, in four weeks’ time.

But after the Olympics that’s not a huge priority, I’m just going to maintain my fitness and have a nice competition to end the season.

After that it’s winter training - but hopefully with a few parties thrown in along the way to finish this brilliant year off nicely!

Katy Livingston was speaking to BBC Sport’s Ollie Williams

Within 36 hours of the Olympic Games closing ceremony the flags in the city of Beijing were changed to Paralympic ones.

The message that I have seen in Beijing is that things happen here fast. I came here a couple of years ago when the foundations of the athletes’ village were being dug and it seemed impossible that anything would be ready.

If the rumours are true, in the last two years there have been 200 new hotels built in Beijing and in the past six months many underground stations have been made accessible for disabled people.

Since my first visit to Beijing there have been many dramatic changes, not just physical ones, but more attitudinal ones.

Last time, there was barely a dropped kerb in sight, and now there is more tactile paving than I have ever seen in my life.

I was out and about in the city a couple of days ago and ramps that weren’t there two weeks ago were appearing in shops.

What I hope is that they don’t disappear as soon as the Games leave town, and there will be a lasting legacy, but from what I have seen over here, the learning curve is steep and what they learn sticks.

There have also been considerably fewer people staring at me in the street. This time, the attention has focused on my blonde blue-eyed six-year-old daughter, who had an average of 25 people a day taking her picture.

People literally stop in the street to look at her or touch her hair, something that she was incredibly patient with, seeing as she won’t let me brush her hair before a school day!

In the last two weeks there have also been Paralympic adverts on TV, programmes showing the technicalities behind wheelchair racing and other sports, and major coverage of the Paralympic torch relay.

But still I have this inkling that the city doesn’t really know what to expect.

There appeared to be a slight lack of international support at the Olympics, so will the local supporters understand the competition and will the stadiums be full? Let us not forget that some of the sessions of the Olympics were not full.

But I do get the sense here that there will be strong encouragement for local support.

In Seoul in 1988, the local churches were brought in to “support”, having the same seats every day, but different countries’ flags appeared to be on rotation.

It didn’t feel patronising at the time, or that they were coming out to “cheer on the poor people”. It felt more like education.

I have no doubt that Saturday’s opening ceremony will be sold out (it seems impossible to get tickets) but we have just a few more days to wait to see if they can also fill the venues.

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.

China showed overall dominance in table tennis event at Beijing Olympic Games, winning eight gold medals. Chinese men and women earlier confirmed their gold in team events. Later on, Chinese women kept hundred percent success rate in singles two days ago. On the last day of Beijing Olympic, it was men’s turn to prove their dominance in men’s singles. Actually, Jorgen Persson from Sweden was not only player outside China in men’s gold medal round, but he was easily outclassed by Wang Liqin in the singles.

China is always a big name in table tennis, but winning eight gold medals in one single Olympic Games has been something special for the Chinese. In fact, this has been the first time a team sweeps eight gold medals in table tennis in the history of Olympic Games.

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