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

Here in Beijing, there’s no sign of Olympic fever abating. Chinese Television is still re-running highlights from the Games; crowds still gather around the perimeter of the Olympic Green to have their photos taken with a backdrop of the Bird’s Nest Stadium and there seems to be an Olympic souvenir store on every street corner doing a roaring trade. Even at Beijing Zoo, sales of the panda-like mascots seem as popular as visits to the real life Giant Pandas!

With the Opening Ceremony taking place next Saturday, Beijing is ready for Paralympic fever to take over. No sign yet of Paralympic souvenirs but the first tangible signs were the replacement a few days ago of all the Olympic banners that line the streets of the city with the Paralympic versions. Street signs have changed too with directions to Paralympic venues instead. For ‘Olympic Village’ read ‘Paralympic Village’.

When the Olympic medal table is swapped for the Paralympic version, it’s a near certainty that China will again top the table. They did so four years ago in Athens, so for the rest of the world, it’s a question of who will come second. Great Britain has come second for the last two Games. In Athens they won 35 Golds with a medals total of 94 and have been set a Beijing target by UK Sport of winning 112 medals. A stiff challenge! With Team GB having exceeded their Olympic medals target and achieved their best performance for a hundred years, one wonders how much extra pressure this puts on Paralympics GB.

In particular, the spotlight will be turned on athletics and swimming. Swimming have been set a lower target this time around, 41 as opposed to 52 medals won four years ago. The opposite is the case for Athletics who are expected by UK Sport to win 13 more medals than their Athens achievement of 17. They are hoping stars like David Weir can become multi-medallists and returning champions such as Danny Crates can repeat their Athens success. In swimming, David Roberts will be hoping to add to his tally of gold medals and beat Tanni Grey-Thompson’s record of 11 gold medals. The pressure, however, will be on all 206 athletes competing in 18 sports to deliver. Public interest and expectation will again be high with London 2012 on the horizon; a challenge for the team and for the BBC.

Following the successes of our Olympic coverage, our aim across all of the BBC’s output must be to put in a ‘Team BBC’ performance that does full justice to those of the athletes. We aim to feature the achievements of Paralympics GB and many of the other performances by the world’s top Paralympians; athletes such as South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius and swimmer Natalie Du Toit. Three distinguished former Paralympians join the BBC team for the Games - 11 time Paralympic Gold medallist Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, wheelchair basketball bronze medallist Ade Adepitan and swimmer Marc Woods along with familiar faces and voices such as Clare Balding, Steve Cram, Paul Dickenson, Eddie Butler, Nick Mullins and Bob Ballard.

BBC television coverage will be more extensive than ever before with six hours a day of live coverage, starting at 1000 BST, being streamed on the red button and broadband each weekday with a one hour highlights show on BBC Two at 1900 each night. At weekends, the coverage starts on the red button/broadband and then switches to BBC One or Two for the afternoon. All BBC One and Two output will also be simultaneously shown on the BBC High Definition channel. Both the Opening and Closing ceremonies will be broadcast live including the London handover moment on the final day.

BBC Radio 5 Live will also have a dedicated team in Beijing to provide news and commentary throughout the Games with the BBC’s award winning Disability Sport (currently renamed Paralympics) website providing news, features and blogs alongside live streaming. There are also teams from News and Nations & Regions providing specific content for all the BBC local tv and radio stations.

We’re looking forward to a great Games; another terrific sporting spectacle. As always, we’ll endeavour to convey the drama and excitement of world class sporting competition to audiences back home. We make no apologies for it but the BBC is ready to convey ‘Paralympic fever’ to the UK.

There’s a temptation (a very British temptation) when looking at the Beijing medal table to ask how on earth are we going to do better than that in London.

It’s a fair question. This has, after all, been Great Britain’s most successful Olympics since our croquet-inspired domination of the 1908 Games.

What’s not fair, however, is to just give up after asking the question and wait for the inevitable disappointment to arrive. As Henry Ford once said, “If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can’t, you’re right.”

So it is to the British Olympic Association’s credit that it has asked the question and come up with an answer.

Its “Ambition 2012” programme is perhaps the most impressive initiative the often-maligned organisation has undertaken since ignoring Margaret Thatcher’s call to boycott the Moscow Games in 1980.

Adding to our haul of 19 golds, 13 silvers and 15 bronzes will not be easy in London, but by giving 152 young hopefuls and their coaches a taste of the Olympics here, the BOA has made it that bit easier.

Speak to any Olympian, past or present, and they will tell you the same thing: the size and scale of the Games blow you away at first and how you deal with that can determine your entire Olympic experience - any way of diminishing that jolt to the system can only help.

The anecdotal evidence is supported by BOA research - 70% of Team GB’s gold medallists have competed at an Olympics before, 55% of our total medallists have already experienced an Olympics.

The BOA has often been criticised in the past for being little more than a glorified travel agent, so it is ironic that Ambition 2012 is the best summer holiday our next crop of Chris Hoys and Rebecca Adlingtons could ever hope for.

The 127 athletes and 25 coaches - representing 33 of the 38 Olympic disciplines - have made the trip east in five waves, each spending a week visiting Team GB’s holding camp in Macau, touring the Olympic Village in Beijing and watching the sports they hope to compete in come 2012.

Craig Hunter, the project’s manager, said the idea was hatched soon after London won the bid in 2005 and is proud to be associated with a scheme that has already attracted “why didn’t we think of that?” glances from other countries, the United States in particular.

“We think it’s a superb opportunity for the athletes and will enhance our medal potential in 2012,” said Hunter.

“One of the greatest experiences we could give them was a trip to the Olympic Village. With 16,500 living in there and a dining area that seats 5,000 it can be fairly daunting for a lot of young athletes.”

Integral to the programme has been the involvement of former Olympians as mentors. One of those is Denise Lewis, who earned a bronze in the heptathlon in Atlanta in 1996 before striking gold in Sydney four years later.

“I became involved because of my own Olympic experience,” said Lewis. “I remember what it was like for my first Olympics - I was completely terrified and quite overwhelmed.

“Luckily I did OK in Atlanta but if I can impart some of my knowledge or offer any advice to these young athletes then I think it’s a job well done.

“You need to almost demystify the Olympics. You need to treat it as just another competition. These guys are good enough - there are some athletes here (on the programme) who were painfully close to making the team.

“If you can allow them to see what it’s like so they are not completely blown away by the experience then hopefully they’ll be the best prepared athletes going into the London Games.”

One of those athletes painfully close to getting a ticket to the main gig was Perri Shakes-Drayton: some might say the 19-year-old was painfully unlucky not to get the nod.

But Shakes-Drayton, the top-ranked 400m hurdler in her age group at the 2006 World Juniors, isn’t the type to dwell on what might have been - she is too busy looking forward to what promises to be a glittering career in a GB vest.

“Getting the chance to come here and experience the atmosphere was amazing,” said Shakes-Drayton, who attended the athletics the night fellow east Londoner Phillips Idowu went so close to triple jump gold.

“I was looking at the track and thinking what it would be like to be down there with all those people in the stands looking at me. I tried to imagine what it would it be like if they were all there to see me.”

She should get the chance to experience that for real in 2012. Born and raised in Poplar, she won’t be short of encouragement in Stratford.

But Shakes-Drayton, who won silver at the European Juniors last year, is an old hand at this big stage stuff compared to others on the trip. She has been mixing with some of her sport’s biggest names for a while and seemed to be taking the entire Beijing experience in her leggy stride.

Where the programme could and should pay real dividends is with the likes of taekwondo player Jordan Gayle. A silver medallist at the Youth Olympics in Sydney last year, the 16-year-old Mancunian has been in superb form on the European circuit this year. But an Olympics is a very different proposition, isn’t it?

“I think the best thing about coming here is that I’ve now seen for myself that the Olympics are just another tournament,” said Gayle, with all the cool a teenage martial artist can muster.

Consider the Olympics demystified, Denise. I don’t think Jordan will be tiring himself out chasing autographs in London either. He was far more impressed with seeing three taekwondo players I had never heard of than his encounter with Asafa Powell in the queue for lunch.

Open water swimmer Daniel Fogg was another to impress me with his infectious enthusiasm for what he does and his belief that he belongs here.

“Despite sitting in the rain for two hours [at Thursday's open water race] I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else,” said Fogg. “It was brilliant to watch the best athletes in the world and it just filled me with a load of emotions that I want to be there next time.”

Like Shakes-Drayton, the 20-year-old Loughborough student was probably unlucky to miss out this time. His time will come, though, as I hope it will for all those who made this Olympic recce.

Of course, four years is a long time and a few who came to Beijing will not get the chance to experience Village life for real in London.

But those who do make it will be better off for the taste they got here, and those who don’t have an amazing story to tell their mates when they’re asked “What did you do for your summer holidays?”

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.