All I see is gold

My first Olympic memory is sitting in front of a small television, locked-in, watching US sprint legend Michael Johnson secure the historic 200m and 400m double gold at Atlanta 1996 while wearing his iconic golden spikes.

I don’t know what it was that drew me in.

Was it his unique, almost action-hero-like running style? His laser focus? His healthy disrespect for what people said was impossible? Or maybe it was just the gold shoes?

The influence of Atlanta'96

The 1996 Games were a major catalyst for my personal journey through sport, and it was also the catalyst for the transformation of the British high-performance sport system for a very different reason.

Atlanta saw Great Britain's worst performance at a summer Games since 1952, finishing 36th in the medal table with a single gold medal.

But as a nine-year-old, I couldn’t care less about the medal table. I just saw a man do the impossible in golden shoes!

Since then, the Olympics have always been special to me and at this year’s Paris 2024 Olympic Games I had the privilege of being on the leadership squad for Team GB’s Olympic preparation camp in Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

My role was to lead on all things technical-training across our sport venues, working with team leaders, coaches, athletes and city partners to ensure that all the athletes representing Team GB had the best possible training block before heading onto the village to compete.

Building into the future

Lots has changed for me since Atlanta 1996 but funnily enough, it’s still not Great Britain’s position in the medal table that drives me.

In my opinion, if you work in sport – to quote Manchester United football legend Roy Keane –  when it comes to winning or the relentless pursuit of victory, “that’s your job”.

Medals and world records may come or not, after all there are many factors you cannot control, so it’s the pursuit (not the outcome) that you should focus on.

Having worked with Team GB over the last twelve months towards Paris, when it comes to the ‘pursuit’ all I saw was gold (like the shoes, not the medals).
 

The leadership, the athletes, the coaching, the environments, the behaviours... the complete process has been unique, laser-focussed and with a healthy disrespect for what people say is impossible.

The outcome is a testament to a finely tuned sporting system that many great people have built over the last 30 years and that many great people will continue to build into the future.

And what is Sport England doing to ensure the future is brighter than the present?

Within the talent and performance team here at Sport England, there are two objectives that guide everything we do – to achieve progression and greater inclusion.

Progression by producing higher quality athletes at every stage of the pathway and greater inclusion because pathways should be accessible to everyone with the potential to succeed at the highest level.

Of course, these two concepts are inextricably linked – quite simply, a pathway must be diverse to produce the highest quality athletes.
 

These objectives must also be considered alongside the fact that, as a nation, we are increasingly reliant on Olympic debutants to win medals: 14% in Sydney 2000 up to 32% in Tokyo 2020.

This trend also extends to Paralympic sport: 31% in Sydney 2000 up to 59% in Tokyo 2020.

Therefore, we need to be doing everything we can to ensure that debutants attending an Olympic or Paralympic Games are as prepared as possible for their first Games.

The School Games National Finals 

This is one of the reasons why Sport England recently invested £2.8 million in the upcoming School Games National Finals – one of very few multi-sport competition experiences that developing athletes will have before attending their first Olympic or Paralympic Games.

Fun fact – 118 of the Olympic athletes that competed in Paris this summer also competed at the School Games National Finals when they were youngsters. They achieved a total of 7 gold, 8 silver and 16 bronze medals for Team GB.

The 2024 School Games National Finals start today at Loughborough University and run until Sunday, 1 September.

For the last 12 months we have been working closely with our delivery partner, the Youth Sport Trust, to redesign the event to ensure it supports our ambitions across both progression and inclusion.

A series of innovations aim to help these goals:

• a holistic enrichment programme designed to support the development of attendees as people, athletes and performers
• deeper selection pools to ensure more young athletes from diverse backgrounds can benefit from this great developmental experience
• for the first time, Obstacle Course Racing will be on the competition programme for Modern Pentathlon and all athletes attending the event will be given the opportunity to engage in an Obstacle Course Experience. This opportunity will offer sports a mechanism beyond their individual technical events and existing profiling techniques to explore the inter-relationship of performance and potential
• an ambitious qualitative research programme – ‘The Aspiring Athlete Innovators' – has been developed to understand who the aspiring athlete is today so that we can better design experiences, environments and talent pathways that ensure they thrive not only as athletes and performers, but also as people (spoiler alert, my next blog will probably be sharing what we find out).

I’d like to finish this piece by shouting out everybody that made the Team GB prep camp what it was this summer… there are too many to list but you know who you are. Legends.

With the Paralympic Games underway, this Paris chapter will soon come to an end but for the athletes competing at the School Games National Finals this week, the pursuit has only just begun and I’ll be there, looking for gold (like the shoes, not the medals).