ABSTRACT
As the euphoria following the success in Singapore abated, administrators, performance directors and head coaches across the UK started to wrestle with the additional challenges represented by a home Games. Preparing a team across an Olympic cycle is a multifaceted problem in itself. The award of the Games to London brought great benefit, as we mention later (this is covered in other chapters), but also some additional pitfalls that needed to be addressed. Developing a structure that exploited these benefits, across both the long and short term, whilst countering the pitfalls was the issue from a performance perspective, however, and this is the thrust of this chapter. Accordingly, the chapter is built around consideration of the macro/longer-term to micro/ short-term challenges of preparing a team for the London Games. Particularly at the micro level, these challenges clearly varied from team to team: sailing and swimming presented different issues despite the hydro-similarities! In a similar fashion, the issues also varied across teams on other factors, including: previous records of success (e.g. track cycling versus handball); ‘status’ of the sport in the public perception (e.g. athletics versus air pistol); and the consequent issues of media pressure. The number of journalists ‘assigned’ to the sport also impacts on this pressure. For example, the existence of the British Athletics Writers’ Association ensures a constant background of copy and attention (not always a positive feature), whilst football will always get coverage (e.g. Hassan, 2011). Other sports, by contrast, only seem to experience the media spotlight once a quadrennial, or when particularly good or bad news occurs: it is interesting to note the apparent preference for the latter, at least amongst some sections of the media (as instanced by the media storm around the RFU and World Cup performance, which was raging as this chapter was finalized). This highlights some of the macro issues around preparation, which means that this chapter will stray into political factors even though these are certainly covered more ably and in more depth elsewhere (see Chapter 22, for example). Accordingly, we start and conclude with the macro political picture and how this has impacted on team preparation. In between, we consider the tactics and strategy of team preparation, exploring how this has been modified to meet the particular challenge of London 2012. In all cases the perceptions are our own, although these are informed by personal experience as a performance director (PD), ongoing contact with elite Olympic sport as support practitioners and our work
on the pressures and methodology of culture change, which has been informed by interviews with current and recently retired PDs. We start by reviewing the political climate and how it impacted on the preparation challenge.
