How Elite Athletes Are Made
At the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Great Britain won one gold medal. In the Rio Games in 2016, Britain won 27 gold medals and came second in the medals table – three medals in triathlon from Alistair Brownlee (gold), Jonny Brownlee (silver) and Vicky Holland (bronze) – eclipsed only by the USA. In fact, Britain won more gold medals in Rio than the combined tally from six successive Olympics, 1976 to 1996.
In the recently published book from John Murray Press, The Best: How Elite Athletes Are Made, co-authors Mark Williams and Tim Wigmore include a chapter where they discuss the reasons behind this incredible change of fortune, from the greater investment from Lottery funding to the Sporting Giants programme, which aimed to turn athletes with the right physical characteristics into Olympic winners in handball, rowing or volleyball in 2012. Heather Glover was arguably its highest-profile success story, winning gold with Heather Stanning in the women’s coxless pairs at both the London and Rio Olympics.
Williams and Wigmore hone in on the English Institute of Sport, the sports-science support funded by UK Sport funded once again by the Lottery, whose adoption of technology and multiple metrics ironically took the
