The making of British Olympic success

The Talent Lab: The Secret to Finding, Creating and Sustaining Success. By Owen Slot with Simon Timson and Chelsea Warr. Ebury Press; 304 pages; £20.

IT SEEMS hardly an auspicious time to release a book on Britain’s Olympic success. Numerous scandals—accusations of bullying, sexism and failure to keep proper records of drugs—are engulfing British Cycling, a symbol of national glory. Yet the transformation of Britain’s performance in the Olympics remains a remarkable tale. In 1996, Britain’s “team of shame” came 36th in the medal table, below Algeria, Ireland and North Korea. At the London games of 2012, Team GB (as the United Kingdom’s squad is officially known) won 65 medals, up from 15 in 1996. Britain performed even better in Rio last year, winning 27 golds and 67 medals in all, finishing second, above China, in the overall medal table, defying the trend of host nations’ sliding down the tables in the following games.

These hauls have been a triumph for detailed and ambitious planning, as Owen Slot, a sports writer for the Times, explains in an engaging book. Huge spikes in cash have helped. Across Olympic and Paralympic sports, UK Sport, Britain’s funding body, spent £69m ($89m) on Sydney 2000 but almost £350m on Rio 2016. Yet cash alone cannot explain all of Team GB’s success: for the 2012 games, South Korea and Japan spent over three times more than Britain and had worse returns.

UK Sport adopts the mindset of an investor seeking the best returns wherever they can be found. The model has been unashamedly ruthless, concentrating on disciplines with the best medal prospects while ditching also-rans. Even among the sports that do receive funding, cash is diverted to a tiny coterie of elite athletes: the £21m allocated to swimming before Rio was focused on nine “Golden Children”. Before Rio 2016, Liam Tancock, Britain’s best male swimmer of recent times, lost his funding largely because he would turn 31 before the games—past his prime.

Mr Slot’s attention to detail turns up some fascinating facts. East German-style national talent-scouting programmes were created, producing Olympic medallists from those who had never previously played the sport—in the process debunking a widespread notion that 10,000 hours are needed to achieve excellence in a skill. Coaches were hooked up to heart-rate-variance monitors, to understand how to manage their stress levels better, and Team GB’s managers analysed the optimal way to coach athletes of different sexes. Teams engaged parents about the best techniques for nurturing high-performance athletes. The British Olympic Association made its first reconnaissance mission to Brazil, to find ideal hotels and training facilities, six years before Rio 2016.

UK Sport has borrowed from a wide array of fields in pursuit of an edge. Music schools and military special forces were asked for advice on spotting talent and performing under pressure, and an expert in turning around flagging businesses, borrowed from a private-equity firm, helped improve British shooting’s meagre performance. Mr Slot’s book is written in conjunction with Simon Timson and Chelsea Warr, two of Team GB’s directors of performance, who contribute a brief summary of lessons after each chapter. Their input is double-edged: it ensures that the book provides an unrivalled look inside UK Sport’s medal-factory, but may also keep Mr Slot from tackling some subjects with complete independence.

The increased investment in the Olympics and the subsequent bonanza of medals, may have given Britain a reason to hold its head high. But success for the elite has come at a time of falling sports participation in Britain, with the decline greatest among the poor. For all the successes, the question lurking beneath this book is an uncomfortable one. In an era of austerity and impoverished grassroots sport, has the price of these medals been too great?