Preparation, Pressure and the Perfect Performance Wales at the Olympics

The Olympic Games come on a grand scale.

So vast, only the biggest need apply.

Olympic budgets are calculated by the billion.

So, too, the television audience.

This is sport subjected to huge pressures,

to protest global in size.

And yet the massive is only a compilation of individuals,

each with a tale.

This is the story of a small land

and our part in the biggest show on Earth.

Paulo Radmilovic knew, Lynn Davies knew, Tanni knew what it was like.

This is all about Welsh winners and non-winners,

seeking perfection on the day fast approaching,

the balance of science and the age-old will to win.

I don't run up the hills in winter thinking,

"Oh, I can't wait to get a bronze," you know.

That's not the mentality of an athlete.

And what happens if, on this day of all days, it goes wrong?

It's not like having a normal job where you can go,

"Ooh, I've got a headache. I'll do it tomorrow."

You've got that moment to get it right.

You know, my heart's going, thinking about it.

It's just, like, you train all year round for one lap.

Nicole Cooke of Great Britain...

And what happens if it goes right?

What may lie beyond the moment of glory?

Nicole Cooke is the Olympic road race champion!

Nicole's become one of these people that most people do in life,

they don't cope with success.

To hit top speed on two legs quickly,

somebody once worked out that it was best to start on all fours.

Somebody in Wales.

It is the beginning of a familiar ritual at the start of sprint events,

the final moments of preparation and stillness

before the explosive start.

It is perhaps less well known that this began here,

in Monmouth.

Before the start of the modern Olympics in 1896,

athletes used to stand before the start of every race.

But then Tom Nicholas of Monmouth Athletic Club

began to experiment with a crouched start.

Tom was a 440-yard runner, a Welsh record-holder for 20 years.

He placed his feet behind the line,

but then reached out with his arms

and as long as his feet were behind the line,

it was within the rules, he said.

Was it fair?

In 1889, the Amateur Athletics Association - the three As -

deliberated long and hard, and voted 6-5 in favour of a change,

and it remains the rule to this day,

one of the tiny adjustments that have helped improve performance

by a fraction of a second. And the change?

You could crouch, but no part of the body

could touch the ground in front of the line before the gun.

The crouch start, made in Monmouthshire,

used the world over by the fastest humans on Earth.

When it comes to finding ways to improve performance,

no sport has done more than cycling, with a strong Welsh connection.

GB team performance director Dave Brailsford,

raised in Deiniolen in North Wales,

GB coach Shane Sutton, an Aussie, but once coach of the Welsh team,

and Geraint Thomas of Cardiff in the four-man team pursuit,

part of the team punching a hole through air scientifically,

beautifully.

The final of the Olympic 4,000m team pursuit gets underway

and this promises to be an absolute cracker.

Away they go.

In anything you do, speed kills off your opponent. We had to get fast.

We look for a 1% improvement in 20, 25 different areas.

That's a really full-on approach and in order to do it properly,

to make it work, you have to work hard at each one of those areas.

So you have to do it all, or nothing, really. And we go for all.

0.7 of a second.

Denmark are trailing already and the business-like start

by the Great Britain quartet is very, very impressive indeed.

What happened in Beijing may have made Geraint - wait for this -

our greatest Olympian ever.

You look at Lynn 'The Leap', Nicole, your Colin Jacksons

and your Ieuan Evanses and you know, you go on...

Your JPRs and you go on and on and on...

I've got to be totally honest with you.

I think our boy surpasses all of them.

He's possibly one of your greatest sportsmen of all time.

This is a display of the highest order.

Masterclass, sheer masterclass.

We all just felt really confident.

Training had gone really well in the month or so before.

We all felt really strong and, all of a sudden,

with three laps to go, we saw the Danes and we knew we had won it then.

3.53.314!

I cannot believe what I'm seeing!

It's an astonishing world record.

The British quartet are the Olympic champions.

Being ready in mind and body,

so you can rise to your occasion.

The whole Olympics is...

It's like nothing else on this planet,

but when you make a final and, dare I say it,

a track and field final, which is always a sell-out crowd,

there's always a great atmosphere, always a lot of pressure, it's amazing.

You don't just turn up and run.

There's a big protocol before you actually step onto the track.

They take away your mobile phones, they check your advertising,

they check your spikes, your kit, that you're wearing the correct...

There's a lot of stuff you have to go through.

You then see your opposition for the first time.

That's when the mind games start playing.

I'll try and get inside the head of the opposition.

I'll be staring at the Americans. You'd start eyeballing them.

It's at that stage when, you know,

you're literally getting your kit off,

you're getting ready, then you walk onto the track and that's it.

You're on your blocks, you're ready to go.

I just remember my body, of how it felt. It felt like a race car.

It was alert, alive, ready, you know.

Millions and millions of people watching it on TV,

most probably a quarter of the world, watching you.

You've made it there. The nerves, the atmosphere. I can even smell Atlanta.

If I close my eyes, I can remember the feeling.

You know, my heart's going, thinking about it.

It's just, like, you train all year round for one lap, for 44 seconds.

It's everything. That one lap is what you train for and if it goes right, it's brilliant.

If it goes wrong, in the relay you've let yourself down,

you let your teammates down. You've let the nation down.

The final of the 4x400 metre relay, 1996.

The first lap always difficult

and Thomas has gone blasting away.

He's run right away from the American, Lamont Smith, already.

He's really tearing away down the back straight.

We decided I would go first leg

and then it was going to be to Jamie on second,

Mark on third, and Roger Black,

who got silver in the individual, on the last leg.

Thomas has run a very fast 300.

Great Britain and America locked together.

Jamie Baulch goes now.

I remember watching him go round and he had a very good leg.

And then it was my turn.

Quite a funny story, actually, which people don't really realise.

As I was going around that bend in the Olympic final,

Alvin Harrison runs past me, he goes, "Oh, yeah, baby! Oh, yeah!"

He's talking as he's running and I'm looking at him, thinking,

"I can't believe this guy's talking as he's running.

I thought, "You cheeky..." you know.

So with 300 metres to go, I went for him.

I ran past him and went, "Beep-beep," like Road Runner!

I love that moment because it just shows you,

at the highest moment of my career, you can still have fun.

America take gold, Great Britain silver, Jamaica bronze.

As a team, we ran so well. We smashed the European record.

We ran 2.56 which still stands as a European record

and we got a silver medal.

But to be honest, it felt like a gold medal cos the celebrations...

We were so proud.

Second in Atlanta.

But what about going one better in track and field?

Well, David Jacobs from Cardiff won a gold medal in the sprint relay

in the 1912 Stockholm Games.

But for an individual gold,

there's just the one, only one, so far.

And for it, we have to go back to the very first time live pictures

from the Olympics were relayed here by satellite.

15 seconds to go, ten seconds to go,

before we go to our satellite for today's events for Tokyo.

This picture is coming to you from Hamburg

or it's coming from Tokyo via Hamburg, any second now.

It should come up. Please.

There we are.

Japan 1964 - just like home for a long jumper from Nantymoel

at his first Olympic Games.

It was the rainy season, it was late October,

very late for the Olympic Games.

They're normally held in July/August, as they will be in London.

So the conditions weren't very good for athletics.

The winter building up to '64 was one of the coldest, wettest,

windiest ever in Wales, and I think that gave me

a mental toughness, and an ability to compete in real tough conditions.

Lynn 'The Leap' was up against two of the best - American Ralph Boston

and Russian Igor Ter-Ovanesyan.

During the competition, we were struggling.

There were headwinds, the wind was gusting, driving rain.

And I suddenly realised that I could,

if I just managed to wait for the wind to drop,

I could actually jump over eight metres,

and the leading distance at that stage was seven metres 80,

which was quite ordinary.

So I stood on the runway, waited for the wind to drop, sure enough,

a little bit of luck, which you need in the competition, it dropped.

I seized the opportunity.

Makes the board, terrific height, and a wonderful one,

over eight metres again.

And he's looking really excited.

He must know that was a great one.

His fifth jump.

It was unbelievable that I'd beaten my heroes.

These two guys I'd looked up to and now

I was standing there with the gold medal and these two guys I'd beaten.

And at the end of the day, this is what the Olympic final is all about.

It's about the person who can recognise the opportunity

when it is arises, expect the unexpected,

and seize that opportunity when it arises.

And that's what I did.

Winning that gold medal does make a huge difference to your life.

You become a celebrity and somebody that all around the UK

knows who you are.

If Lynn Davies had seized his moment on the day,

is it different when you go to the Olympics as, day in, day out, the best?

Is it different when your event is the most technical but you only have the one chance?

Colin Jackson from Cardiff.

His first Olympics were in Seoul 1988.

He was 21 and already the fourth fastest

110 metre hurdler of all time.

I'm a fairly good competitor.

I've got quite a solid technique and I'm fairly quick, so...

His first Olympics, his first final.

Blake got away well that time.

It looked very early.

Jackson going well in lane one.

Kingdom in the centre,

Jackson fading a little,

as Kingdom come through.

Kingdom will it,

Jackson will get silver.

Kingdom wins it, Jackson second

and Campbell in third.

12.99 and Colin Jackson's got the silver.

Did you think that you could beat Kingdom?

Most definitely. I went in going for gold and I'm coming home with silver.

I'm not too disappointed as I put a lot of good guys behind me.

He hasn't stopped smiling since he walked into this stadium.

It was a really great feeling.

It really set up my career. It started me with great promise

and I was looking forward to the prospect of four years to come.

Two years later,

he became champion of the Commonwealth,

Now he was ready for Barcelona.

Tony Jarrett up with him in second place,

and then Nigel Walker...

I was in immaculate shape.

Preparations were absolutely awesome and I was ready to go.

1992 - it started to go wrong in the heats and he was in pain now.

I struggled even getting into the blocks.

The final of the 110 metres hurdles.

Jackson got away well, so did McKoy.

Jackson going well, McKoy leading.

Jackson going well and Dees going well.

And Colin's struggling now, he's gone.

McKoy leading at the moment, Mark McKoy of Canada.

McKoy wins it, he's the Olympic champion.

I think Dees got silver. Jackson run right out of it.

And McKoy has realised his dream.

And, Colin Jackson, well, when it really came to it,

hadn't quite got it.

It was really awful because I'd worked really hard

to become the Olympic champion

and then my training partner seemed to just take it from under me.

But that's the nature of the beast.

That's life, that's what happens in sport.

It took a very long time for me to get over it, really.

But he did get over it.

The 1993 World Championships in Stuttgart.

And it's Jackson going away!

Two to go.

Jackson takes it, Jarrett gets the silver.

12.91, a world record

that would stand for 12 years.

Seville, 1999 - the World Championships again.

Colin Jackson is the champion of the world!

The only one he's not won yet is the Olympic gold.

He came fourth in Atlanta in 1996.

In 2000, he became the only Welsh athlete

to compete in four consecutive Olympic Games.

Sydney - his last chance to win that elusive gold.

I won the world title the year before and I was looking forward

to going into the Olympic Games and winning it.

Away this time and Colin got away well, so did Garcia.

Garcia slightly ahead now,

Johnson making some headway in the centre.

Colin's hit some hurdles and is floundering.

Garcia comes away and Colin won't win this one.

Garcia of Cuba comes through to take it,

Trammell gets the silver

and Jackson was closing down in the final stages.

There's nothing you can do now, is there?

It's just over and how do you feel?

Yeah, obviously, I'm very disappointed with the actual performance.

I made many mistakes during the race

and basically paid the penalty for that.

Looks like I'm the World Championship man but not the Olympic man.

Colin Jackson - one silver that never turned to gold.

Here's a question - which is worse, to get to silver and no further,

or to touch gold and have it taken away, down to silver?

For that, we have to go back to Wembley 1948.

Ken Jones was a member of the sprint relay team at the London Games.

The American team finished first but were disqualified.

Britain were upgraded from second to first,

only for the Americans to appeal, successfully.

Ken and his team-mates had to hand their gold medals back in,

and settle for silver.

There was consolation, though, on the wing for Wales.

In 1953, he scored the try when last we beat the All Blacks.

Ken Jones collects and sprints over, touching down on the way.

This cruel business of performing under pressure.

The Helsinki Games of 1952, and John Disley, born and raised

among the high peaks of Snowdonia.

12 men line up for the steeplechase,

almost two miles long, and lots of obstacles to jump.

Britain's big hope, schoolmaster John Disley,

is lying fourth, number 194, all in white.

Can you remember the race?

Very well.

I'd made up my mind that a German was going to win, called Gouda.

I didn't know he'd had flu four weeks before.

And so I followed him for half the race.

Gouda with flu was the wrong man to follow.

Up ahead, the Cold War superpowers were setting the pace.

Kazantsev and Ashenfelter are almost level.

The American, an FBI agent, has been trailing the Russian all along

and the race lies between them.

Disley, up in third place,

is too far behind to make any difference to the outcome.

Jeff Dyson, my coach,

got himself down from the Royal boxes, or wherever he was,

down to the edge of the track and shouted at me to "wake bloody up!"

He did wake up and finished third.

Though British fans were naturally disappointed that Disley gained only a bronze medal,

it was still a great achievement by one who only took up steeplechasing two years ago.

The last day of competition at the Helsinki Games.

Britain still hadn't won a single gold in any sport,

and it looked as if it was going to stay that way.

The first round of the team show jumping.

Sir Harry Llewellyn,

whose family had once owned coal mines in South Wales,

was on board - or nearly on board - his beloved Foxhunter.

16 and three-quarter faults. It was all over.

Unless...

That was an extraordinary event

because it all depended on the second round.

Harry and Foxhunter shook themselves off and set out again.

They seized their one last chance,

used all the pressure to their advantage and sailed clear.

From wreckage to perfection, from fifth to first.

And he's done it!

It's our first gold medal at Helsinki,

won as the curtain is about to be run down on the 1952 Olympics.

You can't imagine the feeling of...

I mean, you know, whenever we succeed now at cricket or anything,

you can imagine...

how wonderful it makes so many people feel,

so proud of their country, all this, that and the other.

No, it must have been absolutely amazing.

What happens if, in your event,

you are up against the best in the world, the best by a mile,

that however fast you run, somebody else can run faster?

Or if you suddenly know you cannot win because, out of the blue,

somebody else does something truly remarkable?

Ooh, it's an enormous one! My goodness me, it's an enormous one!

That surely shatters the Olympic record.

1968 - after Bob Beamon's flight through the thin air of Mexico City,

the defending Olympic champion Lynn Davies knew he could not win.

When Beamon jumped, there was a huge roar from the crowd

who were watching, so we knew that something spectacular had happened.

Good gracious me! He was up in the air for an age, it seemed.

An incredible opening leap by Beamon.

The Mexican officials had slid the telescopic viewing device

to the end of the rail and lined it up with the pin in the sand.

And of course, he had out-jumped the Olympic measuring device,

so they had to bring a steel tape over.

And we looked down at the steel tape

and eight metres 90 came up on the steel tape.

He had broken the world record by a massive 55 centimetres.

Lynn was now chasing the impossible.

In the final, his best jump was almost a metre behind the American.

He finished in ninth place.

When Beamon went down and did 29.2.

As far as I was concerned, I lost interest in the competition.

If I can't win, I'm not interested.

It may be a selfish attitude

but if I'm not in there with a chance of winning, you know...

A silver and bronze didn't mean anything after that.

Other Welsh athletes

have had to be realistic about their medal prospects.

In Atlanta 1996, Michael Johnson was king at not only the 200 metres,

but also the 400 metres.

And Iwan Thomas breaking through at this level.

Gets them away first time,

flashbulbs going all over the stadium.

Black is chasing Johnson and he's closing slightly,

but Johnson responds.

Johnson going away down the back straight.

Iwan Thomas with a big run on the outside.

The guy was amazing.

I once found myself being in awe of him during a race.

And it's Johnson.

Black now goes into second place,

Harrison on the inside

and on the near side, Thomas.

I went round the top bend and was near him, and remember looking at him, thinking,

"Yeah, his running style is weird but, God, don't he look good!"

And then before I knew it, he'd gone.

By watching him, I'd not concentrated.

I think I came seventh in that race,

because I was watching Michael Johnson thinking, "You're amazing."

Johnson away and clear.

The time - 43.49, a new Olympic record.

12 years later,

Newport's Christian Malcolm found himself up against

another wonder runner of the day.

At the last Games in Beijing,

he made the 200 metre final, up against Jamaica's Usain Bolt.

Bolt in the 100 and the 200

was taking athletics into a new universe.

It's gold for Usain Bolt and a new world record!

I do not believe it. Absolutely brilliant.

I remember crossing the finishing line and looking at Kim Collins.

He looked at me and he just went...

It was just a surreal moment, cos I looked at the clock and I said,

"19.30?" I thought, "Nah, clock's wrong.

"That's not right. That is not right."

But when you see Bolt just run off

to the background, you hear the crowd announcer, the crowd going crazy...

Usain Bolt has taken two gold medals and two world records.

..everything seems to hit home then

and you start to realise that history's been made.

Usain Bolt - two gold medals and two world records.

The process of winning.

Form, fitness, illness, your mood on the day, the weather, luck.

If there is a common factor, it is simply the will to win.

For what? For the moment? Because it'll change your life forever?

Is winning everything it's supposed to be?

And what do you do after it?

For six years as a professional rider, Nicole Cooke went uphill,

down her home Vale of Glamorgan to be among the very best

road race cyclists in the world.

She had been world junior champion,

Commonwealth Games champion in 2002.

She knows she's got the gap.

She's going to win the gold medal for Wales, no doubt about it now.

This was her first year as a professional.

She went to her first Olympics in 2004 in Athens...

..and everything was going well.

So, Nicole Cooke, as they approach the summit of the climb,

is beginning to lift the pace here.

But then...that's Nicole not making the right turn.

She would finish in fifth place.

Can Cooke get on terms?

And the answer is, no, she can't.

Oh, on the line!

Disappointment in Athens, but everything was leading to Beijing,

her year of years, 2008.

200 metres to go.

Nicole Cooke of Great Britain, the 25-year-old from Wales,

is looking here to land the gold medal.

And it's Johannson of Sweden that's challenging.

Cooke is still at the front.

Oh, Cooke takes it!

Nicole Cooke is the Olympic road race champion. The gold medal is hers.

I thought she was going to buckle but she's won it.

The first Welsh woman to win an Olympic gold for 96 years.

Fame and celebration, and since then...not so much.

Nicole's become one of these people,

they don't cope with success.

You know, in our sport or whatever sport, or whatever you do,

if you get beat, what do you do?

You get up the next morning, you start training again,

and you change, because you know you have to change.

But you train and you change.

When you win, most people, they can't cope with success.

You know, there were so many steps along the way where

you could look at any little phase of my career and say

I could have done that better,

but who was there to advise me?

No-one had ever done it before.

No other British rider had become world number one.

No other British rider had won a World Cup.

No other British rider had won the Tour de France.

No other British rider won the Giro d'Italia.

And no other British rider had become Olympic champion,

world number one, so, you know...

If there was a book written on how to do that...

Well, I would have been very happy to have it, but there wasn't a book,

so I had to do the best I could and, yeah, it's part of the journey.

Nicole has made the road race team for London.

Is she a contender again?

We shall see.

This man is.

Dai Greene from Llanelli.

He has to handle the pressure of going into the London Games as the favourite.

The reigning world champion in the 400 metres hurdles.

Dai Green's in third place, second,

he goes up, it's down to the sprint.

-Can Greene get there?

-Yes, yes, yes!

Culson versus Greene. Greene gets there!

It is a gold medal for Great Britain.

It's a gold medal for Dai Greene.

He has produced a quite wonderful run.

He'll go into London having been world champion,

so he's one of the favourites to win.

The great thing is he can handle that.

Of all the athletes in London who can handle that kind of, you know,

"You should be winning this, Dai,"

he is the guy who, I think, can cope with that label of being a strong favourite.

We've been here before.

It's these hurdles, so technical.

They can trip up the best.

It's difficult to be at the top of your game every day,

and you have to be at the top of your game once, one day

in every four years for the Olympics, so that just shows how hard it is.

And if someone as good as Colin Jackson,

who dominated the event for so long, can pick up a silver,

then that shows how difficult it is to get a gold.

The Olympic final is one moment in time.

It's not like having a normal job where you can go,

"Ooh, I've got a headache. I'll do it tomorrow."

You've got that moment to get it right.

All through the year when you're training really hard, you think,

"It's the Olympics. It's going to be so big, the biggest competition ever.

"I can't wait for it." Then about two weeks out, you think,

"Just another race," because you don't want to lose sleep

that this could be the defining moment of your career.

It will undoubtedly be the biggest race in my career.

It's great for motivating the months beforehand,

but once we get close to it, I'll just be thinking,

"It's 400 metres, its ten hurdles, it's that basic,"

and that's what you have to think of.

And we'll be thinking of you, Dai,

all of you who are about to compete in London 2012,

grappling with the tiniest of margins,

and the heaviest of sporting pressures,

in the name of producing

the performance of a lifetime at the Olympic Games,

all of you, who are the story

of our small land at the biggest show on Earth.

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