Olympic ‘best is yet to come’ from Team GB, says talent head Warr

Team GB won only one gold medal at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta to finish 36th in the rankings. Four years later, in Sydney, the team won 11 golds to climb to 10th and in Athens nine golds were claimed, a haul that maintained their top-10 status.

But the major breakthrough came in Beijing, where the team secured 19 gold medals, external and surged past Australia, France and Germany to claim that surprise fourth-place finish.

Warr admits the battle for medals will be keenly contested in London, particularly behind the three big powers of China, the US and Russia, but says Team GB’s upward momentum should continue.

“We’ve gone from an era where we had a few plucky individuals who managed to climb their way to the pinnacle of their sport to a far more robust, more systematic, more sophisticated way of finding individuals who can win,” the Loughborough-based sports scientist said.

Warr acknowledges that some of the thinking behind this approach has been borrowed from abroad but British Olympic chiefs have also looked to the arts, business and science for inspiration. Recent workshops, for example, have been with organisations as diverse as the European Space Agency and consumer electronics giant Sony.

“We can learn from any walk of life where performance really matters,” she added.