Our tally of 29 golds, 17 silver and 19 bronze made impressive reading come the end of the games as we sat proudly in third place in the overall medal table.
Over a quarter of our first places were down to one team in particular, our cyclists, as they repeated what they had achieved in Beijing 4 years before even though their own governing body had tried to prevent such an occurrence from happening again. It didn't matter that any number of events had been changed and only one rider per country had been allowed to enter each competition the result had been the same. So what in particular had secured the ongoing success of this particular group of people.
Well like Lord Sebastian Coe did for the entire London 2012 games, Dave Brailsford, the performance director of British Cycling, did for his own sport too. He held a long term vision and purpose for the team, that had been initiated at least 16 years previously. He had a clearly defined goal and a detailed plan in order to carry it out. A common vision and purpose that all of his athletes, coaches and associates had bought into because it suited their own vision and purpose for their own lives too. The purpose was to become the best cycling team ever, the vision to win as many gold medals and trophies as possible.
It required commitment and talent, Dave says himself that 'you can't have one with out the other' and this had to be initiated from the grass roots up within his sport. It needed a collaborative approach, bringing everyone together into one place so kindred spirits could spark off each other and learn from each others training techniques, something that was also advocated by the athletics team this past fortnight in their success too.
It also needed continuous improvement, just 1% in all areas right across the board because all these little 1%'s actually added up to quite a lot at the end of the day when brought back together. These improvements included not only the usual things most people would think of with diet and nutrition, bike improvement and training but cleanliness and sleep also. By improving everyone's hand washing techniques less athletes became ill. By taking everyone's own pillow everywhere each athlete slept better each night and therefore performed better on the day. Having completely round wheels was another factor also ;-).
His research and development team headed off not deeper into the cycling world to find innovative techniques, but other industries searching for what was being seen as a successful within other fields that could be learned upon and adapted for cycling. A holistic approach was adopted to benefit the entire outfit in the ongoing search for improvement.
Just think what would happen if we all improved our carbon footprint by 1% or our own happiness for that matter too, it doesn't sound much does it just 1% but the reality of the matter is that the improvement will actually be a whole lot more.
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