Mission accomplished: How Team GB achieved the ‘miracle of Tokyo’

Adopting a new holistic view, targeting ‘urban’ sports and making porridge is a mix that has paid dividends for athletes

Positive culture

The Team GB chef de mission, Mark England, described the feat of winning 65 medals, 22 of them gold, as “the greatest achievement in British Olympic history. It has been the miracle of Tokyo”.

The success, however, did not come without controversy. A nocompromise approach linked UK Sport funding firmly to medal potential. As the medals steadily rose with each Olympics after Atlanta 1996, the strategy seemed to be paying off.

But after a succession of athlete welfare and bullying scandals across swimming, para-archery, canoeing, cycling, bobsleigh and gymnastics following Rio 2016, UK Sport announced a major shift to remove the perception that it was guided by a “win-at-all-costs” mentality. The organisation announced last year it would be implementing a “holistic view” towards Olympic funding, with positive culture at its core.

The fear from many was that such a soft approach would inevitably lead to a drop in results, but Katherine Grainger, UK Sport chair, yesterday said the medals won in Tokyo were a vindication of the strategy.

“Everyone who works in sport is always immensely troubled and saddened when there are negative stories of athletes, especially anyone having a bad experience in sport, and everyone felt very strongly that it didn’t need to be that way,” she said.

“It was an immense collective effort across all sports, who felt that regardless of results, sport should be a positive environment to be in. Always tough and always challenging, because it’s high performance, but always healthy and supportive.

“People flourish in positive environments. I’m thrilled that we are in a better place now and we haven’t seen any drop-off in performance. If anyone was unconvinced before, hopefully they will be now. I’m very pleased, I’m not surprised. I always felt it was the right thing to do.”

Spreading the medals

One of the criticisms levelled at Team GB in previous Olympics was a belief the organisation had targeted medals in “posh sports” that were not reflective of wider society.

When UK Sport announced its funding structure for the Paris 2024 cycle, Grainger pointed to a desire for “broader diversity and broader engagement”.

While that has resulted in a reduction in funding for traditional sports, greater resources have been allocated to sports deemed more “urban” and relevant to a larger proportion of the population – including climbing, skateboarding and basketball.

The benefits were expected to be seen in Paris but, fortunately for Team GB, a number of unfunded athletes took it upon themselves to exceed expectations in Tokyo.

Emily Campbell’s silver was Britain’s first female weightlifting medal, earned despite no central funding and relying on the financial goodwill of local companies.

BMX cyclists Bethany Shriever and Charlotte Worthington won gold medals having been forced to work other jobs in the build-up to the Games, Shriever as a teaching assistant and Worthington as a chef.

The result was Britain winning medals across 18 sports – more than any other country in Tokyo. Describing the medal winners in new sports as “trailblazers”, Grainger also pointed to the positive impact athletes across many sports were having away from the competitive environment. “They have gone above and beyond their own sport in so many ways,” she said.

“We have got the best role models who speak out on issues very close to their heart: Adam Peaty speaking about mental health, Tom Daley speaking about LGBT issues, Alice Dearing speaking about inclusion and diversity, Hannah Mills working in sustainability. These athletes are incredible examples for all of us.”

Rigorous planning

When the pandemic struck, and ultimately delayed the Games by a year, there was every chance that hard-worked plans would turn to dust. But while many countries either decided or were forced to abandon their pre-olympics preparation camps, Britain reaped the rewards of years of hard work.

The British Olympic Association scouted out its Yokohama camp in 2015 and undertook extensive work on acquiring the site, even asking the British Embassy how best to approach its hosts, and ensuring that athletes engaged in community work whenever they trained at the venues.

When the pandemic hit, such relationships were crucial in ensuring everything continued as planned. “It was a brave decision to retain our footprint in the country, when most of our competitors chose not to,” said England. “That was a high-risk, high-reward strategy.”

The attention to detail could be seen in multiple elements of the Team GB preparation camp, from flying over a British chef to teach the locals how to make porridge, to acquiring the use of a private balcony for direct sunlight acclimatisation and ensuring training equipment was measured in kilos rather than pounds to avoid any accidents caused by incorrect conversion.

Such meticulous planning meant there was little panic when six trackand-field athletes were told they had to isolate in their rooms after being identified as close contacts of a nonteam GB Covid case on the flight over.

The isolated athletes were provided with barbells and weight plates to continue training indoors, and were assigned their own separate areas at the track and gym once they had provided negative PCR tests.

That calmness even extended to four false Covid positives emerging, which Team GB bosses admitted were “heart-in-mouth moments”. The team conducted more than 20,000 Covid tests during the 40 days of the Olympics without one true positive result.

The fear from many was that a softer approach would inevitably lead to a drop in results