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Hockey: England learning to expect success
Two years ago, Britain's men's hockey team faced a win-or-bust Olympic qualifying tournament in Chile. Fail to win the tournament and Britain would miss Beijing 2008 altogether. They would most likely lose a hefty chunk of funding, too. Head coach Jason Lee admitted the situation was "as pressured as it can be".
A remarkable change has since occurred. Britain beat India to reach Beijing, finishing fifth at the Games, and the England team (which forms the vast majority of the GB squad) went on to stun their rivals by lifting the 2009 EuroHockey Nations title. They came from behind to beat Germany, the current world and Olympic champions, in the final.
Now, England are through to the last four of the World Cup for the first time since 1986, and are once again pitted against the Germans. After years - if not decades - in hockey's doldrums, even a World Cup semi-final caps a commendable reversal of fortunes.
Lifting the World Cup title is a tantalising prospect this week, but just two years ago it appeared unthinkable.
All smiles for England - it wasn't like that two years ago. Photo: AP
"I remember you," sighs the England (and GB) team's performance director, David Faulkner, when I mention interviewing him at a freezing cold Reading Hockey Club before that all-important Olympic qualifying tournament.
Pressed on reasons for British hockey's perilous state at the time, Faulkner had told me to be patient - the sport needed two four-year Olympic cycles to be "fixed", and Beijing represented the halfway mark, he said. Now, with that in mind, does Faulkner feel vindicated?
"I wouldn't use that word, but we have moved on after Beijing," he says. "The Olympic qualifier in Chile was an experience in itself and, combined with Beijing and the Europeans, that has made this group of players stronger and stronger.
"But we're still in a developing phase. I don't want people to get too carried away. By all means get excited, I like that, but the job is not done yet. Will it ever be finished? I doubt it."
It hasn't all been plain sailing since Beijing. England finished last in December's Champions Trophy - admittedly a tournament involving the world's top six teams, of which England are ranked sixth, but coming last never looks good.
"Winning the European title was brilliant, then at the Champions Trophy we changed the team around a bit and took a couple of younger guys," explains England captain Barry Middleton - who, at the age of 26, already has well over 100 caps for England, and many more for Great Britain.
"We finished last but we didn't look to peak there, we looked to peak at the World Cup instead.
"One of the problems with world hockey at the minute is it's very busy. It's pretty hard to peak for two tournaments in three or four months, especially during our winter. We always said the Champions Trophy wasn't a true reflection of how good we can be."
Middleton made his international debut in 2003 and has been part of UK hockey's rollercoaster ride ever since. He insists his team always knew they could reach the last four of the World Cup - "nobody really believed us, but we felt we could do it" - and argues, like Faulkner, that the team's upswing can be traced back several years.
"After 2004, things changed a lot. Most of the guys playing now got their first caps then and, over the last couple of years, a lot of the youngsters coming through have been very talented. We have more technical ability than we've ever had before in the squad.
"In the last two years we've been given the freedom to play a different hockey than England teams have played in a long time. Now we play fast, attacking hockey; we want to entertain and put pressure on other teams.
"For the three or four years before that, we looked to contain teams, stay in a game, defend well, and maybe that would get us through. Now we look to attack."
Nor will that change against Germany, according to Middleton, despite their opponents' impressive array of trophies: "Our game plan has been the same for the last two years. We know it inside out, it won't change. As long as we play as well as we can to our game, then we can beat them, so we won't do anything special."
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But while Middleton's focus rightly extends no further than the next game, Faulkner needs to contemplate the two fronts on which he must now sustain hockey's momentum.
The first is the playing staff. The crop of players first brought together in 2004 is reaching a pinnacle at this World Cup, but the team is older than some, and will need replenishing with new talent sooner or later.
England's Under-21 team suffered a disastrous Junior World Cup in Malaysia last year, earning some damning press back in Britain, in which Faulkner was quoted as bemoaning a "void" where young, British talent should be. He says he is still in the process of plugging that gap.
"The oldest player in the German team here is, I think, 26," he tells me. "Their average age is 22. They can do that because they have a system, and our target is to have the same system, but it'll take another two or three years to develop."
Since another two or three years will take us past London 2012, it is correct to assume the England team you watch face Germany on Thursday will closely resemble the British team that will play at a home Olympics in two years' time.
"In men's hockey, if you're not in the current GB group, you'll find it very difficult to break into that," adds Faulkner. "The current lads are making it even more difficult with the performances they're putting in.
"But everybody knows the most successful nations in the world are looking at the next Olympic cycle while in the current cycle, and I've started doing a lot of work on hockey post-2012 already."
That work extends off the pitch, too, because hockey rarely gets an opportunity like this to generate buzz around the sport. Hockey players and supporters mutter darkly about a lack of coverage in Britain, and this competition represents the sport's best chance in years to rectify that.
Faulkner reached the World Cup final in 1986 as a player, then won gold at the Seoul Olympics with Britain two years later, playing alongside the likes of Sean Kerly and Imran Sherwani - names etched into the memories of a generation of British sports fans.
He knows what happens when hockey catches the public eye, and wants the sport to seize the moment this time.
"The big difference between the success in 1986 or 1988 and the success now is that we are prepared for it. What I'm hearing from back home, and reading from articles sent to me, is that there is a lot of consistency with what we saw 20 years ago in terms of coverage back in the UK.
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"I understand Ashley Jackson's goal against India was on the BBC 10 O'Clock News - hockey doesn't do that, and hasn't done for two decades. We want to capitalise on that profile.
"What we have to be clear about is how we make our players household names. Before we came out to India we held a press day, which we've never done before. The sport needs to be geared up - maybe a campaign of 'Are you ready for 2012 hockey?', because we will have a profile we've never had before."
Savvy marketing alone, however, won't cut it. Everyone inside the team knows sustained international results are hockey's only hope of grabbing headlines with any regularity.
"We know it's going to be hard," Middleton admits. "The Spanish have missed out this time and they're ranked third in the world. There will be more and more teams who miss out.
"This squad is only going to be together for two, three, maybe four years from now, and it's going to be hard to consistently do it. The Germans have done it for 15 years, the Australians have done it for 20.
"It's hard to get the system right to produce people who can do this all the time but, once you can do it, it's easier. Hopefully we can at least do it for the next three or four years."
England v Germany in the men's Hockey World Cup semi-finals will be live on the red button from 1235 GMT on Thursday, 11 March. Join me on the BBC Sport website at the same time for our live text commentary of the game.
Still a lot of questions over ‘legacy’
Kate Hoey, the former Sports Minister, caused huge controversy during London's bid for the 2012 Olympics when she claimed Paris deserved the Games more than Britain.
Today, the Labour MP has given an interview to London's Evening Standard which is likely to anger 2012 officials even more.
The big Olympic issue at the moment is legacy; what is going to be left for both Londoners and the rest of the UK when the Olympic party is over.
Hoey has attacked the Government for forgetting the promises made about changing the sporting face of Britain when 2012 made their pitch to the International Olympic Committee in Singapore in 2005. Remember the emotional film about inspiring children worldwide to take up sport.
She even claims that London chairman Lord Coe regrets using the word 'legacy'.
Hoey is quoted by former BBC and Daily Telegraph sports reporter Mihir Bose as saying: "Two years ago I spoke to Seb about legacy. He said, Kate, I wish I had never used word (sic) legacy'."
I'd be surprised if Coe doesn't deny this conversation. The double Olympic champion is always talking about how he wants the Games to change the lives of kids and to provide unprecedented sports facilities for London, which is way behind most cities in the UK.
I'd love to be a fly on the wall when London Mayor Boris Johnson next sits down with Seb Coe on the 2012 board. Hoey is Johnson's sports commissioner who is responsible for helping to deliver 2012 grass roots legacy.
Does she have a point, though?
I always believed Hoey's argument on Paris during the bid was weak. Olympic bidding isn't about who deserves the Games otherwise Paris would have won on determination alone, having bid twice before. The French do have better sports facilities but the Games would not have had the same impact on the French capital as they are already having on London.
But some would say she has a point on legacy. Is it really as joined up as the Government keeps telling us? Are we using the Games enough to inspire kids up and down the country to take up sport? And what about the Olympic Park? Is it really going to be a great legacy for London? We still don't know what will happen to the main stadium.
There are still many questions to be answered.
The 2012 story has to be told warts and all
Here at the BBC we've the simple aim of being the place where the story of London 2012 is told. But we're aware of the traps: one is that we bore everyone senseless by swamping the airwaves and peaking too early, and another is that we under-report and under-cook the biggest UK event in our lifetimes.
There's also a risk of being caricatured as cheerleaders because we have such a stake in Olympic broadcasting, and we're conscious that our project team operates largely among people who are utterly consumed by the Olympic year in prospect - which isn't the case for most of our audiences.
So the trick is to make sure the independent journalism is being done now, and the longer-term programmes are being commissioned, ready for the point when "Olympic world" and "real world" coincide.
The Olympic Stadium nears completion
One of the pleasures in this job is seeing how ideas in this area are already becoming reality.
An example: in the autumn of 2008 I went to a meeting of our Global News teams - the people who run World Service radio, BBC World and our internationally-facing websites - to chat about how the main BBC 2012 project could work with them.
This has a fantastic opportunity in that we're enormously proud of our global broadcasting role and it would be nuts for it not to be a main plank of the BBC Olympic story, but also the pain that the rights restrictions mean it can share very little of the action when the Games themselves get under way.
So what's essential is that they show imagination and ambition in what the wider story means for the UK and for the world.
At that meeting, Tony Phillips mentioned a thought that the Olympic boroughs already have 'the world' living there: local residents in Hackney come from Jamaica and Senegal, from India and Algeria.
This is part of the theme I've touched on before about the incredible diversity of London in general and the East of the city in particular.
So wouldn't it be interesting to follow their story between now and 2012 - to see how an Olympics based on the concept of "the world in one city" tries to deliver what it promised?
Well, that partly-formed thought of 18 months ago is now a series on the BBC World Service. Its website is here and you can listen to the most recent episode here.
You'll see that this is interactive too: you can email some of the people featured in the programme, and the excellent "World Have Your Say" has already been to Hackney to connect global audiences to the place where their greatest athletes will compete in two years' time. It's available as a podcast here.
Meanwhile on television last week, audiences in London could see "The Day The Olympics Come to Town" - unfortunately not available on iPlayer because of rights restrictions - which was an imagining of the way London might operate in 2012. It's the latest sign of the way that BBC London will follow the Olympic story for audiences in the capital.
I should say that these kind of programmes aren't controlled by the 2012 project team.
It's right that the BBC journalists operate independently, and I've often said - both now and previously as director of sport - that my personal role is to let programmes like Newsnight be Newsnight and not to seek to limit our programme-makers' ability to operate freely.
London is well known for its diversity
Indeed, what we're doing as a project team in addition to our core planning function is encouraging creativity around the BBC: helping make connections, liaising with the outside bodies and making sure that there's an attractive range of programmes for all our audiences as Olympic fever grows.
There's another reason too, of course, why there are "Chinese walls" at this stage between the 2012 project and some of our programme-making.
We spend a lot of time with Locog, www.london2012.com and our other key partners, and it wouldn't be right for us to hotfoot it from an external planning meeting to feeding the juiciest morsels to our output teams.
There's nothing new about this in that confidentiality and daily news co-exist on a whole range of issues - and it's the same with some long-form documentaries where exclusive filming access can give you scoops which have to be saved until the scheduled transmission time.
The crucial thing that guides us is public interest: the public interest in London 2012 being planned safely and successfully for the UK and the world, and equally non-negotiable the public interest in asking the awkward questions and holding the decision-makers to account.
It can be a difficult tight-rope to walk, but I can't see any other way of doing it - and if the story is to be told properly it has to be "warts and all".
Family and friends do more than kiss and cry
When we compete, it looks like it's just us. The coaches are on the bank, the family are at home watching TV, the physiotherapists and support staff are waiting in the team tent to patch us up when we get back, and the other rowers are immersed in their own personal campaigns.
It's just me and my crew-mates sitting on the start line, holding our oars, watching for the moment the red light goes out and green comes on.
When we win it's just us standing on the medal rostrum; when we lose it's just us floating in our boats in the finish area, heads in hands.
But of course there's more to it than that. We often talk about the iceberg - we are the tip of the iceberg, the ones who are rowing the strokes and fighting the pain; but for every one athlete, there are literally hundreds of people below.
They're never seen on television but - to misquote John Donne - no athlete is an island: your family, friends and relationships form a rock-solid support network for you to rack up your achievements on top.
What does that really mean, though? What role do these invisible people actually play in the life of an athlete?
At the Beijing Olympics, the whole regatta was very strictly accredited for security reasons so the only area to mix with supporters was in a tent called the "Kiss and Cry Zone". No joke, that's what it was called in the five or so languages that every piece of writing in the Olympics is translated into.
And I found that quite poignant. Everything that my parents, family and friends had done for me through the years in support of my rowing, all the talking and tea-drinking and celebrating or consoling, came down to that tent. They would be there just to have a kiss and cry when it was all over.
The majority of my family live down in Cornwall so I rarely get to see them as for 99% of the time I'm chained to the River Thames. Consequently, I rely very heavily on my friendship group in London.
Most of my mates I've known since we were all at Downing College, Cambridge, and most of them I met through the college boat club when we were all racing college bumps on the Cam. I'm fortunate enough that they all love to come out to various European or Chinese lakes to watch me race - although I'm under no illusions that this is anything more than an excuse for a boozy weekend away.
Annabel (bottom, second from right) and partner Anna Bebington had strong support at the 2009 World Championships in Poland
Being a full-time international athlete is a rather peculiar life. I'm abroad a huge amount of time and spend most of my life in a state of extreme fatigue and pressure.
Therefore, I can't always be a very good friend. People talk about commitment, single-minded focus and determination; but what this translates into a lot of the time is that I just have to be rather selfish. I have to miss birthday parties and weddings; I can't go on communal holidays; I'm rarely available for a spontaneous night out or weekend away.
Hopefully, my friends will remember that I'm only an athlete for eight to 10 years, they won't ask too much of me and will wait for me to be normal again. They won't expect more of me than I can give, and won't demand anything that compromises my unique lifestyle and strange obsession with moving a boat backwards through the water.
Yet having a large group of friends and family who are integral to your pathway to Olympic success also brings its own kind of pressure. It's a fairly frequent lament, that an athlete who fails to achieve a certain result will feel like he or she has "let everyone down".
And I think the increasing levels of expectation that will come from having a home Olympics will add to this. I certainly felt a higher amount of pressure from having so many of my family and friends on the bank in 2006, when the rowing World Championships were in the UK.
My support networks are there for me every day of the year to help me along the road; but when I push out into the lake for the Olympic regatta in July 2012, I'll be on my own and will live and die by what I do on that day.
Britain and Canada look ahead as flame goes out
As a chicken emerged from the pit housing the broken leg of the Olympic cauldron, Vancouver organisers sent a clear message: the 2010 Winter Games have recovered from a faltering start to end on a successful, buoyant note.
The beginning of the closing ceremony saw the fourth strut of the indoor cauldron - which failed to activate as the Games opened, more than two weeks ago - finally lifted into place, in front of the world, with a sense of humour and self-deprecating style.
Closing ceremonies can, by their nature, become sad affairs. They look back at what has gone before, at events so fresh in the mind that it seems too soon for retrospectives. They look ahead to a future so distant, it feels barely relevant.
But what happens next is important for Canada, and for Great Britain - on and off the field of play.
Canada began its closing ceremony by acknowledging a mistake from the opening ceremony
For most of Britain's winter sports athletes, the question is what their target now becomes.
Arguments surrounding funding body UK Sport's three-medal target, and more broadly how that funding is allocated, will rage on elsewhere. But the stated pledge of UK Sport is to invest purely in "athletes and sports who we believe have a genuine opportunity of winning medals".
Only one Briton took that opportunity in Vancouver: Amy Williams. The 27-year-old, who eclipsed skeleton team-mate Shelley Rudman's silver in Turin four years ago, is one of the liveliest and most striking members of the British team. Rudman carried the British flag at the opening ceremony; Williams had the honour at the close.
In October last year, I met her at the British skeleton team's training facility in Bath. To describe it as such makes it sound as though a full track exists, but you will find no breakneck chutes of ice - just a small hill with a metal tray on rails, attached to a bungee cord. I wrote in more detail about it at the time.
Williams bubbled with enthusiasm as we spoke. She is a character: loud, extroverted, immensely approachable and prepared to say what she thinks. She kept her profile low in the run-up to the Games, and maybe that helped her take gold. While Canada's Mellisa Hollingsworth broke under extraordinary pressure as the home favourite, and Rudman struggled to master the track, Williams kept her composure.
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Her challenge is to retain that composure as an Olympic gold medallist - no easy task, as BBC Sport's own previous Olympic winners have explained. When we spoke to her at the side of the Whistler track, moments after her victory, she struggled to grasp how fans at the sidelines knew her name: "I've no idea who they are," she said, staring at her name painted on their stomachs. "They know me, though." Get used to it.
But the British team has wider challenge in identifying reasons for the gap between UK Sport's expectations and the reality, and finding solutions once those reasons come to light.
The Winter Olympic team has four years to close that gap. London's Summer Olympic organisers, however, already face the intense, worldwide scrutiny which accompanies the Games.
They have lessons to draw from Vancouver. Things have gone wrong here - nobody should die competing in any sport and, while the weather cannot be tamed, it can be accommodated. But the Games recovered in a spirited, determined and optimistic fashion, and most of the operation visible to me has been difficult to fault.
The comedic light touch with which Vancouver put the failure of the Olympic cauldron to bed is instructive. Obstacles can be overcome, defeats can be followed by victories. London faces a big challenge to generate the same enthusiasm for the Games as witnessed here from Canadians, but, to reverse one of the British team's slogans, nothing is impossible.
And speaking of Vancouver, what happens next in Canada is a question that fascinates the host nation's media, many of whom were astonished by the outpouring of national pride that accompanied the Games.
Stephen Brunt, sportswriter for the country's Globe and Mail newspaper, summed it up as follows:
"Come Monday morning, come the weeks and months and years after that, who knows if there will even be a hint left behind of what has happened here beyond a short hangover? Whether all of those jerseys and flags and maple leaf hats will gather dust in some closet, like artifacts of a graduation, of a wedding, other signpost moments that are over, and gone."
As a visitor, it is hard to imagine Vancouver without the flags, cowbells and maple leaf regalia. But many Canadians insist they are not in keeping with the country's mindset. Some even worry it makes them "look American", or at least like the Canadian stereotype of their southern neighbours.
It feels as though most people here would love to keep this feeling going - prolong the sensation, hold on to each other having discovered that, actually, everybody feels that way.
Whether it can be sustained in the absence of an Olympic catalyst remains to be seen, though it certainly manifested itself at the closing ceremony. The entire arena rose in applause on several occasions, most notably when commemorating Nodar Kumaritashvili's death, and on chief organiser John Furlong's mention of earlier events in Canada Hockey Place.
With that in so many minds, the closing ceremony felt more like a back-up for the hockey final than anything else. Vancouver's real defining moment, the true crowning of the Games, came with Sidney Crosby's overtime winner to earn his country the men's ice hockey gold medal, putting arch-rivals the United States to the sword.
Maybe if Canada had lost the hockey, the closing ceremony would have helped the nation salvage its day. But every Canadian sat inside BC Place for the ceremony knew the actual party, ongoing for those outside in downtown Vancouver, would begin for them the moment the performances finished. Crosby supplied the Olympic moment, Canadians supplied the Olympic spirit. And that is all you need.