At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Great Britain ranked thirty-sixth in the
medals table, finishing below countries like Algeria, Belgium and
Kazakhstan. It was their worst ever record, a dismal performance
labelled a national disgrace. But then something happened. In Sydney in
2000 and then Athens in 2004, Team GB achieved a much more respectable
tenth place. By 2016, in Rio, they finished second, above China and
Russia, with sixty-seven medals. How have they so convincingly reversed
their fortunes?
In Game Changers we meet the coaches and sports scientists who rethink
how sport is analysed and understood, how athletes train and perform
under pressure. In Liverpool in the 1980s, a motley group - a
mathematician, a physiologist, a psychologist and a former Olympic
basketball player - began to pioneer new ways of tracking performance.
Over the decades that followed, performance analysis came of age,
becoming an essential component of any elite team, from NBA champions
Golden State Warriors to English Premier League title contenders
Manchester City to America's Cup high-performance sailing teams.
Using a hybrid of scientific method and trial-and-error, scientists have
uncovered the tenets of accelerated learning, the mechanics of
physiological adaptation, the organisational principles behind elite
teams, the understanding of how hormones and environment affect
performance. These discoveries are not confined to athletic endeavours -
they are universal and reveal what it takes to win not only in sports,
but are applicable across a wide range of disciplines, including
business, leadership and education.
