Sir, Important as Team GB’s Olympic achievements at the Games have been for both individual and national celebrations they will also be remembered as returns for imaginative national sports training policies. They could also be incentives for revisions of such policies.

For every Olympian, even for those who received no medals at all, there must be hundreds who have dedicated themselves and worked diligently towards sporting excellence and possible selection for their national teams.

Like the Olympians, they would also have made healthy lifestyle choices — regarding diets, smoking, adequate exercise; rejected gang life and drugs; laid foundations for mentally and physically healthy adult lives. Although it will never appear in health statistics, the contribution of healthy lifestyles developed in youth to the prevention of disorders such as lung cancer, strokes and heart attacks in later life must be enormous.

There can be no more rewarding opportunities for national investment in population health and social welfare than the provision of community facilities to enable young people, the most important stakeholders in national development strategies, to train and compete harmoniously, to contribute to the attainment of national aspirations and to their own development as human beings. Such action by the host country would be a fititng curtain raiser for the 2012 Olympiad and a model for adoption by the countries competing in it.

Professor Sir Kenneth Stuart
Former Commonwealth medical adviser, Cobham, Surrey

Sir, Team GB of course deserve the accolades of recent days for their tremendous efforts and achievements in Beijing, but my wife and I have been very disappointed that no mention seems to have been made of the Paralympic Games that commence in Beijing on September 5.

Surely these athletes deserve an encouraging mention by the British media?

Dr Peter Boshier
Great Dunmow, Essex

Sir, Your front page article “Team GB coaches may quit in funding dispute” (Aug 25) puzzles me. Unless I have missed something, none of the medals so magnificently gained by members of Team GB in Beijing was won by the efforts of a coach but by the world-beating excellence of the competitor concerned.

What did the coaches — “top” or otherwise — contribute to success? The chairman of the British Olympic Association is quoted as saying that “a lot of our performance directors have really delivered”. I have always supposed that it is the competitors who deliver, not those in the backroom. Have I got it wrong?

Philip Gough
Heydon, Cambs

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