Watch Out

“When the National Lottery funding kicked in, it gave the Royal Yachting Association a chance to run a fully professional, fully funded team. To me the key is the coaches and the management and the continuity. We've had the same personnel so they are learning as they go through each Olympics, finding out what works and what doesn't work.

“For sure, we are now the most professional team. A lot of the other nations see that and are jealous of what we have. It's not just the money because we're not the best-funded team. We just use the funding smartly and in the right areas. We also have a great team morale - all the British sailors who raced early on and finished then hung around and cheered the guys still racing. We didn't see that in any of the other teams.”

Chris Hoy (cycling; gold in team sprint, keirin and individual sprint)

“When I started doing this competitively at senior level, in the Nineties, my philosophy was, it was a hobby but also a huge opportunity to do something I love and see how far I could go. I wanted to represent my country, travel the world and then get a proper job.

Back to reality for golden generation

Olympic heroes will discover if the last 17 days has been a life-changing experience or a glorious but brief interlude

• Team GB to be rewarded with gold for gold

• Hard work starts now as British sailors look towards London 2012

• Public support gained from success in Beijing needs to last four years

BACKGROUND

• How the Brits became world beaters

• London double-decker arrives in Beijing

• Olympics proves capacity for greatness

• New dawn for British sport as Olympic sun sets

Multimedia

• Simon Barnes in Beijing

• Bring back the tug-of-war

• Top 100 Olympic athletes of all time

Times Archive: Olympic closing ceremonies: how they used to do them

From Berlin, 1936, to Los Angeles, 1984, we've dug into The Times Archive to revisit some of the high points and the hubris

Related Links

• Back to reality for golden generation

• Pendleton plea to give women chance to inspire

• The appliance of science

“The British were definitely seen as the plucky losers, cannon fodder, making up the numbers. At that point, we were doing it blind, there was no coaching, there was no knowledge of how to train. We'd hear little snippets of news about how the Germans were training or how the Aussies were training. You'd take two steps forward and one back because you didn't know what you were doing.

“The idea that the Brits were not supposed to be successful, I didn't really get, but I was certainly aware of that culture. And you did feel it when you were competing internationally, GB were somewhere and the rest of the world was somewhere else.

“It wasn't until 1999-2000 that we got some coaching and the attitude has definitely changed. Now, anyone in a GB cycling team is good enough to win a world medal. And when you pull on a GB skinsuit, the rest of the world literally fears you.”

David Florence (canoeing; silver medal, C1)

“My sport is very much about delivering on the day under a lot of pressure. It's not a sport where if you win the World Championships then you're necessarily going to win the Olympics. I won silver here but, for instance, at the European Championships earlier this year, I finished 32nd.

“This means that there is a huge psychological aspect to performing on the day. In 2004, for instance, when I was competing for Olympic selection at a World Cup race in Athens, things started going wrong for me. I hit a couple of gates and I knew this was it, the big one, Olympic selection, and I just went to pieces. I let it go completely wrong and finished last. There was no Athens Olympics after that.

“Then in 2005, I went on to world-class performance level funding and one of the great changes was working with a sports psychologist, Hugh Mantle. We spent a lot of time thinking about distraction control, which is about spending time learning how to deal with things not going so well.

“I was already a reasonably fast athlete before this, but when I started working with Hugh, my results started picking up. Would my day in the Olympics have been different otherwise? I will never know.”