An Englishman in America debates British Olympic Glory 2004

Tonight millions worldwide will watch the opening ceremony of a summer olympic event that returns to its ancestral home in Greece.

Being part of the team that develop an olympic event remains but a dream. After other events I have had the honor and privilage of being part of, the olympics would be the ultimate event project. It is a good thing to have ambition, and for all the athletes competing in Greece in the Olympic Games, a gold, silver or bronze medal forms a part of their olympic ambition.

The summer of 2004 has not exactly been a great summer for British Sport, viewing the cumulative list of failures and good efforts, but not good enough in the field of professional British sport, one wonders how well the British olympiads will fare.

Twenty years ago the argument of many British athletes was that the sporting facilities in the UK were far and few between. The underdog argument that the Americans and the Russians who traditionally took away the bulk of the medals had better training facilities.

Fast forward to 2004. The British National Lottery has gone someway to providing funding for facilities. It has thanks to the weekly lottery players funds athletes through their World Class Performance Program. Some sixty-four athletes each receive between twenty and thirty thousand pounds each year for their training, performance standards are set by the lottery to enable them to receive this funding, yet the argument is placed that the standards are below olympic medal standards and furthermore some of these athletes meet the standards for their events but do not show clear effort to go the extra distance for olympic medal standard.

There are others who are accused by their peers of spending the lottery funding on playstations and games rather than use the funding for the purpose that it was truly given.

Do Britain have a team of athletes who are not up to the mark, but have "won" lottery cash to fritter away? The next two weeks will go some way to answering this question.

I would prefer to give the British Olympic Squad the benefit of the doubt. To perform a sport at the highest level does take a great deal of time and commitment. With the infrastructure and private funding to allow them to train to compete with the best of the best from other countries, the medal tables will judge.

How should we seriously measure the success of the British squad. Should it be as simple as how many make the finals of each event and the number of medals, a sporting gesture when 4th place is recognized as a good show, but no medal. Or should we look to each olympiad to do their very best and aim for gold?