Gold Rush: Our Race to Olympic Glory

The first episode begins with the UK's poor performance in the 1996 games at Atlanta, and how the Government diverted National Lottery funding to provide the best possible training for the nation's athletes.

Britain failed to move up from tenth position in the medal table at Athens in 2004. Increasingly reliant on a generation of ageing champions, it was time for our younger hopes. To ensure that funding delivered results, UK Sport introduced a no compromise approach. All funded athletes needed to start winning medals. The pressure was on for the 9-year-old Tom Daley to step up to the big time. Christine Ohuruogu, the potential face of the 2012 games, describes her dramatic fall from grace and her subsequent return to the track. And after no male gymnasts were even fielded in Athens, Louis Smith became the first British man to win an individual gymnastics medal in a hundred years at the Beijing games in 2008. His win finally achieved funding for his beloved sport. With a haul of 51 medals at the epic Beijing games, Britain was finally showing its mettle, but could we continue to fund sport at the increasing rates needed, or would we embarrass ourselves on home turf four years later?

Having unexpectedly come 4th in Beijing, to do even better at London meant defeating 1 of 3 sporting superpowers: the USA, China and Russia. The London 2012 organisers face cynics foretelling international embarrassment so athletes would have to put in the performances of their lives. To boost our chances, the Sporting Giants programme sought to expand our pool of potential medal winners by turning amateurs into elite competitors. With so much money on the line, the scrutiny seemed prudent, but at what cost to the athletes who struggled under the immense pressure? With the eyes of the world on London, 2012 would be a milestone year for the Paralympics – a chance to transform the perception of Paralympians as elite athletes and to demonstrate how far the movement had come since the empty stands at Atlanta 16 years earlier. This film tells the story of the lengths we went to in search of Olympic glory, and the costs, paid in personal sacrifice, that made the gold rush possible.