Liz Nicholl: Great Britain’s potential is exciting – we can win more at Tokyo 2020 Olympics than at Rio 2016

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Liz Nicholl makes no apology for UK Sport’s obsession with numbers, and the pre-Rio mantra of 66/121 — the medal targets for the Olympics and Paralympics respectively — repeated over and over again inside the organisation’s Bloomsbury office.

Nicholl is in the numbers game and the target has shifted to 68/148, one up in each case on the medal tally from a heady summer in Rio de Janeiro, and the organisation’s chief executive believes such lofty aims for Tokyo 2020 are possible.

“There is more medal potential now at this stage than when we went into Rio,” she tells Standard Sport. “We have another three years ahead of us before we get to Tokyo and a lot can unfold in that period but doing better than Rio is perfectly possible.

“We can see into the sports, we can see how things can be even better, that they’re not perfect. That’s exciting. If we’re achieving what we’re achieving with a system that could be even better, what else could be possible?”

The goal is to cement second place in both medal tables, perhaps the ultimate goal surpassing the United States, who finished the Rio Olympics with 121 medals. “There’s no way we can get close to the US in this cycle, maybe in a couple more cycles,” she conjectures in jest but with a serious undertone.

It was reported that in the build-up to Brazil, ‘Get S**t Done’ became a favoured phrase among some of the UK Sport management.

Whatever the reality, Rio was Team GB’s most successful Olympics and Paralympics with Adam Peaty triggering the medal rush, claiming the 100metres breaststroke title on the third day of competition.

Of all the golds, the women’s hockey takes pride of place, a photograph of which hangs above her desk. Nicholl, who was at the final, says: “That was an amazing gold. Everyone in the stands was hugging each other as it was just one of the moments of the Games.”

It is a far cry from her early days at UK Sport in the late Nineties where, after just one gold at Atlanta in 1996, she admits to a certain degree “we were making it up as we went along”.

A total of £345m has been invested in the Olympic and Paralympic sports in the lead-up to Tokyo, a drop of £2m overall for the last four-year cycle, and Nicholl is wary of losing her focus for even a minute.

Nicholl has a picture of Team GB celebrating their hockey success in Rio hanging on her office wall Photo: Manan Vatsyayan/AFP/Getty Images
Manan Vatsyayan/AFP/Getty Images

“This system has to be world class in every respect,” she explains. “We’re competing against the best in the world and, if we stand still, another nation will go past us and we will win less medals. For a nation our size, we have fantastic talent and we are fighting way above our weight.

“The system is the envy of the world. A nation our size producing the results we’ve achieved, to beat China in the Olympic medal table is just extraordinary. To be right up there second in the medal table in the Paralympics, it’s quite exceptional.

“Some people say it’s because we spend a lot of money but it’s also a much smarter way of doing it. If bigger countries got their act together in the way that we have then it would be game on.”

The medal obsession has been lauded because of the results of recent Olympiads but it has also been criticised too, the suggestion being in the case of British Cycling that the drive for gold often came to the detriment of athlete welfare.

An independent review into allegations of a bullying culture at British Cycling has yet to be published but a leaked copy of the draft report described a “culture of fear” while a recent newspaper report claimed UK Sport told its in-house governance unit to “go easy” on the organisation because “that’s where the medals come from”.

Such claims get an angry rebuke from Nicholl: “That’s absolute rubbish. That’s never been the case here. There’s never been any interference in terms of performance perspective and governance perspective.”

But whether the medal obsession has got out of control is a moot point. Nicholl admits addressing athlete welfare is “one of the areas where we could be even better”, while UK Sport have been warned by the independent review into events launched by Jess Varnish’s initial complaint in the media would make for “uncomfortable reading”.

UK Sport have implemented what Nicholls calls “a culture health check” to address such issues as athlete welfare, and there are regrets over how events have played out.

“In terms of culture and climate, we haven’t been as rigorous in terms of advising, guiding and supporting,” she admits. “When any issue is raised in the media, it’s a regret that that’s ever happened. There can’t just be an assumption that things are being led, communicated and managed well. We’re looking at whether we need to be more inquisitive and more requiring of information being provided. We’re we inquisitive enough, could we have found out?”

There is, though, also a bullishness from her that “we don’t run the sport” but that more welfare work is in the offing. As she puts it, “the athletes are our greatest asset”. After all, it is them aspiring to achieve the newer mantra… 68/148.

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