Britain returned from the Paris Olympics in 2024 with 65 medals. The same haul as London, 2012. Behind that number sat an unusually high count of fourth-to-eighth place finishes, more than any nation bar the USA and France, and a gold conversion rate below what the talent in the system should have produced. Meanwhile the nations with home Games ahead of them are spending. As UK Sport's Director of Performance, Dr Kate Baker, puts it in the film: soft medals don't exist.

 

UK Sport and the UK Sports Institute responded with a set of proposals for reorganising performance support - how practitioners are employed, how learning is delivered across the system, whether a more generalist approach might put more people alongside coaches more often.

 

The proposals were written to be provocative, and were to be stress-tested with the sports themselves. Dave Reddin, whose career spans England's 2003 Rugby World Cup, Team GB at London 2012 and five years leading performance at the FA, was brought in from outside the system to challenge its assumptions.

 

Our film was made to be watched before those conversations began. Its job was to bring sports into the room ready to be challenged, and to make clear (as Matt Parker, the UKSI's Director of Performance Innovation, says) that the provocation is about opportunity, not an accusation that anyone has been doing their job badly.

 

Interviews with Baker, Parker, Reddin and Stuart Pickering (Head of Performance Partnerships, UK Sport) were filmed in a single day, with the finished piece delivered within 3 days, faster than we would normally choose to work, but what the brief required.