91Èȱ¬

Although the year still has some time to run for the rest of us, the 2010 season is over for many of Britain's Olympic sports. Hundreds of Olympic hopefuls and their coaches are now taking all the time they can get to prepare for a make-or-break year ahead.

Each sport has a performance director, above the individual athletes and coaches, who must oversee every aspect of the fight for Olympic medals in 2012. They earn their corn putting the funding, facilities and environment in place which will allow medals to be won, and this is a crucial time for them.

Funding body UK Sport brought these performance directors together in St Andrews earlier in November, in the hope that by sharing their experiences of the season just gone - what worked, what didn't, and which other ideas and issues cropped up - sports can learn from each other, with enough time to try some new tricks before the next season begins.

We were allowed into the conference too, to sit in on some of the sessions and speak to those performance directors. We asked them how they rate their progress in 2010, and which big challenges facing their sports we should watch out for in 2011.

Here are a selection of answers from a range of the sports represented in St Andrews. But what's your verdict on 2010 for Britain's Olympic sports? If there's a sport you follow closely, what mark out of 10 would you give them for this year, and what are the major obstacles they must overcome next year?

Read the rest of this entry

Not many sporting arenas look like Le Grand Palais.

Fencing has taken its to Paris and set up home in the vast, imposing metal-and-glass construction on the banks of the Seine, opposite the Eiffel Tower.

Millions of euros have been spent fitting out the interior to accommodate eight fencing pistes and grandstands for thousands of supporters as well as provide an extravaganza of light and sound to accompany each final being contested this week.

Just as some believe the Beijing Games were so lavishly financed as to ensure they will never be beaten for style, the French - working with fencing's world governing body, - have attempted to make this the best venue the sport will ever have.

Like Beijing, it is the British who have the unenviable task of following, with the European Championships coming to the United Kingdom next July. Organisers of that event have been touring , working out how to make Sheffield the next Paris.

The French seem to have it all: an astonishing venue, huge queues of excited spectators waiting to get in and world-class fencers (France topped the fencing medal table in Beijing). How do the British go about replicating that success?

Read the rest of this entry

If you are a parent with Olympic-minded child, think carefully when buying Christmas presents for your little ones. Toy ? Foam pirate's ? Wooden ? Any of those could leave you with a British Olympic fencer on your hands.

Fencing has a new weapon as it fights to ditch the image of posh people and gentlemen's clubs. The sport wants childhood fascination with the likes of Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean to become a route into fencing and, potentially, the Great Britain team for a future Olympic Games.

The fencing club, a mile down the road from the Olympic Park in east London, is leading attempts to turn young into the next .

In the five years since the club formed, a combination of aggressive marketing, rock-bottom prices for participants and top-quality coaching has produced three British junior champions, with more certainly on the way. Their target is not 2012, it is 2016 and beyond. But how this experiment fares will say much for the legacy of the London Games.

Read the rest of this entry