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Eddie Mair | 14:24 UK time, Monday, 14 July 2008

Coverage tonight of the British athletics team...plus a report from Michael Buchanan. He writes:

"To my utter disgust, I've failed to make the British Olympic Team for Beijing. In any sport. And this after watching the Games in Athens and promising to get to China. It will simply have to be London in 2012. I've always though that some sports would be easier than others. Even with the aid of Boots' entire repository, I'd never presume to make the 100 metres sprint. But archery? All you do is stand there firing an arrow at a target, right? Well yes, but no.

The Beijing team have been practicing for years, and are calling on the latest technology to help them. For the past 18 months, they've been using high-speed cameras
archa.JPG to record the arrow leaving the bow, to make sure it doesn't brush anything that could interfere with it flight path. On such small matters rest gold medals.

archb.JPG
Another seemingly low-tech sport - clay pigeon shooting - is also using a timing device to work out what the optimum time difference is between shooting the first and second bullet. The typical difference is 0.4 seconds - far to quick to be using a hand-held stopwatch - so BAE have devised a timing device for them.


archc.JPG
Olympic hopeful (and 2000 Gold Medallist) Richard Faulds says it'll be of great help.


Its all part of UK Sport's attempts to up our medal wins at the Olympics by bring the best experts in their field to sport. archd.JPG Cycling is the benchmark the rest have to follow. It won a pannier's worth of medals at the recent world championships, and is hoping for more success in Beijing.


arche.JPG
Under former champion Chris Boardman, they've analysed ever aspect of the Olympic bike to see if they can make it better. The outcome is that it will cost on average £10,000 to physically make the bikes; add in the R+D says Boardman and the cost rises to between £50,000 and £60,000. For a bike.

archf.JPG
Finally, a picture of archer Alan Wills. He's going to his first Olympics games and he's got a tattoo to celebrate. That'll be me in 4 years time - you heard it hear first."

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