With the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games just around the corner, Britain’s finest athletes are in the final stages of preparation in their bid to take gold at the ‘Greatest Show on Earth’.  For the 313 Team GB athletes the competition will be the culmination of years of precision planning in an attempt to streamline their performance and give them the best possible chance of hearing the National Anthem broadcast around the world.

The attention-to-detail for every single member of Team GB is immense.  Away from the limelight they each have their own training programmes, which not only focus on the physical and technical aspect of their performance, but also offer advice on their nutrition, the psychology of their performance, their travel and logistics - the list is endless.

Why do all these individual factors, however big, however small, count so much?  Let’s go back at Athens.  If we take five of the Gold medals won by Team GB, look at the time of each of these and work out the difference between the Gold and Silver places in these events, it adds up to 0.545 of one second.  If Team GB had taken the Silver medal in each of these events instead of the Gold, they would have dropped seven places on the medal table.  So you see, every little thing really does count.

A key factor of any athlete’s performance is their kit; competition clothing, footwear, equipment, their drink.  Powerade, Official Sports Drink of Team GB and the Olympic Games, has just launched a new campaign looking at this.  The essence of the new ‘InnerGear’ concept illustrates that no matter how sophisticated an athlete’s outer gear is (sports kit), it is not effective without your InnerGear – what you put inside your body.    Let’s put this into perspective; research has shown that as little as a 2% drop in hydration can seriously affect an athlete’s performance. The athletes in Beijing will have to combat the extreme weather conditions if they are to compete at the top level of their event so proper hydration is essential.

So where do I come in. Picture the scene; I’m sat at my desk enjoying another day at the Synergy office, facing the trials and tribulations that rear their heads on a daily basis, when the phone rings.  “Hi, can you please look into getting me three Team GB athletes for a photo-shoot. In London. On the same day.  And there is only one day that we can do – in a couple of weeks. Which is just before the Olympic Games, so yes we realise that not many athletes are free at the moment. In these three sports.  Oh, and by the way…they need to be naked.”

Breathe.  Stay calm.  Speak. “No problem. Leave it with me, I’ll see what I can do.”

So there it began, and following a race against time, complex diary management and persuasion like you have never seen before, on a sunny day in June I found myself in a studio on Caledonian Road witnessing Phillips Idowu (Triple Jump), Rebecca Romero (Track Cycling) and Gregor Tait (Aquatics), stripped of all their performance clothing, and captured without their outer gear by renowned photographer Nadav Kander.  The result; a series of breathtaking images highlighting the athlete’s strength, fitness and power, showing the effort and commitment that is put into their training and being at the top of their sport.

I will certainly be tuning in at 8.08pm on the 8^th of the 8^th  for the Opening Ceremony, and probably glued to my screen for the following 16 days, to watch the athletes in action and hopefully witness history-making competitions as rivals pit themselves against each other in the attempt to take Gold.  At the same time, I’ll be watching three particular athletes very closely, to see how their ‘InnerGear’ is hopefully helping them to achieve their lifelong dreams.

By Sara Wilson on August 4th, 2008

Tags: Olympics, Sponsorship consultants