I AM SITTING in the front-room of an inconspicuous house in London’s commuter belt with one of the chief architects of Britain’s recent Olympic triumphs and his terrier Lucy.

 

Peter Keen, head of performance at UK Sport, the funding body, had, for my money, a bigger hand in Britain’s astonishing Beijing haul of 47 medals than any other single figure.

 

And he is not finished yet.

 

As I sip my tea, he articulates what, in effect, is a sobering message to any Olympic rivals who might be hoping that Britain’s 2008 attainments will turn out to be a flash in the pan. 

 

“We are great - dominant in fact - in a few sports,” he begins, matter-of-factly.

 

“But, geez, how much better could we be in the others!

 

“It is quite mind-blowing actually just how much better we could be…

 

“I watched the Olympics from home for the first time in 20 years and I was lucky in a sense because, whilst it would have been great to be in the emotion of it, I wouldn’t have been able to immerse myself in the images of excellence - or otherwise.

 

“I have seen enough to convince me that we are nowhere near ‘maxed out’ here.

 

“Many, many of our sportspeople can be far better than they currently are.”

 

As if to underline the point, he starts to spell out how Britain’s peerless Olympic cycling team -which won 14 medals, including eight golds - could have done even better.

 

“I know Dave [Brailsford, the team leader in Beijing] well; I know him very well,” Keen says.

 

“He will know, like I do, that there were three events they missed in where they had absolutely genuine medal shots…

 

“So there is more to come and they will be working on it.

 

“They are already working on it.”

 

In cycling, more than anything, Keen knows of what he speaks.

 

After all, he is the man who, as detailed in a timely and revealing new book*, put British track cycling on the path to its present dominance.

 

Just over a decade ago, as British Cycling’s recently appointed performance director, Keen outlined a vision of how the sport could use its new source of seed capital - Lottery funding - to create a team set-up so professional that every ambitious athlete and coach in the country would be breaking down the door to be part of it.

 

PowerPoint presentation key

 

That PowerPoint presentation now looks to be one of the seminal texts of recent British sports history.

 

Keen stayed for the next six years, devising and implementing the World Class Performance Plan that would make that vision a reality, before moving to UK Sport with a brief to sprinkle some of cycling’s magic dust over other Olympic sports. 

 

“If my role was to think the unthinkable, then Dave [Brailsford] and his team are doing the unthinkable - it’s immensely impressive,” Keen says.

 

Brailsford is “an absolutely exceptional people person…But he is also exploiting, I guess, a set of very strong building-blocks in terms of principles and rules and norms that I established before that.”

 

The task for the next four years, leading up to London 2012, will be to ensure that the levels of excellence attained in cycling - and one or two other fields such as sailing - are now transferred to other Olympic sports.

 

“I think we are at a tipping-point in terms of the overall programme,” Keen says.

 

“And it feels very much like the tipping-point we reached in cycling in 2002.

 

“We had been through one cycle of new money and lots of ambition and were starting to do really well.

 

“But when you looked at it, there were still a lot of people on the periphery of the programme who, in truth, wanted to look at the mountain not climb it.

 

“We introduced a much more vigorous review process that really did sit each and every athlete down in a room for hours on end going over and over all the list of variables and saying, ‘How badly do you want this?’

 

“And some cried, and some walked out and some stayed…

 

“It was a big clear-out, I think, of ideas and perceptions, and what we were left with was a group of people who were really up for it.”

 

Creditability enhanced

 

One consequence of cycling’s Beijing gold rush, of course, is that Keen’s credibility as he seeks to “port” best practice around the full quiver of Britain’s Olympic sports will have been immeasurably enhanced.

 

“I guess I wanted cycling to achieve what they did for two reasons,” he says.

 

“One: my own ego - to sort of be able to feel, well, I got vindicated and they are as good as they are.

 

“But another side of me desperately wanted that level of audacious success to finally remove almost the excuse that I still hear, which is, ‘Well, Pete, we’re not cycling.’…

 

“I don’t think you can do that any more.”

 

Keen doesn’t claim to know everything, acknowledging that he can’t tell, for example, “a canoeist how to train”.

 

“But I can look at a canoeing programme and troubleshoot It, or analyse it in terms of the main constituent parts that make up successful elite sport programmes.

 

“I really don’t think they are fundamentally different.”

 

As he goes on to say, a process for assessing these programmes already exists – “We call it Mission 2012”.

 

This examines a confidential list of 32 discrete elements of an elite sport programme.

 

“Not every single element is going to matter the same in each and every sport, but it’s a way of looking at a sport and saying, ‘What are you strong at? Where could you make a difference? Where could you improve?’”, Keen says.

 

“And it’s not just a question of, ‘Well, Sport A, you’re struggling. Go and look at cycling, they’re brilliant.’

 

“It’s, ‘Sport A, you’re struggling in two or three very specific areas. Cycling has the solution to one, rowing has one, maybe swimming…’”

 

Like Lucy, Keen is nobody’s idea of an attack dog, but I leave with the impression that those sports which underperformed in Beijing are likely to endure an uncomfortable few months.

 

“They need to be challenged,” he says.

 

“But I think they probably know who they are.”

 

* Heroes, Villains & Velodromes – Chris Hoy and Britain’s Track Cycling Revolution by Richard Moore. Published by Harper Sport

 

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the recent Beijing Olympics