Gold Rush: Our Race to Olympic Glory

Gold Rush is the definitive story of Britain’s sporting journey from international embarrassment at the Atlanta Games in 1996, to Olympic glory in London 2012.

It is a story of athletes, for whom those sixteen years represent a patchwork of personal triumph, adversity and, sometimes, bitter disappointment; a story of politicians and strategists, who oversaw British sport’s transition from a culture of semi-amateurism to a world-beating professional enterprise; and it’s a story of our nation – facing the embarrassment of being the world’s sporting ‘also-rans’, shedding our cynicism about the idea of hosting the Games, and recognising – slowly! – that we could one day become world-beaters.