During the Rio Olympic Games Great Britain or Team GB won a total of 67 medals coming second in the medal table to USA and ahead of China, a remarkable achievement.

So how did it happen? Mostly it was down to careful, detailed preparation and long, long hours of dedicated practice over many years. You do not become an Olympian overnight, instead it requires sacrifices in many areas such as diet, not going out, putting a career on hold, and even relationships.

To reach peak performance in the sunshine of Rio demanded that the Olympians dragged themselves out of bed on cold, dark winter mornings when it would have been so much easier to pull the duvet over their heads and hide until better weather arrived. Of course, they didn’t lie there or sit on their couches stuffing their faces with doughnuts and chocolate while watching daytime TV. They knew that the way to success was to work hard and dedicate their lives to their dreams of standing on the winners rostrum.

And it is the strength and believability of those dreams which kept the Olympians motivated. To keep going day after day, year after year requires enormous motivation and it is the visualisation of being successful at the Olympics and other events which gave them the belief and energy to keep going when the mountain ahead looked insurmountable. They used their imaginations to build that inner belief and when they were successful many of them admitted that they had dreamed of that moment for years.