Olympics

Now the Olympics are over it is full steam ahead for the Paralympics and the nerves are starting to kick in a bit more.

We headed off to Macau on Saturday for our pre-Games training camp which is an important part of our final preparations and will help us to adjust to the conditions we will experience in Beijing.

It takes a lot of time for me to acclimatise, as it does for a lot of cerebral palsy athletes, so it is nice to get over there early and not feel tired when it comes to the competition.

There's a temptation (a very British temptation) when looking at the Beijing medal table to ask how on earth are we going to do better than that in London.

It's a fair question. This has, after all, been Great Britain's most successful Olympics since our croquet-inspired domination of the 1908 Games.

What's not fair, however, is to just give up after asking the question and wait for the inevitable disappointment to arrive. As Henry Ford once said, "If you think you can, you can. And if you think you can't, you're right."

So it is to the British Olympic Association's credit that it has asked the question and come up with an answer.

Its "Ambition 2012" programme is perhaps the most impressive initiative the often-maligned organisation has undertaken since ignoring Margaret Thatcher's call to boycott the Moscow Games in 1980.