'Backroom story' behind Team GB's Olympic success to Ebury

Ebury Press has signed "the backroom story" of Team GB’s Olympic success to be written by Times journalist Owen Slot.

The Talent Lab will be authored in collaboration with UK Sport’s performance directors, Simon Timson and Chelsea Warr, to reveal the secrets behind Team GB's historic achievements in Rio, which bettered their 2012 host-nation haul.

Ebury deputy publisher Andrew Goodfellow bought UK and Commonwealth rights from David Luxton Associates, to publish in hardback in April 2017.

Timson, performance director at UK Sport, said the book would provide "compelling insight into the secrets of this success”, while Goodfellow said it offered "totally unique access to so many of Team GB’s world-class coaches". The book will contain what they learnt about talent from organisations the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music, the NFL Draft, the Royal College of Surgeons and The European Space Agency, and how this can be applied beyond sport. It will also answer questions about whether a winning personality needs to be innate or can be taught, whether nurturing parents are important or detrimental to creating a champion’s drive to succeed, how important certain physical attributes are compared with natural flair.

Slot has covered six summer Olympics and three winter Olympics for The Times. He has been named Sports Reporter of the Year three times, and has won Sports Feature Writer of the Year three times also. This is his sixth book.

News of the acquisition follows a book deal for Olympic boxer Nicola Adams' memoir, coming in April 2017, and the joint autobiography of golden couple Laura Trott and Jason Kenny, who between them won five gold medals in the Rio velodrome last month.