I'm always busy working, plotting to beat my two main rivals – LaShawn Merritt at 400 metres and Usain Bolt at dominoes
• Introducing the Guardian's Olympic diarists

Life is split between the track and my house. But it doesn't matter where I'm at, I'm always busy working, plotting and preparing to beat my two main rivals – LaShawn Merritt, and Usain Bolt. LaShawn is the danger man in the 400 metres, I see him as the top quarter-miler in the world right now, and I am pushing myself to the limit, training smart and working hard, so I can beat him at the Olympics. And Usain?

Well, he and I have got our dominoes title to fight over, man. That's what we play in our down time when we're away at championships. I won't say I'm the best, but I know what I am doing, I'm not just matching the dominoes, you know? But Bolt just loves the game. He is always playing. So he's the man I need to beat there, for sure.

Maybe some of you guys imagine that us Jamaican athletes are all out clubbing and dancing and having good times in Kingston, but the truth is this is the Olympic year, and life at the Racers Track club is tougher than ever, you know? When we're not working we're all doing things that burn less energy so we can save it for when it matters. For me that means spending a lot of time with my girlfriend and our eight-month-old baby, chilling with my friends and practising my dominoes game.

My background training is pretty much over. I'll be running in my first meet of the year, a 4x400m relay, at the end of this month. I'm looking forward to doing some hard racing. When you are training you don't know exactly where you are at, you need a few races to see. I'm feeling pretty confident so I'm looking forward to getting out there on the track so I can figure out exactly where I am at.

My goal for this year is to become the first man from outside the US to run the 400m in under 44 seconds. My PB is 44.4, and last year I ran 44.6 after doing no off-season training at all because I was injured. So I reckon breaking 44sec this year is possible, because I am way more experienced and I have been training so hard. I am pretty pleased with what I have achieved so far this season. I've been able to deliver the times my coach is asking for, I'm recovering fast, and I have no injuries.

I'm going to need to get down to those kinds of times if I am going to beat LaShawn, Jeremy Wariner and Kirani James to one of those Olympic medals.

For LaShawn to be out for two years and come back late last season and run 44sec and be so competitive, that shows you how good he is.

He has run 43.75 before, and at 25 he is still pretty young.

He is quick and strong and I think he is the man to beat, more so than Wariner or James. I'm not the kind of person who could hold a grudge against LaShawn for his drugs ban. We talk a bit when we see each other. He's not a close friend, but he isn't an enemy either. I think he's privileged to have got that chance to run in the Olympics and world championships again after he was banned.

All I really care about is making sure I beat him. At the world championships last year I thought that I was going to get a medal, even though I had no background training. Unfortunately it didn't happen, which is tough to take. So basically this year I just want to make sure I get that medal.

• Olympic Games 2012
• Olympics 2012: athletics
• Athletics

Smith and Carlos, the 200m gold and bronze medallists, don black gloves and give the Black Power salute on the podium in Mexico in 1968

On 17 October 2005 a 20ft-high statue was unveiled at San Jose State University showing their former students Tommie Smith and John Carlos frozen, fists aloft, as they had stood exactly 37 years earlier on the Olympic podium in Mexico City. "Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood for justice, dignity, equality and peace," reads the inscription. "Hereby the university and associated students commemorate their legacy."

Two years later Smith published his autobiography. In 2008 the pair were given the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPYs, something akin to an American Sports Personality of the Year awards. Carlos's own autobiography followed last October. This, now, is their life, full of speaking engagements and interviews, publicity and publication, applause and acclaim.

In the moments before the medal ceremony in Mexico City, Carlos, Smith – as of a few moments earlier the 200 metres world record-holder – and the Australian silver-medallist Peter Norman sat in a room the athletes called "the dungeon", deep in the bowels of the Olympic Stadium. As they prepared, they discussed what was about to happen. One of the things mentioned was the possibility of them being murdered on the spot.

"I remember telling Mr Smith: 'Remember when we get out there, we've been trained as runners to listen to the gun,'" Carlos has said. "'So when we get out there and do what we do, if the hammer hits that bullet, hit the deck. Don't be just a duck on the table for them to just shoot at.'"

Whose idea was the raised fist? With depressing inevitability, both athletes have claimed it. According to Carlos, just before the final he suggested it to Smith: "I'm going to do something on the stand to let those in power know they're wrong. I want you with me." He even claimed to have deliberately lost the race, because "Tommie Smith would have never put his fist in the sky had I won". But if this were true, why would Smith by then have procured the pair of black gloves the pair famously go on to share? Smith, meanwhile, recalled: "I told John what I was planning to do. I said: 'You don't have to do anything that I do, but this is what I'm going to do. Just follow my lead.'" These competing claims caused the pair to fall out for several years, but more recently Carlos has stated that the protest had been planned by the two athletes together over a period of days.

What is currently agreed on is this: they wore gloves to represent black America, and removed their shoes and wore black socks to symbolise the poverty of the American black community. Smith wore a scarf and Carlos a bead necklace, recalling lynching. Both Americans wore the badge of the Olympic Project for Human Rights, and they planned to raise their gloved fists, which according to Smith at the time "stood for the power in black America".

Norman recalled those moments in "the dungeon" thus: "They involved me in the conversation. It wasn't a secret huddle, they were letting me know. It was my suggestion that they split Tommie's gloves because John had left his back in his room. [Then] I said to John: 'You got another one of those badges?' 'If I get you one, will you wear it?' he asked. 'I sure would,' I replied."

Neither Smith nor Carlos had a spare badge, but as they walked into the light of the stadium they saw Paul Hoffman, a (white) member of the US rowing team and OPHR activist. "I was wearing my badge and he came up and said: 'Hey mate, you got another one of those?' So here's this white Australian, with two black Americans, who wants to wear an OPHR badge, and I was damned if I was going to be the one who says he can't," Hoffman told the BBC (in the excellent documentary Black Power Salute, which you can currently see here). "So I took mine off and handed it to him."

They reached the podium, where a rather bemused Lord Burghley, the sixth marquis of Essex – a Conservative politician and International Olympic Committee member who 40 years earlier had won gold in Amsterdam in the 400m hurdles – placed their medals around their necks. When asked later what he had thought of the gloves, he said: "I thought they had hurt their hand."

The anthem started. Smith and Carlos thrust their fists in the air. Different people recall the reaction within the stadium very differently: Time magazine reported that "a wave of boos rippled through the spectators", but Newsweek describes simply a "murmur [that] rippled through the stadium", and in the New York Times it is reported that the protest "actually passed without much general notice". What is certain is that for everybody involved, life was about to change for ever.

If San Jose's brilliant sprinting coach, Lloyd "Bud" Winter, was responsible for them reaching the podium, another member of the university's staff was largely responsible for what they did there: Harry Edwards, the inspirational young sociology professor and creator of the OPHR, had done much to politicise the pair – particularly Smith, by nature more reserved and less militant than his fellow medallist.

Edwards had originally advocated a black boycott of the Games. "For years we have carried the United States on our backs with our victories, and race relations are now worse than ever," he had told the New York Times. "It's time for the black people to stand up as men and women and refuse to be utilised as performing animals for a little extra dog food."

The boycott was also supported by Martin Luther King, who had met Edwards and several athletes including Carlos in New York a few days before he was assassinated in April that year. "I would like to commend the outstanding athletes who have the courage and determination to make it clear that they will not participate in the 1968 Olympics until something is done about these terrible evils and injustices," he said.

But many black athletes were keen to compete in Mexico, and when South Africa and Rhodesia were disinvited from the Games – one of the OPHR's three main demands – the boycott plan was dropped. Other ideas swiftly took its place, and at the US trials a few weeks before the Games, officials were warned to "expect almost anything".

So immediately after Smith and Carlos made their stand a statement was released which stated: "US Olympic officials knew they planned to do it," and that they "did not expect to take any action".

But then Avery Brundage got involved.

Brundage was the IOC's president from 1952 to 1972, and he was also an antisemite, white supremacist and Nazi sympathiser, whom the athletes preferred to call "Slavery Avery". His removal from office had been one of the OPHR's other key demands. His pet hate – ironically, given his active involvement in the 1936 Games in Berlin, which became a propaganda exercise for the Nazi party – was the use of sport for political or nationalistic ends. He detested and did his best to ban medal tables, and in 1964 came close to passing a motion that would have denied Smith and Carlos their memorable moment, by ending the raising of national flags and the playing of anthems at medal ceremonies and replacing them with the Olympic flag and "a fanfare of trumpets".

He might have been presenting the medals himself that day, had he not been in Acapulco watching the sailing (the original purpose of the gloves, according to Carlos, was as protection in case they were required to shake his hand). But Brundage had seen the ceremony, and he was mad as hell.

The IOC criticised Smith and Carlos for "advertising their domestic political views", which amounted to "a deliberate and violent breach of the fundamental principles of the Olympic spirit". The US Olympic Committee, threatened with the expulsion of its entire team unless action was taken, suddenly changed its tune, putting out a second statement apologising for an act of "untypical exhibitionism ... which violates the basic standards of sportsmanship and good manners which are so highly regarded in the United States". Smith and Carlos were given 48 hours to pack their bags and leave the country. Hoffman, for the crime of lending Norman his badge, was very nearly expelled as well, and got away with it only because his father was a judge and a personal friend of many American officials.

The protest had not been much better received back home. "'Faster, Higher, Stronger' is the motto of the Olympic Games. 'Angrier, nastier, uglier' better describes the scene in Mexico City last week," reported Time, describing the protest as "a public display of petulance that sparked one of the most unpleasant controversies in Olympic history". Associated Press called it "a bizarre demonstration". One of few voices of support from white America came from Robert Clark, the enlightened president of San Jose State, who praised them as "honourable young men dedicated to the cause of justice for the Black people in our society".

Back in Mexico City, Jesse Owens was sent to talk black athletes out of staging similar protests (though he was ignored, and considered a white apologist by many). They were told "A repetition of such incidents ... would warrant the imposition of the severest penalties at the disposal of the US Olympic Committee." But protests of varying degrees of subtlety abounded. After a black American clean sweep in the men's 400m, won by Lee Evans, another student of Edwards at San Jose State, all three athletes wore berets to their medal ceremony. Long-jump gold-medallist Bob Beamon wore black socks pulled up high, while the bronze-medallist, Ralph Boston, went barefoot. "They're going to have to send me home, too," he said. They did not. The women's 4x100m relay team publicly dedicated their own gold medals to Carlos and Smith.

(But another athlete, the heavyweight boxer George Foreman, who claims he "thought about going home myself" in solidarity after Smith and Carlos were expelled, then celebrated his own gold medal by waving a little American flag in the ring. He was castigated in the black community. "I felt what I did was right, and I think they appreciate me more for doing what I think was right than following what they think was right," Foreman said the following month. In his autobiography Smith says Foreman's flag-waving made him "very bitter, very angry".)

The BBC paid them $1,000 in cash for an exclusive interview. Will you not benefit from the notoriety and publicity the protest has generated, they were asked. "I can't eat that," Carlos said. "And the kids round my block can't eat it. They can't eat publicity, they can't eat gold medals. All they want is an equal chance to be a human being."

The truth of this observation was clear after their return to America. After a near-violent scrum of reporters assaults them in Los Angeles, they board a second flight to San Jose. "Once we got back we were ostracised, even by our own," Smith said. "Folks were scared, man. No jobs. We couldn't find work. People even told us, 'We can't get close to you guys because we have our own jobs to protect.' These were my friends. At least, they were my friends before I left for Mexico City."

Smith's agent cancelled their contract, and Smith was sacked from his job washing cars. Within two years his mother had died, his marriage was over, and he was unemployed and broke. "My mother died of a heart attack in 1970 as a result of pressure delivered to her from farmers who sent her manure and dead rats in the mail because of me," he said. "My brothers in high school were kicked off the football team, my brother in Oregon had his scholarship taken away."

Carlos fared little better. "I came back 'John Carlos the neighbourhood bum'," he has said. "I would soon have no money and I had to beg, borrow, steal and gamble to pay my rent. I remember chopping the furniture up for firewood and my wife looking at me as if I was crazy. But our heating was electric and I couldn't pay my electricity bill, so we had to take the kids to sleep by the fireplace." His wife left him, and in 1977 she took her own life. "I lost my first wife in this thing. But I'll never be bitter toward anyone," he said. "Not for the criticisms or the death threats or anything. If I'm bitter, they win."

Peter Norman's time of 20.06 remains an Australian record, and would have won the gold medal in two of the past three Olympics. He continued to race, competing in the 1970 Commonwealth Games, but even though he comfortably reached qualifying standards in 1972 for both the 100m and 200m, for which he was at the time ranked No5 in the world, he was not selected, and Australia travelled to Munich with no sprinters at all. When the Olympics were held in Sydney in 2000 notable Australian former medallists were invited to take part in a ceremony at the Olympic Stadium; Norman was not among them. He made it to the stadium only after officials from US Track & Field heard of their plight and stepped in. "They treated us like royalty," said his second wife, Jan (his first marriage also failed after 1968). When Norman died in 2006, Smith and Carlos acted as pallbearers. "He didn't raise his fist," Smith said, "but he did lend a hand."

The redemption of Smith and Carlos started in 1983, when the president of the organising committee of the Los Angeles Games, Peter Ueberroth, hired Carlos as special consultant on minority affairs. Ueberroth personally handled the resulting storm of protest, but Carlos's work was later seen as one of the key factors behind the success of the Games.

Looking back at the bad times, Carlos has said: "If I've got to take a whuppin' for something I believe in, I'll take that whuppin'."

Although every athletics expert was aware that the United States Negro athletes might protest, the manner of it surprised many in the Olympic Stadium here last night.

It was more restrained and yet more effective than some had thought. There was the possibility that Tommie Smith or John Carlos, overwhelming favourites for the sprint events, might refuse to appear at the medals ceremony. In fact, both showed a keen awareness of the publicity values involved, and their appearance in black socks and black scarves, and each with a single black glove, Smith's on the right hand, Carlos's on the left, showed a knowledge of public relations equalled only by Cassius Clay, now Muhammad Ali

At the press conference afterwards, the same awareness was apparent. The representatives of the world's press crowded into a room perhaps 40 feet by 30. The organisation insisted that questions and replies were put in English, Spanish and French.

International press conferences usually begin with pussy-footing questions of remarkable banality. The first question to Carlos was why he looked over his left shoulder and whether it cost him second place – a good technical question but utterly remote from the emotional context of the occasion ...

Questions concerning which coach had meant most to Smith were hooted off court by all except the conscientious interpreters. Finally Carlos lost patience and burst out with the statement: "We are black and we are proud to be black in white America."

Black Americans, he said, would understand the nature of their demonstration.

"We are not a show horse doing a performance, so if we do a good job we get paid some peanuts. All through these Olympics I hear them say 'Boy, boy, boy, you're doing well.' I am tired of that. I want the whole press of the world to hear what I say and either say it as I say it or not say it at all."

... The US team officials were obviously left with a problem. What, if any, disciplinary action would be taken. "I'd pack them all back home," one British official said trenchantly. He perhaps has no White House to deal with. John Samuel, Mexico City

• Olympic Games 2012
• Athletics

• Farah fourth after fall in opening lap at indoor grand prix
• 'Somebody just caught my leg,' says 5,000m world champion

Mo Farah, Britain's 5,000m world champion, recovered from an opening?lap fall to set a personal best while finishing fourth in the featured mile won by Ireland's Ciaran O'Lionaird at the Boston indoor grand prix on Saturday.

The meeting also produced season's bests in the 400m, where the world champion Kirani James of Grenada stormed to victory, and in the women's pole vault and men's 3,000m.

Farah, a contender for gold in the London Olympics later this year, fell while in a crowded pack, but bounced back to run a personal best 3min 57.92sec.

"Somebody just caught my leg," he told reporters. "Once I fell, I had to get back in as quickly as possible. It wasn't easy."

O'Lionaird, a Farah training partner, won in 3:56.01, followed by the Canadian Taylor Milne in 3:56.40. The American Galen Rupp, who led much of the race, took third in 3:57.10 with Farah fourth.

• Mo Farah
• Athletics

• World silver medallist at 1500m makes light of expectation
• I feel I belong at the front of every race after Daegu

Despite the "bloody cold" weather at Lee Valley this week – a stark contrast from recent altitude training in Kenya – Hannah England is allowing thoughts to stray to this summer's Olympics and the boost her 1500 metres medal at last year's world championships gives her. "It's a massive confidence boost and it's great to know that all my training can get me in that shape," says England, who went into the final in Daegu as the 11th-fastest 1500m runner in the world and ended it with a silver medal around her neck.

"That is satisfying and reassuring. In terms of racing in the summer. I can't wait to go back and feel I belong at the front of every race I step in. That's going to be a great feeling."

England was the first British athlete to jog around the newly laid track in the Olympic Stadium last autumn and is not taking the Mo Farah route to insouciantly blanking out all thoughts of returning there in August.

"I'm halfway in between. I'm not counting down the days and I'm not totally fixated about it but I figured out that, if I was worried about going to the track, then I had some pretty big issues to deal with," says the 24-year-old, who is promoting a national lottery fun run that will offer 5,000 members of the public the opportunity to jog round a five-mile course in the Olympic Park on 31 March.

"I shook that off and thought it was exciting to see it and it was an honour to be one of the first to run on it. It's nice to have that as an image. When I'm thinking about the Games I've got something to visualise rather than a blank canvas."

She jogged round the track with Lord Coe that day and the former Olympic 1500m champion from the Moscow and Los Angeles Games was one of the few who thought England was in with a chance of a medal in Daegu before that silver medal run.

"I've known Kelly [Holmes] for a few years so, when I read something from her, I feel like she knows me. To read that someone like Lord Coe has taken it upon themselves to say that, it's great."

England credits Holmes, who has worked with her for seven years through her On Camp With Kelly programme, with giving her judicious advice at key points in her career.

"She's been massive for me. The advice she has given me has progressed perfectly with me as an athlete. When I was 17 or 18 I needed to hear that it was worth sticking at and I had talent," she says.

"And when I got to the age of 24 I needed to know how to run a world championships final and she was right there. I had lunch with her last week and she's talking about how to cope with an Olympics. She's invaluable. I feel she's my secret weapon."

Before thoughts can turn to the Olympics, there is the small matter of securing a place. The trials will be five weeks before the Games start and England said the art of peaking at the right time to make the team and then stepping up another gear for the Games would be left in the hands of her coach, Bud Baldaro.

"I do have a feel for my body and I do have an input. But he's the real genius of that. It's hard because we do have to peak for the trials as well. It's a very important stepping stone that can't be ignored. You want to be in 99.9% shape for the trials and 100% for the Games."First there is the prospect of the UK indoor trials and championships in Sheffield next weekend. She plans to move out of her comfort zone and run the 3,000m for only the third time in her career.

"I like the prospect of trying to compete against the girls from a slightly different event group; it's more the 5k runners. Hopefully they're relishing the challenge of me moving up as well," she says. "It's going to make for a really interesting race because I know they won't hang around. They won't want me to have any finish left. Likewise, I'll want to hang in there and kick past. It's going to be a lot of fun. It's a change of stimulus."

As for the inevitable pressure of a home Games and the enhanced expectations that her world championships medal will bring, England says she plans to embrace them.

"If you stay in a bubble at some point it's going to pop. I'd be worried it would pop in the warm-up area before the race. I'd rather keep my eyes totally open and see everything that's going on and make sure it doesn't shake what I need to get done."

Hannah England is an ambassador for The national lottery's Olympic Park Run which takes place on March 31. The national lottery is contributing up to £2.2bn towards the venues and infrastructure of London 2012 as well as supporting around 1200 elite athletes to benefit from world class coaching and support. To find out more click here

• Olympics 2012: athletics
• Athletics
• Olympic Games 2012

• Doctor under investigation for conducting blood transfusions
• Dr Andreas Franke was once part of Olympic base in Erfurt

Germany's national anti-doping agency says 28 athletes are implicated in a scandal involving a doctor under investigation for conducting blood transfusions.

Nada says it is receiving files from the court in Erfurt in Thuringia state from an ongoing case against Dr Andreas Franke, who worked at Thuringia's Olympic training facility.

Franke is suspected of treating athletes' blood with UV light before reinjecting it, a procedure banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

The public broadcaster ARD said on Sunday it had a list of the 28 names implicated in the scandal, including the former Olympic speedskating champion Claudia Pechstein, the rising German cycling star Marcel Kittel and the Jamaican long jumper James Beckford.

• Drugs in sport
• Athletics

• European champion requires injection after Glasgow flop
• 'He's 31 and 31-year-old hurdlers don't have great achilles'

Six months out from the Olympics, Andy Turner is in the one place no athlete wants to be – hospital. On Monday morning Turner will go for a scan on his right achilles tendon, and will then, if the prognosis allows, have a cortisone injection to try to ease the pain that he has been feeling for the past two months.

Turner, the European and Commonwealth 110m hurdles champion and world bronze medallist, had a terrible time in the 60m hurdles at the Aviva International in Glasgow on Saturday. He was slow out of the blocks and finished last in 7.74sec, 0.22sec off his personal best. He limped off the track and looked a forlorn figure amid all the excitement of the opening event of the Olympic year.

The performance attracted a barrage of abuse on Twitter. He was accused of faking an injury, told he should be ashamed of himself, and that his lottery funding had made him "too comfortable". Turner refuted the insults, saying: "I always try to do my best and do not fake injuries … I'm the first to admit if I just ran shit so please keep your opinions to yourself."

Turner suffered from a similar problem last year but found that it was fixed by a cortisone injection. He had one before this race but it obviously failed to do the trick. "It's the same thing that was bothering me last year," Turner said. "It's been killing me every time I run and when I land off a hurdle I can really feel it."

He is unsure about whether he will be able to run again in the indoor season, which culminates in the world championships in Istanbul between 9 and 11 March. "After Glasgow, I'm unsure what I'm doing as yet. The World Indoors aren't directly on my horizons at the moment – I'd rather finish indoors early and prepare myself for outdoors."

Charles van Commenee, played down concerns over Turner's fitness. "Andy Turner has had an achilles problem since 2004. It's nothing new," Great Britain's head coach said. "He's in pain 60-70% of the time throughout the year. It's a case of managing the problem. It's not the end of the world. We're in January. There's time for him to come back from this. He's 31 and 31-year-old hurdlers don't have great achilles."

Turner spent the winter training in Florida with the USA's David Oliver, who won the 110m hurdles bronze medal at the Beijing Olympics. "I'm in decent shape despite this," Turner said. "I'll run a few minor races over the next few weeks to test where I am then I'm due to go on warm-weather training from early March, which will be when I begin to see things coming together ahead of a pretty important date I've got at an event in London at the beginning of August." Despite his optimism, you guess he will not be sleeping easy given what is at stake.

• Athletics
• Olympic Games 2012
• Olympics 2012: athletics

• Mo Farah raises roof with victory at Kelvin Hall
• Danny Talbot and Margaret Adeoye also star in home triumph

Mo Farah's life is just a little different now he is a world champion. If he did not know that already, he found out as the bell rang for the final lap in the 1500 metres at the Aviva International in Glasgow. At that point Farah accelerated into the lead ahead of Kenya's Augustine Choge, and the 3,500 spectators who had sat through a somewhat humdrum afternoon of athletics exploded into life, rising to their feet to roar him on to victory.

"It was unbelievable," Farah said. "I just could not believe how much noise was coming out, it just made me work harder and harder. There was just so much noise. I have never experienced that in my life." He will get used to it in the next six months.

For the few seconds it took Farah to compete that lap, the atmosphere was electric. The 1500m was the final race ever to be run at the Kelvin Hall, ending 21 years of international athletics here. Next year this international will move to the new Commonwealth Arena. Farah's winning time of 3min 39.03sec was a stadium record, so it will stand in perpetuity.

It was an enthralling race. Farah had not run a 1500m in three years, and was doing so here at the behest of his coach, Alberto Salazar, who wants him to hone his sprinting technique ahead of the Olympics. Beforehand Farah had said he was treating this mainly as a learning exercise, but that notion seemed to vanish once the race was under way. Choge was the No1 ranked indoor 1500m runner in the world last year. He and Farah clashed time and again, battering each other with their elbows as they fought for the lead.

"It was a good battle," Farah said. "I didn't want to give up the inside lane so I had to dig in, I had to push him a little bit, not to hurt him but just to let him know I was there so he didn't try and cut in." Choge overtook Farah with two laps to go, but Farah retook the lead as the bell rang, and held on to it through the final 200m. "I wanted to win because I was competing at home," Farah said. "The main thing was to start off with a win in 2012. But it's not about this one race, it's about adding them all up ahead of the Olympics."

Once the race was over, Farah ran lap after lap on his own, round and round the arena as part of his warm-down. Hundreds stayed behind to watch, until eventually they were moved on by the stewards. Since he won the 5,000m title in South Korea, Farah has been in the United States and Kenya. This was his first taste of what competing in the UK is like now he is a world champion.

His victory ensured that the Great Britain and Northern Ireland team won first place in the event, their collective tally of 60 points putting them seven ahead of both Russia and the USA, who tied for second on 53. As well as Farah's, there were six other wins for the team.

After five of the 17 events the home team had been languishing in last, which felt like an ominous and disappointing start to the Olympic year. But a trio of wins by unheralded young runners moved the team up the table.

Danny Talbot, a 20-year-old from Trowbridge who spent most of this week sitting sociology exams for his university course, won the 200m in 20.17sec, beating the former world 100m champion Kim Collins into second place. "Last year I ran 21.38 here, which means I've knocked two tenths of a second off," Talbot said. "If I can continue that progression and knock two tenths off my outdoor time then I will be within the Olympic qualifying time and I shouldn't be too far off the Olympic final." He is full of the optimism of youth.

Margaret Adeoye won the women's 200m moments later, and the 23-year-old Joe Thomson ran brilliantly to take the men's 800m. There were also pair of wins for Mark Lewis-Francis and Jeanette Kwakye in the 60m sprints, and Yamile Aldama won the women's triple jump. Really, though, the event belonged to Farah. He was the man the fans had come to see, and he did not disappoint them.

• Mo Farah
• Athletics
• Olympics 2012: athletics

• World 5,000m champion will run 1500m in Glasgow
• 'We are working on my weaknesses,' says British hope

It takes Mo Farah a shade under 27 minutes to run 10,000 metres. But right now he is thinking only about the final 51 seconds. Farah is convinced that is all the time it is going to take to determine whether he fulfils an ambition he has been pursuing for seven years, ever since London was awarded the Olympics. All the miles he has run since then, all the thankless hours pounding the road and track while thinking about that gold medal, and Farah says that in the end "it is definitely all going to come down to the last lap and maybe even down to point-something of a second".

That is why in Glasgow this Saturday Farah is doing something he has not done in three years – running a competitive 1500 metres. He and his coach, Alberto Salazar, have concocted a schedule for his season that will see Farah concentrate on honing his speed and his sprinting technique. "We are working on my weaknesses," Farah says. "Trying to cover all angles." He cannot be certain that he will double up in the 10,000m and the 5,000m at the Olympics because there are too many imponderables. Because the 10,000m falls first in the schedule, he is thinking of it as his only shot at winning a gold medal, even though he is world champion at the shorter of the two distances.

In the world championships last year, Farah's poor sprint finish cost him in the 10,000m. He was overtaken by Ethiopia's Ibrahim Jeilan as he came down the home straight. Everything he is doing now, including this 1500m race, is designed to ensure that he does not make the same mistakes this summer.

Salazar has been taking advice from Michael Johnson on how to improve Farah's sprinting technique and has been teaching him to shorten his stride, lift his legs and loosen his arms.

Farah says he suffered in those final metres in South Korea because he had a "lack of confidence and a lack of understanding" about how to handle a sprint finish. "Now we are doing a lot more work with weights, trying to become more explosive." When he lost to Jeilan, Farah's final lap took 53 seconds. He says he will need to do it in "51 or 52 seconds" to win gold in London. This race in Glasgow will match him against the Kenyan Augustine Choge, who won the Commonwealth 5,000m title in 2006 and who has a PB at 1500m that is more than three seconds faster than Farah's.

"I want to win," Farah says. "But it is not going to be as easy as saying: 'Mo should win.' I will see what I can do. I will try and learn from this race." This is his first race of the year – he only got back from high-altitude training in Kenya earlier this week, and he plans to run more 1500ms as the season goes on. It is all part of Salazar's plan to teach Farah how to relax in sprint finishes. At the worlds, Farah says he "wanted it too much". He tightened up. "I have to learn to try and relax in these races," he explains. "The reason why Alberto has got me doing this is he wants to see how relaxed I can be while sprinting."

A single lap. After 10,000m it is not a lot. In London Farah will have 80,000 people there roaring him on. "I hope when I am coming down the track into that sprint finish with 50m to go the crowd is going to make that difference," he says. It will help, but if Farah holds off the opposition and wins that gold in the summer it will have more to do with the groundwork he has done at events such as this one.

• Mo Farah
• Athletics
• Olympics 2012: athletics
• Olympic Games 2012

To conclude our five-part series, investigating Great Britain's progress in all 29 Olympic sports, we spotlights athletics and also look at volleyball, water polo, weightlifting and wrestling

The athletics team, as the head coach Charles van Commenee is always keen to point out, are under more pressure in this Olympics than any other British squad. And he is right. The success of the Games in the imagination of the general public is going to depend to a disproportionate degree on whether or not they can deliver.

Boil it down further still and you could argue that, other than the final standing in the medal table, nothing is going to matter more than the performances of the four athletes – Dai Greene, Mo Farah, Phillips Idowu and Jessica Ennis – who have a chance of winning gold medals.

Others may win silver and be considered successes but, harsh as it is for these four familiar names, second-best would be something of a disappointment. They are the billboard faces of the Olympics and no amount of silver and bronze would make up for their collective failure to win a gold or two.

Greene and Farah may have the best chances. There are five men in the world who have run the 400m hurdles faster than Greene, but he excels at winning when it matters most, which is why he is world, European and Commonwealth champion. Farah may run in the 5,000m and 10,000m, but he knows he will most likely have to beat the great Ethiopian Kenenisa Bekele, who is still working his way back to fitness after an injury-plagued 2011. Both Britons will have to get used to starting as favourites.

Ennis and Idowu, on the other hand, have both lost that status. Ennis now has to contend with being behind Russia's Tatyana Chernova, who beat her to heptathlon gold at the world championships last year. Chernova's winning score of 6,880 was 49 points beyond Denise Lewis's British record, never mind Ennis's PB. Similarly, Idowu has new rivals to beat in the form of France's Teddy Tamgho and the USA's Christian Taylor, who finished ahead of him at the world championships.

GB have a target of eight track and field medals, which looks ambitious given that they are unlikely to win anything in the relays.

They won seven medals in Daegu, but were a long way short of having the 15 or so contenders that Van Commenee thinks they need to win those eight. But the team have not missed their target at any major championships, indoor or outdoor, in the last three years.

A lot. Van Commenee says that the "indoor season will give us valuable information to use in the run-up to the Games". There have already been some promising early-season performances from young athletes seemingly inspired by the prospect of a home Olympics.

Holly Bleasdale cleared 4.87m in the Villeurbanne indoor arena in Lyon last Saturday, which put her fourth in the world's all-time pole vault rankings for the event. Robbie Grabarz, a 24-year-old high-jumper who has just had his lottery funding cut, set a world-leading mark of 2.34m at a different meet that same day. They could find themselves catapulted into the limelight.

Van Commenee, typically, is not getting carried away. "It is too early to celebrate, we must wait and see what the world [indoor] championships bring because it is a completely different thing to do it in a small meet midweek somewhere in the middle of nowhere and do it with the whole world watching you."

After the indoor season, and the world indoor championships, selection trials will take place from 22-24 June. The European championships in Helsinki follow soon after. No one can afford to coast under Van Commenee, and selection policy stipulates automatic places for athletes claiming the first two places at the trials, provided that they hold a current "A" standard or that they finished in the top eight in the worlds in 2011.

Charles van Commenee, performance director

"We are heading in the right direction. In the last three years we have been better every year and judging by what I have seen in training during the last three months, collectively we are still making progress as a team. Performances of athletes are a big factor when it comes to my general mood, and right now I am feeling quite positive.

"We will know more soon enough because the indoor season starts this Saturday in Glasgow. It will run for another six or seven weeks, before it finishes off with the World Indoor Championships in Istanbul in early March.

We have no big outstanding injury concerns. Obviously when we have about 80 athletes there are going to be a few who are not feeling 100%. But one of the good things that has happened over the last few years is that we now have a much better grip on the injury rate. It is constantly going down.

"I have just come back from camps in South Africa and Kenya and a big percentage of athletes were able to train during that. In athletics, injury rate is a very big factor, and we are in a good place at the moment."

Van Commenee, a man who is unaccustomed to failure, is a head coach who deserves faith. His team should meet their eight-medal target, though some of the medals will have to come from unexpected sources. What will matter more, though, is how many of those eight are gold, and that will come down to how well those four billboard names perform.

Life will never be the same again for anyone who wins gold.

Programme manager Kenny Barton

With six months to go … The preparations are going well, even if we don't quite have enough resources to do everything we possibly would if the situation was different. All our male and female players are abroad, playing for professional clubs in Europe – both the men's and the women's team are the same in that regard. The men's team has some extra funding from the world-class funding programme and UK Sport, which has really helped them focus over the last three or four years. We had a test event behind closed doors last July with Brazil, USA, Serbia, Egypt and Mexico – a similar pool to what we would face when we get to the Olympics. Each player is ranked in every tournament, – with statistics taken for every game – measuring how good your spike is, your block is, they measure you serving and your passing, and your setting up for the attack. And the top-ranked player was British, Dami Bakare, who is playing his volleyball in Belgium at the moment, so that was a huge fillip.

Medal tally prediction … I think you've got to be realistic about our starting point four years ago. We've climbed the performance ladder and now we're competing with and we're beating teams in the top 12. So anything can happen in the Olympics. When we get to the Olympics we've got five games. We will play every second day for 10 days. We will havee need to win two of our five games to get through to the Olympics quarter-finals, and that's our target for all teams. But having said that, should we get to the quarter-final, then we have one home game, with support that would be nothing short of incredible, to try and get to that semi, which would be an absolutely remarkable effort from each of our teams.

Key dates May 11: Men's Euro Cchamps v Albania. July 4: Women's Olympic holding camp

World class performance manager Joanna Wray

With six months to go … The women are going from strength to strength. Initiatives such as entering the team into the Hungarian National League have provided great opportunities for them to push on. Last year they beat Greece and Italy and played well against China and Spain. We have now qualified for the European championships for the first time in 15 years. The competition begins this week. The men are now part decentralised playing in professional clubs across Europe and gaining a huge amount of competitive experience playing against current Olympians from many countries. The men come back together for international duty, which has increased significantly in the last two years. This year the men have entered the World League for the first time and played very competitively against Italy – who are the 2011 world champions – losing 6-14 in an excellent match, and have also just lost against Russia in Kirishi 8-12, an improvement from when we played them in 2010, losing 5-11. With men's water polo having a long history in the Olympic Games, it is very hard to improve quickly in the sport, but our men are proving it can be done..

Medal tally prediction … With both teams we would like to be as competitive as possible at the Olympics. For both of them there are a number of competitions that will help to get us to that position. The women's main targeted event is the European championships where we hope to play as competitively as possible. As it is the first time we have qualified for the competition we want to come in the top seven and gain great experience of playing at this competition. The men will be based in their clubs until the end of May, coming together for the next two games in the World League – return fixtures against Italy and Russia. Then a variety of camps to bring the boys together as a team before a tournament in Holland and Dublin.

Key dates 16-29 January – European Championships, Eindhoven

2-6 May – test event in London

24 June – Team announcement (tbc)

12 July: Women's Olympic holding camp.

World-class performance director Fiona Lothian

With six months to go … Preparations are going quite well at this stage. We've got slots for three men and two women as the host nation, and competition for those spots is going to be quite tight. We've got a couple of competitions in February – the Tri Nations and the English championships, which will be the first run-out for everybody since they were out at the worlds in November. Then we've got the European championships, which will be one of the major selection events. For the boys there's Peter Kirkbride, Jack Oliver, Gareth Evans, Halil Zorba all aiming for the A standard, and for the girls we've got Zoe Smith and Natasha Purdue looking to do the same. Helen Jewell's been injured but is back training now too. Everyone's moving forward. There's been a lot of work on injury management trying to get the guys in the best possible shape that they can. And certainly everybody's base training consistently at the moment and looking forward to trying to get their name on the final squads list.

Medal tally prediction … We don't have any medal targets – we're not a medal target sport, but we're looking to try to put one or two women into an A final. With the men we're looking to finish top of or close to the top of a B group. I think at the moment we're on course for that. Things are going to plan, and certainly this is the final push for everybody but with most of the squad moving to training, consistent training, we've seen performance in training improve significantly.

Key dates 11 February Tri Nations: England v Norway v Sweden, Bristol; 18 Feb English championships, Oldbury, West Midlands; 6?15 Apr European senior championships, Antalya, Turkey; 26 May Final squad selection date.

Chief executive Colin Nicholson

With six months to go … We are looking forward to the Olympics and we're cautiously optimistic ahead of London 2012. Our next aim is to take part in the Olympic qualification events in Sofia and Beijing where we're hoping to get two to three athletes to qualify by right for the Games. We're also firming up a number of training camps abroad for our athletes. We're still waiting to see if some of our athletes are granted British passports by the Home Office. Hopefully that will be resolved soon so we can adjust our plans accordingly. I think wrestling will be a treat for anyone who hasn't seen it before – it is one of the original Olympic sports from ancient Greece and is fast and action-packed.

Medal tally prediction … UK Sport has set us a target of one or two athletes achieving a top-eight position and we're cautiously optimistic we can fulfil that. We're also putting together a talent pathway together so that British wrestlers will be prepared for 2016..

Key dates Mar 6-11: European champs, Belgrade. April 20-22: European Olympic qualifier, Sofia

• Olympics 2012: athletics
• Olympics 2012: wrestling
• Olympics 2012: weightlifting
• Olympics 2012: water polo
• Olympics 2012: volleyball and beach volleyball
• Weightlifting
• Athletics
• Olympic Games 2012

A US track legend advises British athletes: don't be overawed by the daily reminders, be inspired by them

As the winner of two gold medals at Atlanta 1996, the retired US sprinter Michael Johnson understands what is required to succeed at a home Games better than most. And with six months to go before London 2012, he believes that even Britain's most experienced Olympic athletes may be feeling the pressure in a way that they have never previously experienced.

"When you're preparing for a Games and you're living in a country where the Games is taking place, there's really a daily reminder of the opportunity that you have," Johnson says. "What you want to be able to do is just train for a championship like you normally would, without the added reminder that this is really more special than anything else. Athletes in the US right now don't have to deal with stories every day in the news about security, or budgets, or countdown clocks."

Even those who have chosen to pursue their training abroad may still struggle to keep their thoughts from speeding ahead. Johnson also claimed gold medals in Barcelona in 1992 and Sydney in 2000, yet he remains in no doubt as to which of his triumphs was the most significant. The opportunity to compete in a home Olympics is one that may not even come along once in a sporting lifetime.

"All these athletes will understand that an Olympics at home is extremely significant and a rare opportunity. Most athletes never, ever get an opportunity to take part in an Olympics at home. I spoke to Steve Redgrave recently, who won five Olympics – but none at home. Had I come along 10 years later than I did, then I could still have gone to three Olympics without having one at home."

And while winning at home will certainly boost an athlete's fanbase – as well as their opportunities for lucrative endorsements – the real thrill is far more emotive. "Fame is certainly a part of it, but much more than that it's the moment of standing on the podium receiving a medal. I was able to do it in Barcelona and Sydney as well, but … doing it in Atlanta, standing on that podium and having achieved success in front of the home crowd, is a much different feeling and a much different memory."

It is, however, a double-edged sword. Along with that opportunity to thrill a partisan crowd comes the possibility of letting a nation down. May the fear of disappointing others also prove disruptive to an athlete's preparations?

"It all depends how you choose to use that," Johnson says. "I chose not to worry about that, and I actually planned for that, to make sure that I was not affected by it. I didn't allow myself to think about 'what's going to happen when the Games are over?' There's nothing in that that's healthy and there's nothing in that that's going to help me to be successful with the task in front of me.

"Thinking about that isn't going to do anything for me in terms of the task at hand. I'm still going to have seven other athletes who are going to line up against me in the final. I've got three elimination rounds to get through to get to that final, in each one of my races. That's what I chose to focus on in those days leading up to the Games."

It is one thing to control your own emotions, another to handle those of others. At a home Games, athletes will almost invariably be in much closer contact with their family and friends. "Some of them automatically know and understand that they need to not bother the athlete and put any extra pressure on the athlete," Johnson says. "Some will not know that and will actually call you on the day and say: 'Oh, I just read this in the paper about you.'

"It depends how the athlete handles it as well, you have to early on set some guidelines and say: 'Even though I'm right around the corner from you and we normally catch up every day or whatever, that's not going to be able to happen during the Games' … or whatever that athlete feels comfortable with. My family, fortunately, were always a very positive input for me."

In the end, says Johnson, the aim for any successful athlete must always be to recreate the setup that has worked for them in the past. "Even though you know the route to the stadium, you know the city, it's going to be a different city when the Games arrive. There are going to be so many people, roads that were previously accessible will be cut off, there will security everywhere. You have to build in a little more time for everything, so take the same approach you always have.

"And because that approach has generally been one of 'I don't know this place, I'm not familiar' … you're usually a little more on top of things with how you approach for that competition. So the message is – just because you're at home, don't let down your guard."

Michael Johnson is a member of the Laureus World Sports Academy, a unique association of 47 sporting legends. The Laureus World Sports Awards take place at Central Hall, Westminster on Monday 6 February. www.laureus.com

• Olympic Games 2012
• Olympics 2012: athletics
• Athletics

• Pole vaulter failed with three jumps in South Korea
• 20-year-old is now fourth on all-time world list

The pole vaulter Holly Bleasdale, who is suddenly fourth on the all-time world list after a stunning jump of 4.87 metres in Lyon at the weekend, has said the crushing experience of failing to register a height at the world championships last year has improved her chances of success at the London Games.

The 20-year-old, who took up the sport only four years ago and, having won the European Under-23 championships in Ostrava, arrived in Daegu for her debut at the worlds last year, only to fail with all her three jumps at 4.25m in South Korea. The disappointment made her break down in tears after her third and final failed jump but she says the experience has made her a better athlete.

"I think it is good to have had an experience like that [in Daegu]. Firstly I got to experience what a big competition like the world championships was like and that is good with the Olympics coming up. I think what happened there has made me a stronger athlete and more determined in training," she said. "I have remembered what happened there and that has pushed me to work really hard in training, and that has obviously paid off with the height I reached in France at the weekend."

Her result in Lyon on Sunday has made her a contender for a gold medal at the Olympics – it was the second-highest jump ever indoors and she also made a decent attempt at Yelena Isinbayeva's world record of 5m – and she thinks she will thrive on the pressure of being a home medal hope.

"I think it is great that the Olympics are in London. It makes me feel as if I am under pressure and I thrive under pressure. When I was in Lyon there were so many people screaming and shouting and it made me compete so much better," she said. "And if you multiply that by 50, then you get what it is going to be like in London; it will just be an amazing atmosphere and I think it will help me."

Bleasdale's progress is a remarkable achievement considering that, at the end of 2010, she was ranked 62nd in the world and had a personal best of 4.35m. A year later she was in the top 10 in the world, having jumped 4.71m. Now she has cleared 4.87m and, according to herself, there is more to come. "I think I have made that kind of progress over the past 12 months because I had so much to work on," she said. "My technique has got a lot better. It is still not perfect but it has got better and I've just started doing strengthening conditioning. We've just increased the workload really."

In addition Bleasdale and her French coach, Julien Raffalli-Ebezant, have just introduced a nutritionist and a psychologist to prepare her for the Olympics. "I have only just started covering these aspects and I think I could get a lot stronger mentally. I've got a lot to work on with those aspects and, as I have only just started covering them, they are parts of my training that are only going to improve."

• Olympics 2012: athletics
• Athletics
• Olympic Games 2012

Rand's supporters in her home town of Wells argue that she's undervalued and want her made a freeman of the city

Women athletes have always struggled to break out of the sports pages and into the national consciousness, a miserable fact highlighted by their total absence from the shortlist for the latest BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. But there was one decade when women counted. Between 1961 and 1971, half the winners of the BBC award were women, three of them athletes – the sprinter Dorothy Hyman, the pentathlete Mary Peters, and in 1964 the most complete competitor of them all, Mary Rand. Rand's supporters in her home town of Wells argue that she's undervalued, and want her made a freeman of the city. The first British woman to win an Olympic medal, at Tokyo she won three: gold with a new world record in the long jump, silver in the pentathlon, and a bronze in the 4x100m relay. Glamorous, engaging and the mother of a young daughter; after that anything seemed possible. Fifty years on, it doesn't look quite so easy.

• Women
• Athletics

Well, it's not every year that the greatest sporting show on earth comes to our neck of the woods, is it?

Yes, really. The Olympics. London 2012 has been a source of almost frantic pessimism from pretty much the moment the Games were awarded, its progress towards readiness subjected to a distinctly British brand of roundhead miserabilism: the totting up of costs, the preoccupation with traffic problems, the minute cataloguing of infrastructure wastage. But an odd thing has begun to happen in the past 12 months. As the world has continued to fall apart all round it, the approaching shadow of the Games has somehow lightened a little. When you're a little bit broke, holding an Olympics looks like an unnecessary burden. When you're absolutely stony rock-bottom broke, well, you might as well have a party and the first two weeks of August look like a moment of much-needed jollity in the dark. Plus there is even some good news: fiscally, this was supposed to have been a disaster, but it is instead merely a budget-pushing headache. The stadiums will be ready. The opening ceremony has been fireworked-up with next week's rent money, but in essence London 2012 may end up being a relatively sleek and austere frothing global sports beano. More importantly, the Games are a wondrous sporting event in themselves. Beneath the insincerity of the Olympic industry there is a genuine purity to the efforts of amateur athletes whose lives are packaged into an impecunious, four-yearly pursuit of generational glory. Developing world nations will dominate on the track, but even for our own partially-funded athletes – such as Scott Overall, Team GB's top marathon man, who works part-time in a sports shop, or the fencer Chrystall Nicoll, one of many British athletes to have put a career on hold to train in hope – not to mention the entire competing body of the Paralympics, this is a labour of sporting love. The Olympics were founded as an inspirational spectacle in the toughest of times. Perhaps, beneath the bombast, they might even be something a little similar once again.

• Olympic Games 2012
• Athletics
• Olympics 2012: athletics
• Olympics 2012: fencing

• British triple jumper's main rival for gold to miss London 2012
• Nelson Evora's injury denies Idowu chance to 'beat the best'

Phillips Idowu said it was "in no way good news for me" that his biggest rival for the Olympic triple jump gold will miss London 2012. Nelson Evora will be unable to defend his Olympic title because of the recurrence of a serious injury to his right leg that will need another operation. The 27-year-old Portuguese collapsed in agony while warming up for his first indoor event of the year in Lisbon.

Evora's absence leaves Idowu, Britain's former world champion, and the world champion Christian Taylor, as the leading contenders for the Olympic title but Idowu tweeted: "I wish him a speedy recovery. Nelson Evora's injury is in no way good news for me. I want to compete and win against the best."

Evora's problem is with his right shinbone, which required an operation to repair a stress fracture in 2010. "Given the necessary recovery time, it is out of the question to take part in the Olympics," he told insidethegames.biz. "But I don't want anyone to think this injury means I'm finished. I have a lot of competitions ahead.

"The popping sound at the track was a recurrence of a previous injury but it is not as serious as first imagined. I feel mentally strong and now my priority is to heal myself to return."

The triple jump field for London 2012 looked as if it would also lack Teddy Tamgho, the world indoor champion, after the Frenchman faced a 12-month ban following an altercation with a female athlete at a training camp.

But the 22-year-old, who holds the world indoor record of 17.92m and has produced the third longest outdoor jump of all time with 17.98, had six months of his punishment suspended and is due to return to action on 18 May.

• This article was amended on 24 January 2012. The original said the world indoor triple jump record held by Teddy Tamgho is 19.92m, and also said Tamgho has produced the third longest outdoor jump of all time with 19.98m. This has been corrected.

• Phillips Idowu
• Olympic Games 2012
• Olympics 2012: athletics
• Athletics

• Ethiopian Athletics Federation bans 35 athletes
• Olympic 5,000m and 10,000m champions affected

Ethiopia has indefinitely banned 35 athletes – including the Olympic men's 5,000 and 10,000 metres champion Kenenisa Bekele – from competition in a row over training, the technical director of the Ethiopian Athletics Federation has said.

The body, angry about flagging results in the past few years, summoned 200 athletes to a training camp two months ago ahead of the World Indoor Championships in March and the London Olympics in July and August.

But Bekele and other athletes including the Olympic women's 5,000 and 10,000 gold medallist Tirunesh Dibaba ignored the call-up, the technical director Dube Jilo said.

"We have banned 35 athletes, including Kenenisa and Tirunesh, from competing in any event," he said. "It has been two months now since we summoned every athlete in contention, but this group has so far failed to respond."

Dibaba was not immediately available for comment, but Bekele, who has yet to decide if he will compete in London anyway, told Reuters he had been injured.

"I have not discussed the details with the federation," he said. "My injury is quite serious and I would not be able to bring back the performance of old for the time being. I'm only receiving a combination of treatment and training at the moment. It will take weeks before I return to ordinary training, and some two to three months before I return to competition."

The 29-year-old, who had not raced on the track since 2009 because of injury, dropped out of the 10,000m at last year's world championships in Daegu, South Korea, after 10 laps. However, he was back to his best at the Brussels Diamond League meeting later in the season, setting a year's best for the 10,000m.

For years a powerhouse in long-distance track events, Ethiopia has lost ground in recent years, with local commentators concerned by a lack of talent coming through the ranks to replace the likes of the great Haile Gebrselassie.

After a disappointing world championships in Daegu, where Ethiopia won a single gold medal, the country's athletics chiefs decided to revamp their preparations for upcoming events. "There is a lack of commitment, and our preparations haven't been up to standard so far," Dube said, adding that the ban would be reconsidered as soon as the athletes involved reported for training.

• Athletics
• Olympic Games 2012
• Ethiopia

• Wilson tested positive for testosterone and clenbuterol
• Four-year ban upheld by National Anti-Doping Panel

The British sprinter Bernice Wilson has had a four-year ban confirmed after losing an appeal against the sanction imposed following her positive test for two steroids.

Wilson, 27, from Lincolnshire, broke into the British team last year and competed at the European indoor championships in Paris in March but tested positive for excess levels of testosterone and for clenbuterol on 12 June.

An independent National Anti-Doping Panel handed out a four-year ban against which Wilson appealed, and UK Anti-Doping (UKAD) confirmed on Friday that she had lost her appeal.

UKAD's chief executive, Andy Parkinson, said: "We have successfully argued for a four-year ban, which demonstrates that UK Anti-Doping always seeks robust sanctions against athletes who look to cheat the system and betray those around them.

"This sends a strong message to anyone looking to dope in the UK and gives clean athletes the confidence that we are working hard on their behalf, within the framework of the World Anti-Doping Code, to protect their right to compete in doping-free sport."

A first doping offence normally carries a two-year suspension but it can be increased to four years for "aggravating circumstances" including if an athlete tests positive for more than one banned substance.

In its decision, the National Anti-Doping Panel said Wilson was an "experienced and senior athlete" who saw herself as a role model to younger athletes. "Far from admitting her guilt … she sought to blame other people," the panel said in its ruling.

The appeal panel confirmed the four-year ban, said Wilson's arguments were "entirely without merit" and ordered her to pay UK Anti-Doping's costs arising from the appeal.

Wilson had been almost unknown in athletics until 2010 and qualified for the European indoors in Paris with a personal best 60 metres time of 7.25sec.

• Drugs in sport
• Athletics

The European heptathlon champion on her diet secrets – and why all athletes like Nando's

Current European and Indoor champion, as well as silver medallist at the world championships. Jessica is the unofficial "face of the Games"

"People expect athletes to eat a certain way. Everyone says: 'You must be on a really strict diet. Do you only eat salad?' Are you not allowed to eat chocolate? But that's really not the case. I've got salad and vegetables in my shopping trolley but there's always some chocolate in there, too. Athletes eat normal food – they all love Nando's, like everyone else. One thing the nutritionist did tell me, which I never realised, is how bad for you flapjacks are – they are really high in calories.

The night before I compete I make sure I've eaten enough carbohydrate and protein to perform well, then on the morning of competition I get so nervous I feel really sick so I have to force myself to eat so I'll have enough energy for a long day. We start warming up at 8am and our last event is at 9pm, so we don't get back to the hotel until midnight to eat again. You have to make sure you're fuelled up for all that time. What I eat depends on the event. I'll eat something quite heavy before I do the shot put because the digestion time doesn't matter too much, but I don't eat or drink a lot before the high jump because I want to be as light as possible.

Sometimes I get those days where I don't want to be so disciplined. You think: 'I've trained really hard, I just want to have a Chinese.' It's OK to have a little relapse every now and then but I can't have a chow mein every day or I'd be rolling round the track! I'm so hungry and so tired by the end of the heptathlon that I just want to indulge. If I could eat whatever I liked I'd go out for a slap-up Italian meal or a Chinese takeaway. Anything bad for me, basically.

I do most of the cooking at home, because I'm a better cook than my fiancé Andy. I make a nice lasagne or Italian meatballs with spaghetti. My mum and dad are both really good cooks so I've been brought up with good food. I'm not picky – there's only a couple of things I don't really like – fish and milk. My dad's Jamaican so he made a lot of Jamaican food, and my mum did lots of traditional shepherd's pies and homemade quiches, but I was brought up on some really minging things as well – my mum gave me liquidised tripe when I was a baby. How disgusting is that?"

Jessica Ennis is an ambassador for Aviva

• Jessica Ennis
• Food & drink
• Nutrition
• Olympic Games 2012
• Olympics 2012: athletics
• Health & wellbeing
• Athletics

We look back at the 1948 Olympic Games when a 30-year-old mother of two from Holland put all the pre-games criticism behind her and blazed her way to four gold medals

The Dutchwoman demolished prejudices about gender, age and motherhood and, as a pioneer who inspired millions at the 1948 London Games, established the legitimacy of women's sport
• Relive Blankers-Koen's feat in pictures

Moments after King George VI had declared the Games of the XIV Olympiad open and the former Cambridge University 400m runner John Mark had lit the Olympic flame in Wembley Stadium, the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, stood to make his dedicatory address.

"When the Games are over," he said, "those who have taken part in them should return to their homes as torch bearers, not indeed bearing the visible light just carried into the arena but with the flame of goodwill burning in their hearts and continuing to burn there long after the Olympic flame has been extinguished."

Fanny Blankers-Koen, named the women athlete of the 20th century by the International Association of Athletics Federations in 1999 at a gala in Monte Carlo, was not there to hear his words. Her husband and coach, Jan Blankers, had refused her permission to walk with the Netherlands team in the opening parade, deeming it "too tiring". But the Dutchwoman, who went on to emulate Jesse Owens's four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics 12 years earlier, embodied the archbishop's aspirations more than anyone else, demolishing prejudices about gender, age and motherhood and, as a pioneer and standard-bearer who inspired millions, establishing the legitimacy of women's sport in an Olympic movement that had been the preserve of male competitors until 1928.

The woman lauded for her feats on Wembley's damp and unresponsive cinder track as "the Flying Housewife" and, more cleverly, "the flying Dutchmam", was 30 and the mother of a six-year-old son, Jantje, and three-year-old daughter, Fanneke.

Born in Baarn in the province of Utrecht, Blankers-Koen's father, Arnold Koen, a farmer who competed in the shot and discus, encouraged his daughter to take up athletics. Impressed by her effervescence – she used to run at full pelt on errands, vaulting the garden gate – Arnold took her along with him to local meetings where she quickly began to win multiple events. She also showed immense promise at swimming and skating but concentrated on athletics after joining the Amsterdam Dames' Athletic Club in 1935 at the age of 16, cycling the 18 miles there and back from her home in Hoofddorp.

A year later she set a national record for the 800m, an event that would have precluded her from Olympic glory. At the Amsterdam Games in 1928 Lina Radke won the 800m in world-record time but six of the nine runners in the final had collapsed with exhaustion in extreme humidity and the event was banned until 1960.

Blankers-Koen's versatility saved her from international obscurity and her aptitude for sprinting and jumping earned her a place in the Dutch team for the 1936 Olympics where she finished sixth in the high jump and fifth as a member of the 4x100m relay team. In Berlin she met Owens, his autograph becoming her most treasured possession. "When I met him again at the Munich Olympics in 1972," she recalled, "I said I still have your autograph, I'm Fanny Blankers-Koen. He said: 'You don't have to tell me who you are, I know everything about you.' Isn't that incredible? Jesse Owens knew who I was."

In 1938 she set her first world record, 11sec dead for the 100 yards, and won bronze medals in the 100m and 200m at the European Championships held in Vienna. The Dutch press predicted that the 1940 Olympics, scheduled to be held in Helsinki, would be her stage to shine. However, international sport was suspended on the outbreak of war in 1939 and Blankers-Koen spent the next six years at home near Amsterdam which was occupied following the German invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940 and not liberated until the Nazis officially surrendered in May 1945.

In 1940 she had married her coach, Jan Blankers, twice a former national triple-jump champion who was 14 years her senior. Domestic sport continued under occupation and Blankers-Koen set six world records – in the high jump, long jump, 80m hurdles, 100 yard dash, 4x110 yard relay and 4x200m relay – from 1942-44. All were achieved after the birth of her son and in the face of criticism that she was acting selfishly by not retiring to devote herself solely to motherhood.

The family survived the Hongerwinter of 1944-45, when the German blockade cut off supplies of food to the Nazi-occupied regions of the Netherlands and famine was widespread, and she gave birth to Fanneke in 1945, the year of liberation. She did not train during the latter stages of pregnancy but after seven months off she resumed her regime, absurdly light by modern standards, of twice weekly two-hour sessions, taking the children with her to the track in the basket of her bicycle.

"What will happen to my milk supply if I train and race?" she asked her doctor. Her concerns were assuaged enough to attempt to carry on when he replied: "You won't know until you try."

At the first post-war European Championships, held at the Bislett Stadium in Oslo in August 1946, Blankers-Koen won the 80m hurdles, anchored the 4x100m squad to gold and finished fourth in the high jump.

In 1948, at the age of 30, she ran a world-record equalling 11.5sec for the 100m but was subjected to intense criticism for stating her intention to travel to London for the Olympics. "I got very many bad letters, people writing that I must stay home with my children and that I should not be allowed to run on a track with – how do you say it? – short trousers," she told the New York Times in 1982. "But I was a good mother. I had no time for much besides my house chores and training, and when I went shopping it was only to buy food for the family and never to buy dresses.

"One newspaperman wrote that I was too old to run, that I should stay at home and take care of my children. When I got to London, I pointed my finger at him and I said: 'I show you.'"

Probability suggests she was referring to Jack Crump, who was not only the honorary secretary of the British Amateur Athletic Board and team manager of the Olympic athletics team but also a BBC commentator and Daily Telegraph athletics correspondent. What is certain is that Crump's famous pre-Games verdict, that Blankers-Koen was "too old to make the grade", was as miscalculated and provocative a sporting prediction as the one Alan Hansen delivered on Manchester United's title ambitions after one game of the 1995-96 Premier League season.

A pre-Games stipulation that athletes could enter only a maximum of three individual events meant that Blankers-Koen was forced to forgo the high and long jumps in which she was the current world record holder.

Germany and Japan were barred from participating at London 1948 and the Soviet Union declined an invitation to compete. Great Britain, mired in austerity to pay back the debts accrued during the second world war, was not even able as host to supply food for the visiting athletes who had to bring their own provisions to London. Based with four other teams at St Helen's school in Norwood, Blankers-Koen took the train to Wembley for each of her events, completing her journey on foot.

Her first event was the 100m and she won her heat and semi-final comfortably. Clement Attlee, in his opening address as prime minister, had said: "May the weather be fine, the events well contested and may records be broken." He was to be disappointed with the first of these ambitions, much of the athletics programme took part in wet and windy conditions.

Blankers-Koen felt that the margins of victory she achieved to qualify for the final had been deceptive, thinking her fellow sprinters had been holding themselves back. But wearing the white shirt and orange shorts of the Dutch team, her knees pumping high and her head held back, she discovered that her pre-eminence had not been an illusion, storming to the tape three yards ahead of Great Britain's Dorothy Manley. "If I won gold I had told my father he should dance around the table," she said. "On the radio I told him it was time to start dancing after I won the 100m."

That night back at her digs she told her husband: "I am an Olympic champion and I don't want to run any more." She said she had achieved her goal and that she was missing her children but Jan knew her better, an impression her daughter, who did not subscribe to the common perception of her mother in later years as a benevolent and modest person, recounted in Kees Kooman's biography Een Koningen Met Mannenbenen – A Queen with Man's Legs. "My mother never loved herself and, the other way round, she could not give love and friendship herself to other people," she said. "My mother only enjoyed herself when she was being worshipped."

Blankers told her to go to bed and rest for the following day's hurdles heats and she qualified with ease. The final, however, was her toughest race so far and Blankers-Koen said she had felt intimidated by the home favourite Maureen Gardner's form in the preceding races. She started poorly. "Nobody could have felt less like a champion," she said. "My knees trembled. I hit the fifth hurdle, my style went to pieces and I staggered home like a drunkard." The roars of the crowd as the Dutchwoman and Britain's Gardner seemed to hit the tape, literally neck and neck, suggested to Blankers-Koen that her rival would get the decision but, as she told the Sunday Times' David Walsh in 1999, she thought she had nicked it. "I just leaned forward enough to get in front of Maureen. I leaned so low, the tape cut my neck and the blood trickled on to my vest." She was right, she had won and Jan embraced her. "See, you aren't too old after all," he said.

Again she said she felt she had achieved enough and tried to withdraw from the 200m. Sobbing in the Wembley dressing rooms minutes before the start of her heat she told her husband she wanted to go home. "You can go home if you wish," he said. "But in time you will be sorry. Just go out there and try to make the final, that will be enough." She stormed into the final and on 6 August, after a rain delay, slaughtered the field, beating Britain's Audrey Williamson into silver by 0.7sec, still the largest margin of victory in an Olympics 200m final.

That night she had the party she craved after winning the 100m, going to a party in the West End with journalists and savouring a glass of wine. The next morning she went shopping, spending so long choosing her ideal raincoat that by the time the crowded train delivered her to Wembley her team-mates in the relay squad had already begun warming up on the track.

She was running the anchor leg and the efforts of Xenia Stad de Jong, Gerda van der Kade-Koudijs and Nettie Witziers-Timmer had put her in fourth place when she received the baton, a few yards behind Australia's Joyce King. "I thought to myself I could never win this, never, never, never," she said. "Then with 50m to go I thought: 'Maybe I have a chance.' I ran faster than I have ever run, getting closer all the time, until a couple of metres from the line, I went into the lead."

Two days later she boarded a train at Liverpool Street for Harwich and the journey home to Amsterdam. In her luggage were the four gold medals, 64 years later still the greatest individual haul by a woman track and field athlete, at a single Olympic Games. She went home to receive Queen Juliana's praise, a knighthood in the Order of Orange Nassau and a gift of a bicycle from the people of Amsterdam. But more than that she went home with the spoils of victory over sexism that kept the Archbishop of York's beacon of hope burning for the women of the world.

The King and Queen entered the Royal Box here today a few moments too late to see one of the finest races so far in the London Olympic Games. They missed seeing F Blankers-Koen (Holland) pressed so hotly to the last inch of the women's 80 metres hurdles by both M Gardner (Great Britain) and SB Strickland (Australia) that though she won in a new world and Olympic record time of 11.2sec, Gardner was so close that they both returned the same time and Strickland was barely a yard away.

Blankers-Koen is easily the outstanding all-round woman athlete of her day. Off the track she is as feminine as man's capricious heart could wish. On it not only is she as expert technically as most men champions but her actual foot and leg movements are straight like a man's rather than a woman's and temperamentally she is a lesson to all. She is cheerful before going to her mark, is as steady as a rock on it and then starts as though she herself had been fired.

In today's final Gardner was at her best and much cooler than yesterday. She actually had the better of the start and led over the first hurdle. At the seventh flight, however, the Dutch woman was a yard ahead and Strickland was coming with a great rush. Gardner was quicker away again on the run-in, gained on both and left many of the spectators in delicious half-belief in a British victory.

• Athletics
• Olympic Games 2012

The mother of two toddlers is preparing for her fifth Olympic Games by slogging along Kenyan dirt tracks with Mo Farah

"It will be the hardest day," Paula Radcliffe says as she imagines waking up in the mountains of Kenya on Tuesday morning with the certain knowledge that her first thoughts will be with her daughter on the other side of the world. "Isla turns five [on Tuesday] and you can guess how I'm going to feel being away from her. I've missed other birthdays, because I have to work at this time of year, but this feels more difficult.

"In the past, if I had to be away, we've managed it so that she's not really noticed the difference. We've brought her party forward by a couple of days so I could be there. But she's getting older and so this is the first time I've not been there for her actual party. Hopefully, with all the excitement, she won't miss me too much. But it's not going to be an easy day for me."

Even on Skype, with dusk settling across Radcliffe's training camp at 6.30 in the evening and small echoes of the Kenyan bush around her, it's possible to track her regret. Her day had begun, this past Sunday, with another early run. Radcliffe ran for 19 miles, tracking Mo Farah and the men, loping past herds of giraffe in the distance, with yelping barefoot children trying to keep up with the British athletes as images of Isla and London sometimes reeled through her head.

I've met Radcliffe enough times to know how much the loss of days like her daughter's birthday eat away at her. There are feelings of guilt and emptiness even when, as a marathon runner rather than just a mother, she rationalises the need to be apart from Isla and her one-year-old son, Raphael. "I was in Kenya in November," she says, "and it's almost a month this time. I really, really miss the children and I kind of miss Gary [her husband] as well. I miss him as a coach and a husband. But, as an athlete, there are advantages being with a team and getting regular physio and running with Mo at high altitude."

Farah has also had to leave his young daughter, and wife, to continue his preparations for the London Olympics. But the expectations and demands of motherhood exert more pressure on Radcliffe – and also illustrate the depth of her sacrifice as she tries to finally overcome her past bitter disappointments.

London 2012 is the fifth successive Olympic Games for which she has qualified and it will be the last in which she runs. Her best so far is a fourth place in the 10,000m at the Sydney Olympics almost a dozen years ago. But the far more haunting and injury-ravaged failures of Athens in 2004 and Beijing in 2008 still shadow her greatest achievements – including the fact she has run the three fastest times by a woman in a marathon.

Her extraordinary world record of 2hr 15min 25sec, set in 2003, should overwhelm everything else; but Radcliffe has been defined equally, and often cruelly, by her Olympic disasters.

Radcliffe once told me that she loved setting "realistic and dream goals" every New Year's Eve. On 31 December 2011, in between her Kenyan training camps, she repeated the ritual. "I set myself some specific goals, but the key one is just getting myself into as good a shape as possible for one day this year: the Olympic marathon. You can wish as hard as you like but all that really matters is the shape you're in on the day of the race. I've always felt these really big races aren't necessarily won by whoever is the fastest. They're won by the athlete who is the smartest and in the best shape on the day."

Radcliffe qualified for the London Olympics last September by finishing third in the Berlin marathon in a time of 2:23.46 which she still describes as "really disappointing".

She was seven minutes within the Olympic qualifying mark but her race symbolised "the crappy year" she endured in 2011. Florence Kiplagat, the Kenyan winner in Berlin and one of the favourites for Olympic gold, set a personal best of 2:19.44 – a time that remains well within Radcliffe's range. "If I'm fit then a faster time than that is definitely feasible for me," Radcliffe says. "I'd say getting down to 2:18 or even 2:17 is realistic. Hopefully, that would be more than good enough to win. I don't think we're going to get a red-hot time – especially as it's going to be a summer day and we're only starting at 11 in the morning. But you never know. The weather in London could be 15 or 35 degrees. We have to prepare for both but I still think 2:17 or 2:18 would do it."

Radcliffe has never lost a marathon in London and she is boosted further by the memory that the 2008 Olympic marathon was won by the 38-year-old Constantina Dita of Romania in 2:26.44. "She didn't come out of left-field," says Radcliffe, who also turned 38 last month. "She'd been around a long time but it just happened that all the big favourites got things wrong. Constantina probably didn't think she was going to win a medal but she ran the perfect race for herself. It happened to be enough on that particular day."

The field in London is likely to be much stronger than it was in Beijing four years ago. "Definitely. You've got three great Kenyans – whoever they pick – and you can't ignore the Ethiopians, the Japanese and the Russians. There are a lot of potential winners out there."

It's still easy for Radcliffe to imagine herself among them – if she can somehow hold her fragile body together and withstand the emotional turmoil that has afflicted her past Olympic ordeals. She suggests she is coping better than her often intense husband. "It's been a very long buildup," she says, "and on the whole Gary's not too bad. But he does worry and stress out more than I do. It's to be expected in a year like this one. But that's why having the kids around is great. You can't waste too much time fretting because there are so many things to do. Even Gary gets distracted from 2012."

Radcliffe laughs her jangly laugh before becoming more serious. "We've both said to each other that the important thing is not to panic this year. You can only do your best and prepare as well as possible and with any luck that will be good enough. So it certainly feels like one of my most relaxed Olympic buildups."

The problem for Radcliffe, however, remains the doubt around her fitness. Last year she was beset by back and foot injuries and an overactive thyroid that almost led to her considering retirement. "I thought something was badly wrong with me. I couldn't run hard any more. I couldn't do my sessions and I started to get very down. I was asking a lot of questions about myself and I wasn't enjoying it any more. So it was a huge relief when I finally got the diagnosis. At least I knew it wasn't just that I was too old and couldn't do it any more. That helped me get through it."

Radcliffe's thyroid has now been regulated and she also appears to be making a full recovery from the operation to an ankle last autumn, when a bone spur was removed. "I still get a bit of post-op fatigue at the end of the longest runs but it's not affected my training. I did sessions on the track over Christmas that I haven't been able to do since 2009 because my foot couldn't cope. It can now. So I'm just being careful on the really rocky trails we have out here.

"Today, for example, was a really good day. Twenty of us set off this morning and I was really pleased. I went better than last week. I hung on as long as possible with Mo and Ben [Whitby] and that was good. But by the end they were gone a long way further up the road than me."

Radcliffe carries a special affection for Farah, an athlete she has supported and mentored for years. Farah won world championship gold and silver medals in last year's 5,000m and 10,000m, but how is he coping with the gathering weight of expectation around his Olympic chances?

"I'm really impressed with how Mo is handling things. There's a lot of pressure on him and he did a workout yesterday and there were so many people going down to watch him. I know what that's like and it's an added pressure and stress you can do without. But it seems to roll off him and he has matured so much in the last year. He's really got his head right."

She becomes animated when assessing the huge strides Farah has made. "I always knew Mo had this potential. You could see it in 2010 in the command he had at the Europeans. But even then he was still drifting a little and he wasn't getting the coaching guidance he needed. There were little things he could improve in a big way but ever since he's hooked up with Alberto Salazar [his new coach] he's really settled. They've concentrated on small areas – and he's now so much stronger and more stable in his core. He's not rocking and rolling and that translates to a good few seconds over five and 10k."

Farah has yet to experience the public pressure which Radcliffe has known for so many years. "It is a concern," she says. "I would say it's the biggest concern. But he's smart and he's got everything planned between now and then and I guess he's not going to be in the UK aside from racing. That's a good thing because it means you're removed from that pressure. But, for an athlete, the biggest pressure comes from within. You know what you want to do and what you're capable of. So it's a case of keeping his head firmly screwed on and not panicking."

Radcliffe says those words so passionately she could be talking to herself. Despite days like Tuesday when she can only accept missing her birthday girl by running hard in the Kenyan hills, she sounds like an athlete primed for one last tilt at glory. "I have a very good gut feel about this year," she says. "My gut tells me it's going to be a good year."

And then, down the line, and across the continents, Radcliffe emits a wry little laugh. "I guess your gut only knows so much. So we'll see. But I'm feeling good. I'm feeling strong."

• Paula Radcliffe
• Olympics 2012: athletics
• Olympic Games 2012
• Mo Farah
• Athletics