London 2012: Handball progress report

Podium athletes None Development athletes 30 UK Sport Mission 2012 progress rating Amber Lorraine Brown, performance director In the past year we have … continued to make steady progress in making our teams competitive in 2012, with wins for the women against Finland and Portugal, and the men gaining their first competitive game on home soil against Bulgaria. In the next two years we will ... focus on gaining greater international exposure for our young players and develop a culture to ensure that GB teams are best prepared to compete on home soil, with around 60 international games, to help achieve our target of a top eight finish at the London 2012 Games for both our men's and women's teams. Medal tally prediction … It is expected that the GB teams will be the youngest competing handball teams at the Olympic games, and we will use the experience of London 2012 as a springboard to gain a by-right qualification for Rio in 2016. We are in our first full Olympic quadrennial cycle, and as other Olympic sports have shown it takes three full cycles for the systematic high performance programmes to produce podium-winning performances. The focus is to maximise the opportunity that a home Olympic games provides to best prepare the teams for a credible performance and ensuring that there is a sustainable high performance pathway in place for beyond London to Rio 2016, and the Olympics in 2020.