At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Great Britain ranked thirty-sixth in the medals table, finishing below countries like Algeria, Belgium and Kazakhstan. It was their worst ever record, a dismal performance labelled a national disgrace. But then something happened. In Sydney in 2000 and then Athens in 2004, Team GB achieved a much more respectable tenth place. BY 2008, in Beijing, they finished fourth with forty-seven medals. How had they so convincingly reversed their fortunes? In Game Changers we meet the incredible coaches who rethink how sport is played, how it is performed, how people train and how people coach. In Liverpool in the late 1980s, a motley group - a mathematician, a physiologist, a psychologist and a former Olympic basketball player - began to pioneer ways of tracking performance. Over the decades that followed, performance analysis came of age. Incredible technological leaps have led to devices such as the OptimEye S5, developed by two Australian mechanical engineers to combine fifteen different sensors which monitor every aspect of athletic performance. These advances are now the gold standard in sport: providing the world's best athletes with a competitive edge that has been crucial to some of the most extraordinary victories of all time. Joao Medeiros's fascinating, insightful account takes us behind the scenes to tell the stories of this sporting revolution and disclose its secrets. We'll find out how the England rugby team used match analysis software and a vision coach to win their first ever World Cup, how a middling football team with no budget and older players found extraordinary success in the best football league in the world using tactics based purely on statistics, how Britain transformed itself from one of the worst to the world's best cycling nation. And we learn too how surgeons, police forces, dancers and business leaders are applying these skills to all aspects of everyone's lives.

At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Great Britain ranked thirty-sixth in the medals table, finishing below countries like Algeria, Belgium and Kazakhstan. It was their worst ever record, a dismal performance labelled a national disgrace. But then something happened. In Sydney in 2000 and then Athens in 2004, Team GB achieved a much more respectable tenth place. By 2016, in Rio, they finished second, above China and Russia, with sixty-seven medals. How have they so convincingly reversed their fortunes? In Game Changers we meet the coaches and sports scientists who rethink how sport is analysed and understood, how athletes train and perform under pressure. In Liverpool in the 1980s, a motley group - a mathematician, a physiologist, a psychologist and a former Olympic basketball player - began to pioneer new ways of tracking performance. Over the decades that followed, performance analysis came of age, becoming an essential component of any elite team, from English Premier League title winners Manchester City to America's Cup high-performance sailing teams. Using a hybrid of scientific method and trial-and-error, scientists have uncovered the tenets of accelerated learning, the mechanics of physiological adaptation, the organisational principles behind elite teams, the understanding of how hormones and environment affect performance. These discoveries are not confined to athletic endeavours - they are universal and reveal what it takes to win not only in sports, but are applicable across a wide range of disciplines, including business, leadership and education.