Canada’s pursuit of medals at these Olympic Games may be relentless, hard-nosed and beyond the tastes of your old Corinthian types, but what it has undoubtedly been is very, very smart.
So smart that they bottled Can$8 million (about £4.9 million) of investment, handed it to the best science laboratories in the country and challenged them to deliver the most hi-tech advances in world sport.
In most countries, such projects are called “Research and Development”. In Canada they have been so open about the clandestine nature of the programme, they called it “Top Secret”.
They commissioned 55 secret projects to help to make their athletes faster and stronger and found 20 research institutions and 150 researchers to deliver them. They also required all researchers, as