The tunnel in which athletes wait before they enter a stadium ahead of a major race is “by no means a friendly place to be”, says Lisa Dobriskey – and as a former Team GB athlete who won Commonwealth gold and world championship silver at 1500m, she has stood in enough of them to know. “Different people handle it differently,” she says. “Some people are really relaxed and friendly; other people just look right through you. It’s scary. I remember my coach saying to me, ‘When you go to the Olympics, you’ll be standing next to the meanest, toughest, hardest people that you’ll ever face.’ Everybody wants to win.”
As it turned out, the wait to walk into London’s Olympic stadium for the final of her event in August 2012 was even more stressful than she’d been warned. With British excitement at fever pitch, support and expectation for home athletes had reached near hysteria at times. “It was terrifying,” Dobriskey says of hearing the 80,000-strong crowd in the stadium. “People were yelling, people were screaming, it was overwhelming.”
