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To not only know them as the player who scored the winning goal or stood on top of the Olympic podium or whose dreams were dashed on the biggest stage.

What I find fascinating in sport is the person behind the story, the psychology behind the athlete and coach.

The margins between success and perceived failure are fine, a hair’s breadth, but the subsequent highest of highs and lowest of lows span the emotional spectrum.

The spotlight of elite sport is an unforgiving one, its relentless glare impossible to evade. There is a brutality, a raw nakedness. And some very dark places.

Joy and despair, hope and gloom, light and dark – it is all there in sport.

I love hearing people’s stories. About what has made them, what marked them out as different, the sometimes bumpy road they have travelled, what they hope will be their destination and what they found when they got there.