For Marcus and myself the Olympics was an amazing achievement; it’s still not really sunk in yet. You’re back and straight into training and life turns to normality but in time it will sink in and we will realise what an achievement it was for us and the sport.
When training gets hard - and it gets harder and harder as you get older - it gives you that extra bit of motivation knowing you can achieve great things. In the lead up to the Olympics we worked incredibly hard and it paid off because we achieved a great result.
We’ve got to take the confidence from the Olympics into the next tournaments, we’ve got five left this year so we need to keep the level we’ve shown up in those tournaments.
Team GB did so much to make it feel like home. We were so lucky we had GB house and so much to help us achieve what we did achieve.
I don’t think anyone from Britain has won two badminton medals at successive Games and I would like to say it’s a target. Marcus and myself are getting better every day and hopefully my body holds up.
We’d love to go to Tokyo because that is going to be an amazing Olympics. We’ve been to Japan a couple of times and they are the most organised nation and if we keep getting better between now and then who knows how good we could be by 2020.
If from the Olympics just 500 people decide to give badminton a go, it can spread. Badminton in England doesn’t have a huge profile, it’s not seen on a regular basis and people don’t necessarily know the rules but you see it in the Olympics and hopefully some people will decide to give it a go or come and watch the All England or the AJ Bell National Badminton League. We’d love to see badminton get bigger as a sport.
After the Olympics, I went on my honeymoon and it was nice to be able to go on holiday, I think it was the biggest one I’ve ever had. It was nice for me and the wife to get away and I think I’m in a bit less trouble now.
The Denmark Open is our next tournament, we’ve seen the draw and it’s quite tough, we’ve got an up and coming Chinese pair that we’ve never played before. We’ll have to see how it goes, if we play well then we’re confident but it’s whoever plays better on the day. We’ll do our video analysis beforehand to make sure we’ve got the game plan sorted and we’re in a confident mood. Hopefully we can take the form from Rio to Denmark.
We know how well we can play. Individual performances in small parts of tournaments we’ve played really well but the difficult thing is doing it on a consistent basis. That’s why our ranking is outside of the top ten. But if we can do it consistently we’ll break into the top ten.
Sportsbeat 2016