Tokyo 2020 was a Games like no other and produced its own breed of resilient and resurgent Olympic champions.
We were told to expect the unexpected for Team GB on the field of play - and while many performances went to 2019 form, there were more surprises than ever before.
Here are five of the biggest British bolters who peaked at just the right time and went big in Japan.
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— Team GB (@TeamGB) August 8, 2021
Tom Dean - Swimming
On returning home, Dean’s mum told him he’d still have to wash the dishes despite being a double Olympic champion. But it was the kitchen sink her son threw at his Olympic chance.
The 21-year-old, under the guidance of Bath-based guru Dave McNulty, was in personal best shape in early 2020 having finished 11th on World Championship debut in 2019.
Two bouts of COVID, seven weeks out of pool and 18 months later, he won 200m freestyle gold and led Team GB to 4x200m victory in one of the great British Olympic bows.
Charlotte Fry - Equestrian
It wasn’t so long ago that Carl Hester was giving Fry the very first leg-up of her career, helping her find a place to train in Holland. In Tokyo they stood together on the Olympic podium.
The 25-year-old was competing as a junior as recently as 2018 and took a place on Britain’s team alongside riders she described as dressage’s ‘king and queen’ in Hester and Charlotte Dujardin.
Yorkshire’s Fry, riding Everdale, shouldered the pressure to help Dujardin deliver a fifth Olympic medal in the team event. She may go on to have an equally distinguished Games career.
Matt Walls - Cycling Track
Few marked their card with Walls’s name - recently he has focused forging a neo-pro career on the road with trade team Bora-Hansgrohe.
But good legs are good legs, whether you’re going a straight line or in circles, and the softly-spoken Oldhamite’s omnium gold came by a thumping margin.
Walls hadn’t ridden Madison with Ethan Hayter since the European Junior Championships in 2018, but the pair put on a perfectly-judged final burst to take silver on the event’s return.
Keely Hodgkinson - Athletics
Hodgkinson’s initial target for this summer was to upgrade European junior bronze into gold, simply saying she’d be ‘silly not to' keep the Olympics in the back of her mind.
It edged its way to the front in an incredible 2021 where she became the first British woman in 36 years break a world under-20 record and beat Jemma Reekie and Laura Muir to secure selection.
The 19-year-old blitzed to 800m Olympic silver in 1:55.88, breaking Kelly Holmes’s 15-year national record in the process. Keely is at the top for a good time and a long time.
Beth Shriever - Cycling BMX
In 2017, Shriever moved back in with her parents in Saffron Walden and took a job as a teaching assistant at a local primary school. The Olympics felt a long, long way away.
But the talent that helped her become a world champion as a junior never faded and she worked her way back to the sport’s top table on the World Cup circuit in Australia.
Shriever’s persistence paid off with a dominant display in Tokyo, and her gold in the same session as Kye Whyte provided indelible images and memories that will last a lifetime.