• Professor Mark Orams is associate dean of AUT Millennium and head of the school of sport and recreation at Auckland University of Technology.
New Zealand's most successful Olympic Games ever has ended. The Olympics once again displayed the reality of elite sport - that unless you are continuously improving, you are falling behind. So after we have celebrated our athletes' successes and enjoyed the moment, it is important that our Olympic performances are thoroughly reviewed, to ensure the key lessons of the Games can be learned.
The lesson from the track cycling results, where New Zealand had a target of improving on its three medals from London 2012 but returned only one in Rio, is that you need to be improving faster than the opposition to succeed at the Olympics.
Great Britain did just that with a staggering haul of eleven medals in track cycling, six of them gold, bettering their performance at their home Olympics four years earlier. New Zealand track cycling improved on its London times and performances, but not as much as the Brits. So it's not just improvement that's important, but improving faster than everyone else.
Interestingly New Zealand's most successful sporting code at the Rio Olympics, in medals won, was sailing. They collected a gold, two silvers and a bronze. Yachting New Zealand's selection strategy for the Games was controversial. While New Zealanders qualified in all 10 sailing classes, only seven were selected to compete at the Rio Games.