The Role of Mental Conditioning in Elite Sports Performance

With the London Olympics just weeks away, athletes are completing their final preparations - and that means fine tuning the mind as well as the body.

In elite sport the title 'head coach' increasingly refers to the specialist hired to get inside the athlete's head to instil a winning mentality.

Stephen Sackur talks to the psychiatrist Dr Steve Peters - a consultant to the British Olympic cycling team and a highly prized adviser to a host of other famous sporting names. Is winning really all in the mind?

(Image: Steve Peters speaks to the British cyclist Victoria Pendleton during the UCI Track Cycling World Cup Classic in February, 2011. Credit: Getty Images)