Remember the also-rans

Nice piece from Charlotte Leslie in The Guardian:

I celebrate the magnitude of Olympic glory not as one of the winners, but it means so much to me because I am one of the losers. I used to swim. I never got to Olympic standard, but between the tender ages of 11 and 14, I was a national finalist (backstroke) and Olympic glory didn't seem utterly impossible.
Then my feet didn't grow. I didn't grow. And I subsequently watched several of my 15-year-old rivals zoom ahead, eventually to swim in the Olympics, while for me, four hours of training a day with City of Bristol swimming squad, at 7,000m per session, resulted not in better times, but the slow realisation I just wasn't quite good enough.

Join the rest of us, Charlotte. And just because I never got my marathon time below 3:38 doesn't mean I can't appreciate the effort and talent of the Hoys and Adlingtons.