Tom Daley's Rio 2016 bronze medal the end product of years of dedication, says Gabby Logan

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Gabby Logan9 August 2016

This last weekend has confirmed a few things for me; I am still an Olympics nut and can’t get enough of the Games. After 72 hours of sporting action from Rio I now have the bags under the eyes to show it. I may be 20 years into sports TV presenting but I still can’t believe my luck that today I get to fly out for 12 hours and work on my third Olympic Games.

Having hosted highlights shows on the BBC for the previous two Olympic Games, London 2012 and Beijing in 2008, this time I am anchoring the athletics which starts on Friday. So I have been enjoying our coverage from the comfort of my sofa with my kids.

The time difference, Rio is four hours behind London, means we have live action until at least 3am most days, so there isn’t really a place in the schedules for the kind of highlights show we did in London.

It’s been quite a useful exercise to watch our coverage and see how it’s being received at home.

There’s no doubt the time difference does pose a challenges to the schedulers. For the sport I cover that means Usain Bolt will go for his third consecutive 100m gold in Rio early on Monday morning, 2.25am in the UK.

Bolt’s legion of fans here will either have to stay up late, set the alarm or watch repeats of the evening’s coverage the morning after, which will be a big effort if they have done the same thing the night before for Mo, Jess and Greg on 2016’s version of Super Saturday.

I heard a representative of the TUC on BBC Radio 5 Live last week advising bosses how to handle the late nights with their workers. After Adam Peaty’s 100m breaststroke success in the early hours of Monday morning I spent most of yesterday yawning, and consuming lots of caffeine and looking about 10 years older, but it was worth it. Making tea and toast for the kids, celebrating a brilliant gold medal at 3am was a memory that will last a lifetime.

Eighteen hours later the family was again screaming at the TV, this time for Tom Daley and Daniel Goodfellow in the 10m synchro. I interviewed Tom Daley in his family home in Plymouth, on his bed, when he was 13 years old, just a year before the Beijing Olympics. So Tom and I go back a few years.

You don’t need me to tell you what he has been through in those two Olympic cycles: the death of his dedicated father Rob, coming out and then getting engaged to Oscar-winning director Dustin Lance Black, moving to London from his home in Plymouth and leaving his coach to forge a new partnership with the incredible Jane Figueirdo.

The bronze that Tom won with Dan on Monday night was the end product of incredibly hard training and dedication but also an example of how to grow up in the public eye and still be an awesome human being which is actually more important. I am in awe of Tom.

One of the sports that will benefit from the prime-time viewing it wouldn’t ordinarily get is gymnastics — with finals taking place at about 8pm in the UK it will get big figures.

I can’t stress to you just how huge the progress in British gymnastics has been over a generation. When I was a lass we didn’t make finals, let alone expect to make the podiums. The men’s team bronze in London was one of the most impressive British medals of the whole Olympics. The men came agonisingly close last night to repeating that feat but gymnastics is a sport which punishes mistakes heavily so in the end they had to settle for fourth, the worst of all Olympic positions.

What thrilled me most in our house was a mini battle for the remote control when I wanted to watch the end of the gymnastics session and my son wanted to watch the GB women’s bronze medal match against Canada in the Rugby 7s. That is what I love about the Olympics; my 11-year-old son was arm-wrestling me to watch women’s sport. But he doesn’t see it as ‘women’s sport’ — he just sees it as great sport. There’s plenty more to come, so I’ll see you in Rio.

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