What did Beth Potter learn from her first Olympic experience? That she wasn’t good enough to win a medal on the track.
And what did he do? He moved to a new city, took up another sport, hung out with some of the best in that sport, and decided to get a spot on the podium in that sport.
The 31-year-old may not have quite made it yet, but she will be heading into this summer’s Paris Olympics as the world and European women’s triathlon champion.
That’s not only a testament to their determination, tenacity and competitiveness, but also a huge change from Rio eight years ago.
At those Games, Potter crawled 10,000 metres despite having suffered a stomach virus the night before.
The Glasgow athlete finished 34th, a result that left her “embarrassed” and feeling like she “had put on a show”, according to her younger sister, Sarah.
“It was really tough to watch,” she told BBC Sport. “I was really proud because I knew she was in a lot of pain. Seeing the time she ran, I thought, ‘Oh my God, that’s amazing.'”
“I felt like her confidence was shaken after that, but if she hadn’t done that race, I don’t think she would have made the decision to try triathlon.”
Potter has always loved a challenge.
As a child, she played a variety of sports, including obstacle course racing with her sister and cousins in her grandfather’s garden and soccer with boys on the playground.
“He’d come home and say, ‘Guess what, I got second overall today,'” Father Alex said. “But he worked and worked on his maintenance plays and got into the hundreds.
“You could get Beth to do almost anything by telling her you would time how long it took her to do it and compare it to the last time.”
“If you went up and down stairs she wanted to race you,” Sarah adds.
“Or you’d be walking down the street and if she saw you even take a couple of steps ahead she’d think ‘oh, there’s a race’ and start running.”
Potter was so competitive that the punishment for any bad behavior was to miss any sports practice she was required to attend.
At that time, it was mainly about swimming.
After breaking her leg at age nine and worrying that she would lose fitness during her recovery, Potter resumed her progress in the pool.
It wasn’t until just before starting high school that running became a part of his life.
“All the primary schools in Bearsden organised a race around Kilmardinny Loch,” Alex recalls. “It was two laps and Beth won it by a mile, breaking a record that stood for about 15 years.
“Then Beth was choking on a fly she’d swallowed and someone came up to me and said, ‘Does she run?’ I said, ‘No, not at all.’ And they said, ‘You should sign her up for a running club because she’s phenomenal.’ And it just kind of snowballed from there.”
Potter soon broke future Olympic bronze medallist Yvonne Murray’s Scottish schoolgirl record at 1,500m before moving up to 10,000m.
A period studying physics at Loughborough University furthered his education on and off the track before he moved to London to study teacher training.
It was there, at St Mary’s University, that he met Michael Woods.
The acclaimed athletics coach recalls watching Potter win a school cross country event in Scotland in 2008, beating some of his English athletes.
“I encouraged my athletes to try and catch her,” he recalls. “I told them something like, ‘Go get her, she’s dead.'”
“Beth told me years later that she listened to me and that encouraged her to keep going.”
Under Woods’ tutelage, physics professor Potter competed at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in her hometown before going on to those Olympics in Rio.
“He came away feeling very unhappy,” she says. “He said he would never win a medal in the 5,000m or 10,000m because of African dominance and that he was considering switching to triathlon.
“We watched the triathlon there and that was a bit of an inspiration because Beth had competed against Non Stanford in the past as an athlete, and seeing her finish fourth probably made Beth think she could do it too.”
But where do you start when it comes to changing sports at the elite level?
For Potter, it was a case of moving to Leeds to train with double Olympic gold medallist Alistair Brownlee and his brother Jonny, who has a medal each from London, Rio and Tokyo.
The Scot stayed at Jonny’s house for a while and trained harder than ever while continuing to teach part-time at a secondary school.
“It’s really amazing how far he’s come,” Alistair tells BBC Sport.
“I was really impressed by her dedication. She was training three sports for 20 or 30 hours a week, while still working, and she was new to the sport, so maybe she made people feel a little bit threatened.
“But there is one thing that can definitely be said about Beth: she is very determined.”
Nowhere was this clearer in his approach to mastering the cycling stage of the triathlon.
Although running and swimming came naturally to him, Potter was unfamiliar with road bikes.
“There is a lot of information on social media about Beth not having a bike as a child, which is not true,” says dad Alex. “She had ridden a bike, but she had never owned a road bike.
“But she is very motivated and woe betide her if you suggest doing something that interferes with her training! Once she sets her mind to something, she commits.”
“You can’t just be mediocre on the bike, you have to be one of the best,” Brownlee added. “So to get to where she’s gotten to is really impressive.”
“She has won many races in recent years and if she can do the same in Paris she will be an Olympic gold medallist.”
