Before we had even reached the end of the first day of competition at the IPC European Athletics Championships in Stadskanaal, Holland, I was starting to get hung up on the overall medal table.

The thing is, when we selected our small team of 18, I'd made a point of saying it wasn't purely about medals.

It was a stepping stone to London 2012 for most and Rio 2016 for some. It was about taking opportunities and using them for maximum benefit and not just satisfying our need to win.

For some of the athletes, such as 15-year-old T38 sprinter Olivia Breen (pictured below) who was making her debut, it was a learning experience and she did brilliantly with two personal best performances and two bronze medals.

For others it was about putting down a marker and building confidence before the Paralympic Games and Richard Whitehead did exactly that by clocking a new T42 200 metres world record time of 24.93sec.

Overall, we enjoyed a really successful Championships with 28 medals in total.

But the action didn't stop there.

We had another group of athletes at the US Paralympic Track and Field Trials in Indianapolis, in the United States, where we knew the competition would be at a more appropriate level for certain event groups, such as our wheelchair racers and a few of our male sprinters.


Those guys also made the most of their opportunities with world records from Jonnie Peacock (pictured below, in blue) of 10.85 in the T44 100m - the fastest ever time by an amputee sprinter - Mickey Bushell who clocked 14.38 in the T53 100m and Hannah Cockroft with 31.23 in the T34 200m.

There were also several personal bests from Jade Jones and Ola Abidogun.

Prior to the IPC European Championships and the US trials, we had a number of athletes out in Berlin at the German nationals.

Highlights included personal bests for Libby Clegg in the T12 100m (12.41) and 200m (26.10), improving her previous best times achieved at the Beijing 2008 Paralympic Games, a personal best for Jordan Howe in the T35 100m (13.04) and a British record for Sean Clare in the F40 discus with a throw of 29.33 metres.


It's definitely been a really busy few months but I think [wheelchair racer] Shelly Woods summed it up when she said, at the start of the year, it was still a bit of a windy path but now she can see where it's leading and she just wants to ride it.

She's right.

The road to London is now pretty much clear and we're all heading in the same direction.

Now we just need to get back into some solid training so we're prepared to be the best we can be when it all begins on August 29.

Peter Eriksson is the UK Athletics Paralympic head coach and former mentor to Chantal Petitclerc of Canada, the most successful Paralympic track and field athlete in history. Eriksson is widely considered one of the best Paralympic athletics coaches in the world and in total; his athletes have won an astonishing 119 medals at the Paralympic Games.