Time for Kelly and Co to show true grit

As well as wheeling out a parade of nine of our Olympic athletic champions, from Don Thompson to Jonathan Edwards, on the new Crystal Palace track, they have also arranged for a Routemaster bus - with "Athens" the destination, naturally - to parade the Games-bound team to a full-house of 17,000 amid fireworks at the end of a hopefully rousing evening.

Now, if you were cynical, you might suggest that a crawling Routemaster, soon to become obsolete and a vehicle which is easy to jump off any time you feel like it, might be a fitting mode of transport for a team dismissed as being on the road to nowhere.

Just don't say it around any of the athletes nor their boss, that's all. Because even Max Jones, the mild-mannered figure who is directing the Athens challenge, admits to being "disgruntled" by all the negative vibes from the doomsayers about our Games prospects.

Denise Lewis, our reigning heptathlon champion, told me her team-mates are fed up with it. "There's too much pessimism. It starts transmitting to the athletes," she said. "If you tell someone often enough that they're not good enough, eventually they'll begin to believe it."

So tonight at Crystal Palace, Jones, UK Athletics performance director, is counting on his charges to start proving his contention that they're rather better than they are given credit for. "I think this is the time for us to start showing our true colours," he said.

In the last three weeks since the trials in Manchester, Jones has been encouraged by outbreaks of good news for his team - like Kelly Holmes's magnificent performance against European champion Jolanda Ceplak at Birmingham last week, like information that Paula Radcliffe's training is going brilliantly in the Pyrenees and like the discovery of Christine Ohuruogu as the possible missing link in what could become a medal-winning 4x400metres squad.

"Now others have to keep the good news rolling," said Jones. "I think the Grand Prix is a key indicator of how we'll do in Athens. For the first time at a top British meeting this summer, our athletes have the chance to post good marks in good conditions. I accept that whatever happens at Crystal Palace will have to be built upon, but this should be the perfect springboard into Athens."

The springboard, he fancies, for athletes like triple jumper Phillips Idowu and sprinter Christian Malcolm, is to show they are timing their run-in to Athens perfectly. The platform too for Chris Rawlinson, in the one-lap hurdles, and Holmes, in the 1500m, is to show again, that their medal hopes are not idle. Holmes ought to be inspiring everyone. At 35, she is persuading Jones that she has never run better. After the luxury of an injury-free season, she looks about Britain's best bet on the track in Athens, yet life is never quite that simple with this old soldier.

She had set her mind on concentrating solely on the 1500m but now she's not sure. Last week, she ran a blistering 800m and, admitting that she hasn't quite got her fall in the 1500m at the world indoor championships out of her head, sounds as if she's convinced herself she can't run mile races at all. Tonight's exercise is a mental one: to remind herself why she has won six major championship medals at the distance.

Mind you, knowing the indefatigable Holmes, she'll probably end up doing the 800m/1500m double in Athens anyway, especially if there are any more signs of vulnerability in the two-lap event tonight from her training partner, Maria Mutola, whose defeat in Lausanne after 36 straight 800m wins, followed by injury problems, have put a different complexion on what had been seen as a one-horse race.

It is not just Mutola. Supreme miler Hicham El Guerrouj and triple jumper Christian Olsson have lost long unbeaten streaks recently too, which is exactly the sort of thing Jones likes to drum into his team.

He added: "You just have to look at recent results to know it can all change so quickly. Nothing is written, nothing is decided." Let's hope he's right. All aboard the Routemaster.