Georgie has the potential to go well beyond what Kate and I have achieved and take modern pentathlon to a new level

“Georgie has the potential to go well beyond what Kate and I have achieved and take modern pentathlon to a new level,” she says.And Jim Fox, who first hauled the sport into public consciousness when he led his team to Olympic gold in 1976, has long sung the praises of the all-rounder from Canterbury. Even before Sydney he was marking our card: “Steph and Kate are both brilliant and will win medals But keep an eye on Georgie. She’s going to be better than both of them.”Actually, Harland also qualified for Sydney, but teams were restricted to two competitors so they took her along, not only for the ride but also as a sparring partner “Officially I was the team armourer,” she says. “But my job was also to keep them laughing and act the idiot I’m quite good at that. Basically, I went out to enjoy the atmosphere and the Olympic experience. What better place to do that than Sydney?”But I came away from there marvelling at how the girls dealt with the pressure, particularly the shooting I was shaking myself, and I wasn’t even competing That comes with us all being really close It gave me a new focus.

I went out thinking, ‘Oh, it will be nice to go to an Olympics’, and came away thinking, ‘Right, I want to go to the Olympics and I want to win a medal’.”Harland took the Pony Club route into the sport as a young teenager. Her father is a chartered surveyor and her mother a sports teacher She was swimming at three and riding at seven. She took up running at Benenden school, where Princess Anne had been a pupil, and when she met Britain’s modern pentathlon head coach, the Hungarian Istvan Nemeth, at a training camp, he steered her in the direction of the sport. She has now deferred her studies at Loughborough University to train full-time (and that means eight hours a day, seven days a week) with Cook and Allenby at Bath.An accomplished horsewoman, good runner and swimmer and reasonable fencer, she finds shooting the discipline on which she most needs to concentrate. As well as her coach she has been working with a top sports psychologist, Jeanette Diamond. “She hasn’t been trancing me out or anything like that,” says Harland.

“In fact, when it was first suggested I should use her I was pretty sceptical about the whole thing. I thought there’s no way she’s going to be sitting in a room and zapping me, you know, hypnosis, all that stuff.”But it’s not like that at all. It’s more working out a gameplan, looking at what you are doing and how you are doing it, and with that plan comes the confidence to get you into a routine for the competition It’s all about getting the edge. At the Olympics, it wasn’t only that Steph and Kate were fantastic athletes, they had it right in the head.”She admits surprise at her rapid progress, from 16th in the world to No 1 in a year “It all seemed to come together in Mexico But there is so much strength in depth in this country. If you are the best in Britain you are probably the best in the world.” Britain now has four women in the world’s top 10: Harland, Cook, Allenby and another up-and-comer, Sian Lewis. There are also two world-ranked juniors, Emily Bright and Jo Clark. “We couldn’t have got into this position without Lottery funding.