Friday 24 March 2017 12:55, UK
Britain's swimmers have gone from being limp in London to the kings of Kazan, all within 36 months.
It's been an incredible transition and teenager Siobhan-Marie O'Connor has been at the heart of it. Three GB medals at the 2012 London Olympics was poor. One at the Worlds in Barcelona was woeful.
Under the guidance of head coach Bill Furniss, the team headed to Russia at the start of August and bagged five golds, a silver and three bronze to finish fourth in the medals table.
Two of these pieces of metal belong to O'Connor with the 19-year-old Sky Academy Scholar battling to bronze in the 200m individual medley before crowning her third World Championships with gold in the mixed 4x100m medley relay.
Read Siobhan's words as she provides an insight to life in the GB team, how they've found their spark and how the Rio Games and racing against her dad this summer are inspiring her to get even better......
It was such a great week in Kazan. It was tough but I'm just really chuffed with everything. I'm now going on holiday with my family for some rare downtime.
I try not to get in the swimming pool when I go away though. Although if it's hot you can't really avoid it and you get in the pool to cool down.
In the last week of a holiday I will do a bit so I'm not losing the feel of the water, but I try hard to switch off. Every year though I will swim my dad and he still thinks he can win. This holiday will be no different.
It will be a 15m pool and every year he challenges me and my brother, and every year he dives in front of me and doesn't let me swim past. He then says he wins. He says he's the best swimmer in the house. He's too competitive for his own good.
On to more serious swimming.... It was a crazy week in Russia at the Worlds and just amazing to be part of the team. Everyone is on a massive high and we're all so proud having produced some incredible swims and races.
Everybody stepped up and showed the world what we are capable of. Two years ago in Barcelona we came away with one bronze and this year we won nine medals which is pretty amazing.
Everyone is in a really good place a year out from Rio. The next year will be a huge challenge but it also gives us great motivation to do more and push forward and improve everything.
Winning is great but you don't learn anything. The biggest learning experiences come from when things don't go well. London 2012 was a huge learning experience for the GB team. It didn't go well, same as Barcelona 2013. We have definitely put things right and changed things – it is working.
We have a new young team and those swimmers in Russia swam amazingly. Adam Peaty (100m breaststroke), James Guy (200/400m freestyle) and Ross Murdoch (100m breaststroke) weren't in London. The team is now fresh and we've got new talent coming through and that's one of the main reasons we are performing well.
You can see things that are working but you can't get complacent in sport. We had so much to learn over the past two years and now we're in a good place. The changes we've made are a huge benefit.
The main change is the morale in the camp. That's so important. The attitude in the team when you're racing is all about competing tough and enjoying it. It's about getting in there and having no fear who you're up against. That's definitely changed. The young swimmers coming through have changed that.
I was first part of the team four years ago in Shanghai and I've seen it change a lot. It's now very different. We're a lot closer and tighter and more positive and we've really gelled together as a team.
We've been really working on training hard to race. It's not just at the major meets. It's all year round and we've focused on that. Your body is often not in race shape, it's only at the end of the year when you taper and all the work comes together and you rest and you are then ready to compete.
You have to push through that to get the good performances . It's tough. When you get to the meets, racing tough is thinking about your tactics and how you swim the race – not thinking about who you're next to - and having no fear when you're swimming.
At the Worlds, James Guy (200m freestyle) was up against the Olympic champion and world record holder and he didn't care. He swam an amazing race and got to the wall first. He just didn't care and that was amazing.
I swam in the 200m individual medley and finished with bronze behind winner Katinka Hosszu who broke the world record. I tried as hard as I could to stick with her for most of the race. It didn't pay off in the end but it was just getting in and racing tough and that's we aimed to do.
It was a tough race and it hurt so much in the final 50m but I hung on for a medal. I'm very proud of that. I've definitely had a lot of good racing this year. It's been a hard training environment, especially because I've been without a home pool (in Bath). I've been all over the place and I've had to be tough.
Training is everything but it's also so important to rest. We get no time off during the year apart from after a competition in the summer.
You train for 11 months in a year and it's very tough on the body and you need to recover. It needs to be fresh to start again in September. It is possible to push yourself too far if you carry on back-to-back years.
Rest simply means not training and taking breaks. I'm going on holiday with my family and that will be chilling and just not doing much! It's pure rest and having downtime. Things like hanging with friends and catching up.
It's not necessarily medals that drive me on. It's the desire to be better. It's about constantly improving and getting the best out of yourself.
Every athlete dreams of being an Olympic champion and the dream is to push myself as far as I can. That's the ultimate drive. Everyone trains the best and wants to win and it's trying to make the best out of the talent and opportunity you get. I will then see how close I can get to that dream.
The next 11 months will be so exciting. It will be a huge challenge and very tough to qualify for Rio.
We have an altitude camp in Flagstaff in the States coming up. There will be some races over the next few months and then it's the Olympic trials in April.
That will be my main focus and after that everything will be geared towards Rio.
