SEPTEMBER 13 - USA TRACK & FIELD'S chief executive Doug Logan (pictured) has set up a committee to look at the team's performances at the Olympics in Beijing after he described them as "mixed".

 

The Americans finished top of the medal table with 23 medals, including seven gold, but Logan is hoping to investigate how the team can do better at the 2012 Olympics in London.

 

He wants the panel, which will be made up of a mixture of former athletes and coaches not involved in this year's Games, to dicover why so few US athletes produce their best performances of the year in Beijing.

 

Logan said: "Our overall results on the track can best be described as mixed.

 

"While our overall medal count and number of gold medals won was the best of all the participant nations in the competition, I became uneasy about the performances of our athletes on an individual basis.

 

"I wondered why we appeared not to be generating peak performances for the year, whereas others, whether in our sport or other disciplines, were achieving PRs [personal records] and world records.

 

"I questioned whether the areas in which we seemed to underperform were the result of a fluke and bad luck, or if they were reflective of a systemic problem."

 

Logan has calculated that of America's men ony 10.6 per cent of the 66 did season's bests while for the women it was 16.9 per cent out of 65.

 

He also wants to discover why the US so often perform so poorly in the relays.

 

Both the men and women's quartets dropped the baton again in Beijing, the eighth time in 28 years that has happened to an American team in a major championship, the most of any country [Britain are third with six].

 

Logan said: "The expectation is that we should dominate [the relays]. 

 

"They are also the activity that we, as an organisation, should have the greatest control over. 

 

"We select the athletes and train and coach them."

 

Athletics is the United States most successful Olympic sport.

 

They have won a total of 736 medals in the sport in the last 112-years, including 308 gold - comfortably ahead of the next most successful, swimming with 490, 214 gold.

 

Logan said: "It is only after vigorous, objective and aggressive examination that we can determine those systems and methods that require improvement.

 

"We spend sizable sums of money on these programmes, and I and we should ensure that they are being spent judiciously and are producing results."