Faster, Higher, Stronger Episode Rating Graph

Taking its title from the Olympic motto, this series explores the history of the modern Games through the stories of extraordinary athletes who have pushed performance to the limit and beyond in pursuit of gold. Faster, Higher, Stronger examines how the most anticipated and hyped event in any Olympics, the 100 metres final, has been run faster and faster by men like Jim Hines, the first to run the race in under 10 seconds, Carl Lewis, the best finisher of them all and Usain Bolt, whose massive stride allows him to eat up the track. Sprinters run the 100m in distinct phases and the programme reveals what they are and how the athletes, who are running at up to 28 miles an hour, have to master each of them to win. Combining expert eyewitness testimony, rare historic archive, period reconstruction and special filming techniques to slow down and analyse performance, this is a unique insight into the most electrifying event in all of sport.

The series telling the history of the Olympics continues with the story of gymnastics at the modern Games. It explores a never-ending pursuit of perfection by athletes constantly pushing their sport to greater and greater levels of technical difficulty both on the floor and up on the high apparatus. Like Olga Korbut, who transformed gymnastics with revolutionary new routines that risked everything in Munich in 1972; and Nadia Comaneci who picked up the baton and went one further by scoring the first perfect ten out of ten in an Olympics at Montreal in 1976. One of most inventive Olympic gymnasts, Vera Caslavska, re-lives the protest she made at the Soviet invasion of her country Czechoslovakia during the 1968 Mexico Games, and Japanese athlete Shun Fujimoto recounts the extraordinary story of how he competed with a broken knee to ensure his team won Gold.

The series telling the history of the Olympics reveals the story of the blue riband event of any Games - the 1500 metres, or metric mile. This was the race that gave Britain its finest Olympic hour in Los Angeles in 1984 when three British world champions competed for gold - Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett and Steve Cram. Travelling to the varied environments that have helped shape the greatest 1500m runners - from the forests of Finland to the beaches of Australia, from the city streets and country lanes of Britain, to the high altitude terrains of Kenya and Morocco - it reveals that although the race is run on a track, it is ultimately won on punishing training runs in natural landscapes. With contributions from some of the greatest Olympians ever to run the 1500m and the current world record holder Hicham El Guerrouj - the programme shows that to win 1500m gold, athletes need the stamina of marathon runners, the speed of the best sprinters and the tactical brains of chess masters.