Near the entrance of York high school, painted in large letters, are the words of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." It is not a bad motto, particularly for a school that prides itself on its sporting prowess. Along all the corridors and outside each of the classrooms are images of sportsmen and women, many of them famous Olympians. At the start of every lesson, whether it be mathematics or PE, the state school's 800 pupils are set three targets; gold, silver and bronze. "We really try to incorporate the ethos of the Olympics into every aspect of school life," says the headteacher, David Ellis.
Tennyson's concluding line from his poem Ulysses was also the one chosen by David Cameron to encapsulate the Olympic spirit in his speech welcoming athletes from across the world to London on 26 July last year. "It's this spirit that is going to shine out from London," Cameron declared. "We want this to be the Games that lifts up a city, that lifts up our country."
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