Team GB will leave the Vancouver Winter Olympics having been given the most instructive of lessons as to how home advantage can be a hindrance as much as a help.

Much of the success of the British team in the London Games in 2012 will hang on how they have learnt from the mistakes they believe that the Canadian team have made here.

That, at least, was the observation of Andy Hunt, the chief executive of the BOA, yesterday, when he talked about “what happened to the Canadians” and how “expectations set for Canadian athletes were maybe beyond what they can achieve”. Of perceived home advantage, he said that in Vancouver and Whistler, “we’ve seen maybe the flip side” and that the case study in how the Canadians had handled pressure was “one of the most significant things to come out of this”.

A succession of underperforming Canadians has indeed told something of a story. The pressure of the crowds, the expectations and, in particular, “Own The Podium”, their high-performance programme, has inspired some to peak, but others have come to the most important day of their performing lives and failed to deliver.

However, the BOA has a fascinating challenge here. Hunt commented yesterday on how important the home team were to the success of the Vancouver Olympics, that because they have become household names, the public had bought into their home Games. And so, he said, we have to “make sure that Team GB is part of the DNA of the London Games”. But in the next breath, he talked about not raising expectations too high and not “over-profiling” the athletes.

The London Games will thus result in the home team being pulled in two directions. On the one hand, they are the faces of the Games and their images will be used to sell the London Olympics to the public. They are also contractually obliged, through their membership of Team 2012, to make appearances for the Olympic sponsors. And furthermore, they have a living to earn and they will know that the Games is the best opportunity in their lifetime to pick up endorsements. As Sir Steve Redgrave said yesterday: “That’s the nature of sport: there is a lack of funding. Each individual needs to top that up more than ever.”

On the other hand, Hunt is talking about protecting them from over- profiling and excessive expectation. The two sets of demands on the athletes are diametrically opposed.

But it is not as if the challenges of being the home team have not begun to be addressed. For Own The Podium, read Project Leap. That is the equivalent project with which the BOA is intending to maximise the benefits of home soil, and led by Sir Clive Woodward and Ben Hunt-Davis, the rowing gold medal-winner from the Sydney Games. A chief lesson for Project Leap will be how it is delivered as much as its content.

Vancouver 2010, as indeed any Games, has been a lesson in how challenging is the business of medal-winning. Hunt repeated yesterday the mantra that he has used as his calling card throughout his first Olympics.

“We’ve driven performance and athletes at the centre of everything we’ve done,” he said. However, he will have discovered that the BOA is not the only operation in town that has put the athletes first. Indeed, the Olympic sports in Britain have been increasingly professional operations since lottery funding allowed them to behave so. The idea that recent British teams, who have recorded significant medal hauls in Beijing, Athens and Sydney, have not been putting their athletes first is surely misconceived.

It is one thing to make your athletes the priority. The challenge for London 2012 is how effectively you prioritise them.