Sport and art are closer than you think.

Whether you are a sporting fanatic, a competition fiend or just a well-wisher of the athletes, you could not help but be sucked into the drama of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The Olympics is the largest, widest and most regularly occurring festival of cultural exchange in the world. It is the greatest coming together of people from different nations and cultures for an event that I would argue is pure theatrics.

For me, it was not just about the sporting feats of these amazing athletes that were captivating. It was their hard work, battles, stories and, of course, their achievement of being at the top of their game that kept me riveted and I know I was not the only one! It’s fantastic that the Paris 2024 Olympic Games broke BBC Sport's record with 218 million streams.?

Many people might assume there is a cavernous gap between art and sport, but I disagree. Both are, at their core, spectacles drawing crowds to watch drama unfold in front of their eyes with plot twists and turns, and characters whose stories we are drawn into.

It is often the stories of the athletes that have brought us in, made us cheer for them, and will put them on just like we would do any character in a play. For example, we saw the amazing Simone Biles, who, after two years off, staged a comeback and won three gold medals and one silver; the diver Andrea Spendolini-Sirieix, who opened up about her mental health struggles; Leon Marchand, who won two Olympic gold medals in one day. At the end of the day, these are human stories of endurance that we all simply love and cannot get enough of.

While the Olympics stopped giving medals for painting, sculpture, musical composition, literature, and poetry in 1952, there has always been a strong link between the disciplines, with the Cultural Olympiad being an essential component of every edition of the Olympic Games since 1912. They are designed to show what the host city and country have to offer and explain their culture to the world with some world-class art. The two go hand-in-hand.

The most recognisable form of this is the Olympic opening and closing ceremonies. Each host country has strived to present a remarkable spectacle by condensing its own cultural history along with the history of the Olympic Games within a 90-minute window. This year was the first of its kind, with the ceremony immersed in the city of Paris. It divided opinion in exactly the way such an artistic spectacle should in my opinion!

But it is more than the obvious link. To be an athlete or a performer, it takes discipline and years of gruelling training to hone skills and to condition the body to perform in a certain way. Athletes might go to the gym, the track, or the pool; performers will repeat their lines until they stick. Singers will train their vocal cords and diaphragm, and dancers will spend just as much time in physical training as many athletes.

I especially loved that fact that dancers’ athleticism was celebrated during this Olympics, with breakdancing making its debut. If you have been in Norwich this week you might have seen Carlos Acosta and the Acosta Danza company around the city as we work on our new production, Nutcracker in Havana. Having spent the week with dancers I can truly attest to their discipline and determination.

There is a funny old theatrical saying that ‘you must suffer for your art.’ It isn’t used very much anymore but it was a way of actors trying to prove the discipline that they go through, which it is often misunderstood. What this year's Olympics showcased was discipline and we enjoyed watching the results of that in the same way we watch the result of a performer’s discipline on stage.?

It underlines the fact that both art and sport can produce some amazing spectacles and cathartic experiences that have us gripped.