Stella McCartney and Adidas unveil new Team GB kit

British designer Stella McCartney has been charged once again with designing the British Olympic and Paralympic team's kit, this time for the Rio Olympics which take place this summer. The new Team GB designs were unveiled by the designer and sports brand Adidas today and feature an heraldic coat of arms as the central design motif.

The coat of arms was produced by the College of Arms and a digital artist and features British lions, a shield and the floral emblems of the four home nations. Overall the design, which is said to commemorate the team's great victories of London 2012, is deemed to be much more patriotic than the 2012 kit, which was also designed by McCartney and whose central design feature was an abstraction of the Union Flag.

The kit has also been optimised for performance and is said to be 10% lighter than the 2012 designs. “The goal for Rio 2016 was to rewrite the rules of performance and design for athletes, allowing them to look and feel like champions on and off the field," McCartney said at the unveiling which was attended by a number of athletes including Jessica Ennis-Hill and Tom Daley.