Team GB scored more Golds in each of the previous 4 summer games. It’s 14 for 2024

https://www.statista.com/chart/25497/team-gb-olmpic-medals-timeline/

by turbo_dude

19 comments

  1. Labour government already messing up world rankings! *Thanks Kierbama.*

  2. Isn’t this in part due to fewer medals being available for incredibly expensive sports (that our nation can well afford) such as Cycling, rowing, and Strictly Come Riding (complete with abuse scandals)

  3. Less golds makes sense in retrospect. We are in an in between stage where lots of our historic athletes from 2008 and onwards and either retired or not quite good enough to get gold and our younger atheletes are very good but need some more years to compete for gold. That’s why we have so many total medals but such few golds

  4. Yeah well, they’ve gotten the highest number of bronze medals since London 1908: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain_at_the_Olympics#Medals_by_Summer_Games.

    Russia was barely in this edition, with 15 competitors getting 1 silver in total: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_Neutral_Athletes_at_the_2024_Summer_Olympics#Competitors. For Tokyo 2020, they still managed to send 334 athletes who got to 5th in the medal table. I don’t think GB ended up benefitting from Russia being effectively absent.

    I guess a lot of the momentum from London 2012 has gone. I can’t comment about funding possibly being cut too much.

    They still did great though, whatever.

    [I seem like I’m annoyed by this post. I’m not.]

  5. Sailing was awful as the sport has now gone for more x game style of categories, so we ended up with two medals (way down).

    Cycling, especially the men, we are behind Holland on the sprints and have a very weak endurance team compared to normal. Women sprint options are good, but lacking in endurance too. Shreever was a strange one as she ended up nowhere.

    Rowing was solid, but Dutch had an immense squad there. Maybe our kayak/canoe could have been better.

    Athletics was strong but only one gold thanks to the Americans being so strong.

    Otherwise I think we did well across a lot of sports. Boxing was awful (judges mostly) and slim pickings in taekwondo too.

    Problem is if you look at the teams above us, they have half the total medals, but japan hoovered up 8 wrestling golds and another 4 in judo! Korea picked up 5 archery golds and were just behind.

    So either we find a swimming prodigy and chill, or we go after gold heavy sports with more funding. One weightlifter when China picked up 5 golds, a splattering of taekwondo and judo entries mostly gone in the early rounds, no fencing entrants either.

    Also (apart from hockey and rugby7s) did we enter any teams?

  6. I’d like to see a ‘medals per Olympian’ table to get a better judgement on which countries performed better than others.

  7. 65 medals is fantastic and 14 is still a heck of a lot better than we were getting prior to lottery funding, but considering we’re spending £220 million funding our athletes so they can train full time with state of the art facilities etc, I think some questions need to be answered.

    We’re not going to compete with the US or China (Rio must have been a blip as we had 2 fewer golds than London but overtook China for 2nd), but we should be doing better than Australia and the Netherlands.

  8. I don’t think it’s coincidental that the number of medals available in events certain countries aren’t competitive are decreasing, while other events remain the same, or even get more medals.

    Cut cycling, cut sailing, cut rowing, but god forbid one of the fifty six thousand swimming events gets cut, reducing the chances of an American gold medal.

    We saw some highly touted medal chances that didn’t come to pass – Molly Caudery didn’t even make the pole vault final, Josh Kerr and Matt Hudson-Smith were beaten in the final strides, Jade Jones got beat “unexpectedly” again, the Modern Pentathletes got nowhere near defending their titles.

    As for the sailing, I think it all needs to go. Such a nonsense event, with rules that seem incompatible with competitive fairness and no contingency for what happens if the one thing you cannot control – the wind – doesn’t cooperate.

    I’m going to make a larger point about athletics, because it’s been concerning me for a while – I don’t know how anyone can think it’s good for the long term health of the sport when one nation wins almost every gold medal. Michael Johnson has been voicing concerns about the sport’s prospects for a while, but then he crows about the US finally getting medals in the middle distance and almost sweeping the sprints.

    Thank god for Alfred and Tebogo, for at least showing people that Americans won’t win every bloody event. If not for standout athletes like them, we might as well all just pack up and go home.

  9. We need to spend a lot more money. Let’s throw loads at schools to build more sports facilities.

  10. I enjoyed seeing medals across such a wide variety of sports (lots of new climbing fans I expect!), I think that’s a v positive outcome. Yeah, a bit ‘unlucky’ not to grab a few extra golds, but such is life. The BMX seemed the most nailed-on medal and look what happened there… (the structure of that event seemed a bit dubious to me).

    The USA dominance on the athletics track is kinda scary though.

    I did not realise there were so many wrestling medals, some sports do seem to have far too many events :/

  11. Smaller squad, investing in less athletes but also giving them more money. Barely any team sports, I’d imagine because we couldn’t afford it.

    Sure we’re a generational swimmer away from these figures being warped. But it’s a shame we can’t get competitive athletes in a wider range of sports – like climbing, wrestling, fencing or the story about the 3000m steeplechase guy or the top 8 rule.

    I’d like us to be creative, like tie funding to national service so athletes can draw a salary, train at a centralised location with elite equipment and hold some kind of job.

  12. Also finished 7th when we were top 4 for those last 4 Olympics…

    Tho I wouldn’t say this year’s been a bad look for us, more we’ve way overachieved in those last 4.

  13. Fewer golds than the Netherlands should trigger some introspection on funding for 2028. A really poor showing.

    Having said that I won’t care in a week’s time.

  15. UK did absolutely shite this olympics,.we’ve fallen far from 2nd in Rio.

  16. Don’t worry gang, I’ve got the 2028 breakdancing gold in the bag already (I’m stealing it)

  17. We should be investing more in the relatively cheap sports with a lot of medal opportunities, eg weightlifting, wrestling, judo etc. It would likely be a 8-12 year thing but surely this would be a much more efficient way of improving things

  18. Skeet shooting we were potentially robbed of a gold. She hit the target but the judges didnt see it

  19. I wonder why this graph separates gold, but not silvers and bronze. It would have been so easy, the graph is already gold and silver…

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