Investment behind Britain’s best Olympic result in over 100 years

Given the nationalist atmosphere that prevailed at the London 2012 Olympics, in which the British team achieved its best medal result in more than 100 years, the country’s sports authorities warned of a possible decline in performance at Rio 2016.

The conservative position now looks modest: on the fields, tracks, rings and pools of Rio, Team GB not only surpassed the number of medals won on home soil, but also achieved its best result in the overall medal table (67) in the most recent Games era, behind only the United States and ahead of China.

Britain’s performance, although it surpassed the 2012 competition by just two medals, was surprising because it defied a kind of sporting performance law: host nations show a decline in performance at the next edition of the competition. A list that included the Chinese themselves, who won 100 medals in 2008, when Beijing hosted, and 88 in London four years later.

How do we explain Britain’s success? The answer is not that simple, but it is closely linked to what the country that “invented” a series of modern sports managed to describe as a dismal failure at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. That year, the British team finished the competition with 15 medals (one gold, eight silver and six bronze), placing 36th in the overall rankings, behind Brazil.

The performance generated such a buzz among the media and public that the then Prime Minister, John Major, decided to use British Lottery money to fund high-level sport in the country. This caused an influx of money: for the 2016 Olympics, the total value was more than R$1.3 billion – less than the estimated R$2 billion that Brazil invested in high-level sport at Rio 2016.

It was 10% higher than at the 2012 London Olympics.

“Twenty years of investment has resulted in consecutive Olympic Games of medal growth. No other country has achieved that,” Bill Sweeney, chairman of the British Olympic Association, said on Sunday.

The 15 medals certainly doubled in subsequent Games, but before anyone sees a simple correlation between money and results, experts point to an interesting feature of the British programme. UK Sport, the body responsible for managing the resources, has not hesitated to prioritise sports that perform well and offer the potential to win medals in at least two Olympic Games.

This, for example, helps explain the British success in sports such as cycling, which gave Team GB the most medals at Rio 2016 (12). The sport’s success in London, when it also won 12 medals, was worth 36% more investment than at the last Olympics. Sports that showed potential in 2012, such as artistic gymnastics, also benefited from budget increases – with British gymnastics jumping from four to seven medals at Rio 2016, including an unprecedented Olympic gold for Max Whitlock.

In contrast, “peripheral” sports, especially those with no tradition in the country, are suffering. This explains the absence of British representatives in basketball and handball at Rio 2016, sports that benefited in London from the automatic classification of the host country.

Using lottery money, sports federations have invested in training centres and sports technology, as well as searching for new talent.

The British approach has its critics. “The system is efficient, but it is brutal. There is definitely a return on investment, because the medals are going up. But there are questions we can ask here: what do we say about sports that don’t win medals, like basketball, but have huge potential for recruitment in British urban centres,” asks Borja Garcia, a sports policy expert at Loughborough University in the UK.

Academics like Garcia are uncomfortable with focusing on Olympic results in the face of research showing a downward trend in population participation in sports in the post-London period. “The argument that medals lead to sustained increases in sports participation is not ideal,” he says.

Author of one of the most popular books on the Olympics, which discusses the reasons for what might be called the successes and failures of nations in the medal table, German researcher Daniel Reich has analysed the sporting model of several countries, including Britain. He praises the British efficiency, but does not believe it is a global model.

“There is a tendency for countries to focus only on sports that can bring medals, including those that invest more specifically, such as Jamaica (all 11 medals the country won at Rio 2016 came from athletics, including Usain Bolt’s three golds). The problem is that medals do not reflect the popularity of the sport, and the most important thing in all of this is that the population plays the sport.”

“This is particularly important in the case of Western countries that are facing high rates of obesity in their populations, as is also the case in Brazil. Brazil could learn how to organize its elite sports institutions as Australia does, and it needs to encourage all female athletes to enter, as the Americans have done,” he adds.