THE BEST OF BRITISH
FOR an Olympic Games in the exotic surroundings of Rio de Janeiro, there has been something very British going on this last fortnight. Not only have Team GB confounded expectations by threatening to surpass their gargantuan medal haul from London, but their successes have even been great enough for certain commentators to start feeling queasy about it all. Particularly galling to some is the calculation that the going rate for each one of these medals was in the region of £5.5 million.
One columnist was even prepared to draw the comparison between the current British team and the Soviet era, where communist regimes pumped secret money at, and in some cases secret chemicals into, their best athletes as a proxy for economic success. Considering the ongoing doping scandals afflicting that part of the world, you might have thought he would have known better.
OK, we get it. There is a crude calculus at work here, where nations with bigger budgets can “buy” medals against more less well-off countries. Or maybe our bikes and Lycra are just better than everybody else’s.
Cricket enthusiast and Conservative prime minister John Major started it all off in the wake of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics when Britain finished 36th in the medal table, overseeing a scheme where a third of all National Lottery funding would be siphoned off for elite sporting performance. With medals the best hope of a measurable outcome, resources are thrown at athletes deemed to have the strongest chances of returning with silverware.
While funding for Team GB has grown substantially, it has necessarily placed a focus on events such as track cycling and swimming, where athletes can rack up multiple medals in one go. Others, where the prospects are not quite so alluring, have been ghettoised. Academics point to the example of the Netherlands, and Sweden, 10th and 36th in the medal table respectively, who have far more impressive grassroots participation rates than we have.
This analysis misses the point, though. We are not Sweden or the Netherlands. Lord knows there are other great challenges for government to consider right now, but to blame elite sport for childhood obesity seems a bit rough. The Rio Olympics has been a great British success story and perhaps it was worth it. Would any of us really be significantly better off if the Chancellor of the Exchequer had taken the money and used it to pay off another little chunk of the national debt instead?
It is true, few kids from Easterhouse or Drumchapel will ever attempt to emulate Charlotte Dujardin in the dressage, but as Judy Murray says, you can’t be what you can’t see. You can’t say that Callum Skinner, a man with both a gold and silver medal to his name now, didn’t take inspiration on his track cycling career from Sir Chris Hoy. Perhaps it might have happened around the time when he was presented with the Chris Hoy trophy for Edinburgh’s most talented track cyclist. By Chris Hoy.
As for Andy Murray, what else is there to say? The flag-bearer of Team GB typically set the standard, channelling the disappointment of his loss with brother Jamie in the doubles into the kind of buccaneering final win against the hard-hitting Juan Martin del Potro which endears him to his fans the world over. In so doing he became, as he corrected John Inverdale, the first male tennis player to win two Olympic golds.
Super Saturday might have been superseded by seismic Sunday, but most of Britain’s golden generation were returning heroes. In addition to Murray, the Brownlee brothers kept their stranglehold on the triathlon, Alistair leading Jonny in as usual. Dujardin and her horse Valegro did their thing, as did Mo Farah in the 10,000m, even if Jessica Ennis had to settle for silver and Greg Rutherford bronze.
After a misfire in the C1 event, Scotland’s David Florence drew inspiration from kayak gold medallist Joe Clarke to reprise his 2012 silver with Richard Hounslow in the C2. Heather Stanning, from Lossiemouth, and partner Helen Glover were perfection as usual in rowing’s coxless pairs, while there was something quietly extraordinary about the way Katherine Grainger, in her fifth Olympics, and her partner Vicky Thornley challenged from nowhere before taking silver in the double sculls.
Then there were cyclists Laura Trott and Jason Kenny, who will get married next month with another five medals in their collection. By the time their careers are over they will have more gold bullion in their household than Fort Knox. Scotland’s Katie Archibald, whose participation was jeopardised not so long ago by a motorbike crash, was a formidable engine in Trott and Britain’s team pursuit victory.
There were newer faces in the firmament too. Greatness was expected of, and duly delivered, by Adam Peaty, but few expected Duncan Scott to make such a splash. Not only did the 19-year-old, with some assistance in the 4x200m freestyle from his fellow Scots Dan Wallace, Stephen Milne and Robbie Renwick, end up with two relay silver medals, he was within a whisker of an individual medal, too. Incidentally, swimming was one of the few sports able to buck a negative funding trend, having had its money slashed from £25.1m to £20.8m after a disappointing London 2012.
Max Whitlock will not be short of offers of employment after racking up two nerveless individual golds in the gymnastics. Justin Rose isn’t exactly a new kid on the block, but a gold medal in the golf after a tense shoot-out with Sweden’s Henrik Stenson more than validated his decision to go to Rio.
There was an emotional gold, too, for the GB women’s hockey team, while the rugby sevens side were another success story, at least until they ran into a formidable Fiji side in the final. There was bronze for Sally Conway in the judo, while diving and badminton were other unlikely sources of medals.
There were disappointments too. Two of Scotland’s golden girls on the track, Laura Muir and Eilidh Doyle, came home empty-handed but left everything out there.
But whether Britannia Rules the Waves or not, British sport is still riding the crest of one and we may be able to surf it all the way to Tokyo. This kind of Olympic success might just be the new normal.
British sport is still riding the crest of a wave and we may be able to surf it all the way to Tokyo