Olympic Games medal haul predicted to slump in Paris
New Zealand’s medal return at the Paris Olympics is predicted to almost halve from its Tokyo haul.
Entertainment and sport data company Gracenote projects that the New Zealand team to contest the 2024 Games, starting in late July, will win 11 medals, four of them gold. That would put the country 22nd on the medal table in Paris.
New Zealand won 20 medals at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 – seven gold, six silver and seven bronze; the country’s best performance at the Summer Olympics
Canoe sprint superstar Lisa Carrington won three gold medals, and New Zealand also grabbed three rowing golds.
Nielsen’s Gracenote expects Carrington to win a second successive gold in the women’s K1 500 in Paris and claim silver as part of the K4 500 crew. However, she hasn’t been predicted to get a medal in the K2 500 – Carrington won gold with Caitlin Regal in Tokyo and is likely to team up with Alicia Hoskin in Paris.
Cyclist Ellesse Andrews is predicted to win gold in the Keirin while Gracenote projects dual gold for New Zealand’s women’s and men’s rugby sevens sides.
Silver medals have also been forecast for single sculler Emma Twigg and swimmers Erika Fairweather (women’s 400m freestyle) and Lewis Clareburt (men’s 400m Individual Medley), and bronze to shot putter Tom Walsh (who won bronze in Rio 2016 and again in Tokyo), the NZ women’s team pursuit cyclists and trampolinist Dylan Schmidt, who claimed bronze in Tokyo.
The projected medallists for New Zealand omit the likes of triathlete Hayden Wilde, high jumper Hamish Kerr, rower Tom Mackintosh, canoeists Aimee Fisher and Luuka Jones, and golfer Lydia Ko.
New Zealand has produced some surprise medallists at recent Olympics, such as Marcus Daniell and Michael Venus in the tennis men’s doubles in Tokyo.
Eleven medals for New Zealand would put them on the same number as predicted for Denmark, Poland and Belgium, and ahead of the likes of Serbia, Romania, Sweden, Jamaica and Kenya.
New Zealand won 18 medals in Rio in 2016 (four gold, nine silver and five bronze), 13 in London four years previously (six gold, two silver and five bronze) and nine in Beijing 2008 (three gold, two silver and four bronze).
One hundred days ahead of the opening ceremony in Paris, Gracenote released its latest Virtual Medal Table forecast, which projects the United States to win the most medals (123). It would be the eighth consecutive occasion the US had finished at the top of the Summer Games medal table.
China is projected to finish second for total medals but should challenge the United States for most gold medals.
Gracenote believes host nation France should sharply increase its medal haul from the 33 won in Tokyo to 55, while Australia is expected to be fifth on the total medals table, with 50.