Olympic team’s success should not be measured solely by gold standard
British athletes set for Tokyo must be prepared to give something back while they are there
To flesh out the flipside of an obsession with winning, the Chinese have, at the Olympics at least, offered a salutary case study. At London 2012, weightlifter Wu Jingbiao was so chastened by the indignity of a silver medal that he cried on state television, saying: “I’m ashamed for disgracing the motherland.” When the country’s gymnasts failed to grasp even a single gold, the South China Morning Post spoke, with no little alarmism, of a “crumbling dynasty”. “Where is all the gold?” its editorial demanded.
Ever since, China’s fixation with medals for their own sake has softened.
Fu Yuanhui, the swimmer who took bronze in the 100metres breaststroke, won plaudits less for her performance in the pool than for the exuberance with which she celebrated third place. Rejecting customary platitudes, she would come up with sayings such as: “I’ve already spent my supernatural energy.”
A younger Chinese audience loved her for it, with the image of successful athletes less one of blinkered, state-manufactured automata than of infectious personalities who showed joy in what they did for a living.
By degrees, Britain’s Olympic credo has undergone a similar evolution. In London, the myopia around medals was so acute that the wait for a first gold, which stretched into a fifth day, threatened to trigger a national nervous breakdown. The reckoning post-rio, though, with a 2017 report by British Cycling claiming that the preoccupation with medals was having a “blinding effect vis-a-vis culture”, suggested that an alternative philosophy was needed. As a result, Team GB’S path towards next summer’s Tokyo Games follows the slogan “medals and more”, a marked shift in tone from the 2012 equivalent of “no compromise”.
Quite what “and more” denotes is still anybody’s guess, although Mark England, chef de mission for
Tokyo 2020, suggests that British athletes will engage far more directly with their hosts this time, striving to become the Japanese fans’ second-favourite team by supporting Yokohama schools and arranging for the hockey players to visit Hiroshima. It would signal a clear departure from the approach in Rio three years ago, when Team GB inhabited a hermetically-sealed bubble, right down to their personalised lunch and dinner menus.
Talking of bubbles, there is a sense that Britain’s is about to burst.
Gracenote, the company that analyses the performances of all Olympic athletes, forecasts that Britain will come away from Tokyo with 18 gold medals, down from 27 in Rio and a record 29 in London. Tom Daley, the poster-boy of British diving, is predicted to manage only two bronzes, while the traditional bankers of rowing, track cycling and artistic gymnastics are expected to yield just seven medals between them.
There is reason to be sceptical of Gracenote’s algorithms. For
It would signal a clear departure from Rio, when Team GB inhabited a sealed bubble
example, its tip that Laura Muir will win gold over 1500m looks absurdly optimistic, given that Holland’s Sifan Hassan beat her by almost four seconds at this year’s World Athletics Championships in Doha. More broadly, the British have acquired a habit of shooting far beyond initial expectations.
For Rio, their overall medal target was set at 47. They eventually returned from Brazil with 67.
Last night, UK Sport conveyed an attitude of cautious optimism, releasing data to illustrate that British athletes have, during the latest Olympic cycle, been achieving better results at global level than their predecessors.
While members of Team GB collected world medals in 15 separate sports between 2012 and 2015, they have since expanded that base to 22. Granted, one of these sports, skateboarding, is making its debut in the Olympic programme for Tokyo, but there are growing signs of a more even spread in British medal prospects, rather than an over-reliance on the low-hanging fruit on offer in the velodrome.
Dame Katherine Grainger has, as chair of UK Sport, never underplayed the significance of medals. This year, she even laid out a vision for Britain to finish top of the Olympic table: still a flight of fancy, considering that the Americans plundered 46 golds in 2016. The previous incumbent, Liz Nicholl, had the same priorities, emblazoning the numbers 65 and 120 – the British medal haul at the London Olympics and Paralympics – on the wall of her Bloomsbury office.
But we have reached a point where British efforts in Tokyo have to represent more than raw numbers. In London and Rio, sport was used by Britain, to an extent of which even the Soviets would have been proud, as an exercise in soft power. In a period of diminishing influence on the world stage, the spectacle of a triumphant women’s hockey team delaying the BBC News at Ten by half an hour served to burnish national virility.
The effect of a take-no-prisoners approach to medals, not to mention the yawning gap between the elite and the grass roots, appeared almost an afterthought. Take Scotland’s Ross Murdoch, who arrived in Rio with a world bronze, but neglected to reach the Olympic final. Within weeks of his homecoming, his funding had been stripped away.
Chelsea Warr, UK Sport’s director of performance, is offering a double-edged message for 2020. On the one hand, she is insisting that “bases are loaded”, that Britain is primed to eclipse all previous medal marks. But on the other, she is advocating a solution “more sophisticated than a binary medal target”. The athletes, she argues, have a diplomatic responsibility that extends beyond the rowing lake or the swimming pool. At these Olympics, they will not be allowed to retreat into their own gilded cage. As England has put it: “We don’t want any of our sports to go into Tokyo without giving something while they’re there.”
At last, it seems, there is a recognition that glory need not be measured solely in gold.