How Team GB rose from one gold at Atlanta ’96 to ‘sporting superpower’ at Rio 2016

7 years ago

How Team GB rose from one gold at Atlanta ’96 to ‘sporting superpower’ at Rio 2016

It has been an Olympic fiesta like never before for Britain: their best medal haul in 108 years, second in the medal table, the only host nation to go on to win more medals at the next Olympics.

Never before has a Briton won a diving gold. Never before has a Briton won a gymnastics gold. There have been champions across 15 different sports, a spread no other country can get close to touching.

It enabled Liz Nicholl, chief executive of UK Sport, the body responsible for distributing funds from national government to Olympic sports, to declare on the final day of competition in Rio that Britain was now a “sporting superpower”.

Only 20 years ago, GB were languishing 36th in the Atlanta Olympics medal table, their entire team securing only a single gold between them. This is the story of a remarkable transformation.
As that nadir was being reached back in 1996, the most pivotal change of all had already taken place.

The advent of the National Lottery in 1994, and the decision of John Major’s struggling government to allocate significant streams of its revenue to elite Olympic sport, set in motion a funding spree unprecedented in British sport.

From just £5m per year before Atlanta, UK Sport’s spending leapt to £54m by Sydney 2000, where Britain won 28 medals to leap to 10th on the medal table. By the time of London 2012 – third in the medal table, 65 medals – that had climbed to £264m. Between 2013 and 2017, almost £350m in public funds will have been lavished on Olympic and Paralympic sports.

It has reinvigorated some sports and altered others beyond recognition.

Gymnastics, given nothing at all before Atlanta, received £5.9m for Sydney and £14.6m in the current cycle. In Rio, Max Whitlock won two gymnastics golds; his team-mates delivered another silver and three bronzes.

As a talented teenage swimmer, Adam Peaty relied on fundraising events la!d on by family and friends to pay for his travel and training costs. That changed in 2012, when he was awarded a grant of £15,000 and his coach placed on an elite coaching programme. In Rio he became the first British male to win a swimming gold in 28 years.

There are ethical and economic debates raised by this maximum sum game. Team GB’s 67 medals won here in Brazil cost an average of £4,096,500 each in lottery and exchequer funding over the past four years.

As determined by the Sport Industry Research Centre

At a time of austerity, that is profligate to some. To others, the average cost of this Olympic programme to each Briton – a reported £1.09 per year – represents extraordinary financial and emotional value. Joe Joyce’s super-heavyweight silver medal on Sunday was the 700th Olympic and Paralympic medal won by his nation since lottery funding came on tap.

“The funding is worth its weight in gold,” says Nicholl.

“It enables us to strategically plan for the next Games even before this one has started and makes sure we don’t lose any time. We can maintain the momentum of success for every athlete with medal potential through to the next Games.”

The idea of marginal gains has gone from novelty to cliche over the past three Olympic cycles, but three examples from Rio underline how essential to British success it remains.

In the build-up to these Olympics, a PhD student at the English Institute of Sport named Luke Gupta examined the sleep quality of more than 400 elite GB athletes, looking at the duration of their average sleep, issues around deprivation and then individual athletes’ perception of their sleep quality.

His findings resulted in an upgrading of the ‘sleep environment’ in the Team GB boxing training base in Sheffield – 37 single beds replaced by 33 double and four extra-long singles; sheets, duvets and pillows switched to breathable, quick drying fabrics; materials selected to create a hypo-allergenic barrier to allergens in each bedroom.

“On average, the boxers are sleeping for 24 minutes longer each night,” says former Olympic bronze medallist and now consult