25 August 2016
Didn’t We Do Well?!
Were the reasons for our Olympic success just financial?
by Frank O’Nomics
As we all bathe in the shared national glory of a record medal haul at the Rio Olympics it is hard not to be struck by the widespread comments that the biggest factor behind Team GB’s success was that of lottery funding. Successive medal winners took great pains to express their gratitude for the help that they received and asserted that it would not have been possible without the lottery money channeled to them by UK Sport. However, this simplistic view may be doing an injustice to some of the other major contributing factors, some circumstantial, others meriting high praise. It is important to acknowledge them, as otherwise sporting excellence will be perceived to be just down to how much money we are prepared to throw at the various events, with an inevitable worry about diminishing returns. We also need to be reassured that the money is being well spent, with a view to maximising success and the potential legacy created. It is further worth reviewing the process, beyond that of mere spending, to see if there are any broader applications that could be used to good effect in the wider economy.
First of all, let’s look at some pretty compelling evidence regarding the money factor. In 1996 we won just one gold medal (in rowing) but this was the last Olympics not to benefit from the National Lottery set up by Sir John Major, which went on to fund UK Sport. That one gold left us 36th in the medal table, and at the time there was just £5 million of funding for Olympic sports. By the Sydney games in 2000 funding had reached £69 million and we had risen to 11th, with 10 golds, a feat broadly repeated in 2004 when we came 10th. The Blair government increased the investment still further to £128 million to help us come 4th in Beijing in 2008 and then we had the fantastic success of 29 golds and 65 medals at London 2012. Our medal hopes for Rio were more modest, even though funding from UK Sport had increased to £275 million, and, while this looks like the usual British tendency to under promise and over deliver, no-one since the games began in 1896 has ever managed to increase their medal haul in the Olympics following one that they hosted. Until now. Not only did we win 67 medals, up from 65 in 2012, but these medals came in 19 different sports, as opposed to 17 in 2012.
If you look at the cost per gold medal, we have gone from £5 million in 1996, to £6.73 million in 2008, to £10.2 million in 2016. This would suggest that the more golds that you want the more money has to be devoted to a broader range of sports, so that each incremental gold will cost more. However, the rise in costs per gold are not unreasonable given the development of sport globally and the investments being made elsewhere. Compared to the rising price of a Premier League footballer, the inflation rate for medals seems very modest, and it is possible to argue that there are other factors which have been critical in converting the resources channeled into the Olympics into medal success.
The first, and most obvious has been the smart way in which the lottery money has been spent. Simon Timpson, the Performance Director at UK Sport, has said that the “blueprint for success is long-term, sustained, coherent investment, targeted at areas where you have the greatest likelihood of success”. This is borne out by the number of medals that we won in cycling, which received a 14% increase in funding from 2012, rowing, which got 16% more, and the equestrian events, which got 26% more. Sports which are very competitive on a global basis, such as Basketball and Table Tennis, , do not, despite widespread participation in the UK, get the funds that these (“sitting down”) sports get. Once the money has been directed at a sport it is then how it is used that is crucial. Mark Cavendish has pointed out that: “we don’t use the best equipment, we stay in terrible hotels. It is all about saving so that we can really push it in an Olympic year”.
The second major factor is coaching and training. British swimming was very disappointed in 2012 with a medal haul of just 3, with no golds, and the subsequent review led to the recruitment of Bill Furniss (previously coach to Rebecca Adlington) as coach to the GB team. Despite having seen a 21% fall in funding for swimming in response to the poor showing in London, the team managed to achieve 6 medals, with an all important gold for Adam Peaty. The importance of the appliance of science is also well illustrated in the response of British cycling’s head coach Iain Dyer to insinuations from elements of the French and German teams that we were winning by “questionable” means. He puts GB success down to the timing of getting the team to their peak for major events and pointed out the times of some other teams had been poor. He also highlighted the importance in peaking not just in the performance of the athletes, but also in research and innovation, ready for the Olympics.
The next key element may be a little controversial, and that is the importance of drugs, but this time not their presence – but their absence. If these games were the cleanest for many years (and only time will tell us the real truth) then the fact that many athletes who had been excluded from the games for previous indiscretions was to the benefit of those nations who race clean – which hopefully includes Team GB. Indeed, there are suggestions that our medal count could have been even higher if some previous cheats had been excluded. Bill Furniss is frustrated that we had a fourth place in 7 swimming events, at least 3 of which featured medal winners who had previously failed a drugs test. In athletics, Laura Muir (7th in the women’s 1500 metres) has expressed doubts that her race was clean and the coach of the runner who came second was arrested in June as part of an anti-doping investigation.
The fourth factor is five guys – and Mo. Every so often there comes an athlete who stands head and shoulders above all those who have gone before, and we are lucky when they grace us with an outstanding performance at an Olympics. This year our team featured a great many of them: Laura Trot, Jason Kenny, Bradley Wiggins, Matt Whitlock, and of course Mo Farah. This may be put down to serendipity, or the result of the levels of investment in sport in this country over the last 20 years. Either way, timing has to have played a great part in Rio 2016.
It seems then that there are a number of key reasons why we did so well at Rio, and there is good cause to hope that, if we continue to invest well and train smart, the progress can lead us to look for still more medals in Tokyo 2020. Whether this will benefit the nation’s health is a more difficult question to answer, but the increase in over 16 year olds participating in sport rose from 14 million when the London games were announced in 2005 to 15.9 million just after the 2012 event, and the fact that the increase in interest in diving clubs has risen 36% over the last month, gymnastics clubs by 380% and trampoling by 500%, gives good cause to hope. The interesting question that has been raised this week is whether there is a case for applying the insights used by UK Sport to the wider economy. Greg Clark, the business secretary has said that we should “recognize our strengths and make sure that they are nurtured”. It may seem obvious, but I think it a good point nonetheless.
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