Of course, we can’t all be China, so success is a relative measure. What are your expectations, and is your country performing above or below them so far?
UK Sport has set an ambitious target of 48 medals, 1 more than we won in 2008 in Beijing, where we somehow managed 4th in the overall table. So far, it’s been a bit of a mixed bag. We’ve had more medal prospects drop out of contention than unexpected successes, but it’s early days yet. We’re 20th in the overall table with 2 silvers and 2 bronzes. We can expect to make our main push upwards when the Cycling and Rowing finals take place over the next few days, and when the Sailing events finish after that. Basically, we are world-class when sitting on our arses. In the Athletics, we can expect to pick up a few medals, but none of our gold medal prospects are looking secure.
Personally, I’m hoping for a steady diet of medals from now on, but I don’t care strongly what colour they are, or whether the arbitary target is hit. It does add to the interest when your team is in contention, and it’s frustrating when we keep coming 4th or 5th.
Australia, indeed, aren’t doing too well. The narrative seems to be about overconfidence and it’s starting to edge toward “hold on, how_much are each of these medals costing us?”.
The pool is where Australia expected to shine, and they’re doing substantially less well than expected. The usual medals from team sports like hockey don’t look like they’re going to eventuate, the athletics aren’t likely to return much, even from those who should be favourites and it’s hard to see where the usual couple of random late golds no-one had any idea of (such as trampolining) probably aren’t going to come off either.
Fortunately, Australia still has more gold medals than the UK.
I don’t think Australia is doing too badly, just more realistically than we’ve been used to in recent times. From Atlanta to Beijing we were spoilt, winning almost everything we were expected to, plus some that were unexpected. Maybe that was part of the home-town Olympics effect that GB should be enjoying now.
But it definitely feels like we’re heading back towards the Montreal-Seoul period when you could count our gold medal winners on one hand and each of them became a national hero (excepting Montreal when we got none).
We’re still a good chance for gold medals in the men’s hockey, cycling, rowing, long jump and 100m hurdles. I just hope our form in the swimming doesn’t carry over.
Yeah, but that was before the founding of the AIS and the concerted push toward professionalisation of elite sport. This is the first time I’ve actually started to hear grumbling about costs per medal from more than the ABC.
Terribly. This is shaping up to be Canada’s worst Olympics since '80 in absolute medal count, and one of our worst ever in terms of medal proportions - 4 bronze and that’s all.
Helen Glover and Heather Stanning with our first gold of the games in the rowing this morning.
Lizzie Armistead’s unexpected silver in the Women’s road race.
Rebecca Adlington’s bronze in the 400m freestyle. She was a double gold medallist in Beijing, but only just made the final here. She actually improved on her Beijing time, despite the high-tech swimsuits being banned since then, but the rest of the field has moved on even further. It sets her up nicely for her stronger event, the 800m, and she was delighted to get it.
No longer true I’m afraid. Now we’re into the rowing and cycling finals, I expect we’ll soon put you colonials in your place.
Thought the GB Men’s 8 did a more than creditable job in their final too. Briefly got in the lead but pushed too hard too early to win and came third. In the interviews afterwards, they said (paraphrasing), we gambled on going hard for gold and as a result lost silver. Good for them. Death or Glory - and don’t die wondering whether you could have given more.
I should add, the GB men’s eight (rowing) also deserve a mention. They blew themselves out trying to take-on the favourites Germany (undefeated in four years), and had to settle for bronze as a result. If they had been more conservative they would probably have taken silver, but that’s what we like to see.
Yes, we are generally fairly hard to beat in sports that involve sitting down. (I put this theory to Sir Steve Redgrave earlier this year, shortly after beating both him and another Olympic champion in the same day.* :p)
OK, the sport was skiing, but it still counts, right?
