I think it's great to showcase the sporting talent in this country. Hopefully it will get more people out there doing sports, rather than thinking they like sport because they watch footbal on the tv.

A lot of money has been poured into cycling and rowing but for a small island efforts and money has to be focused on an area that can bring success. The money spent probably is dwarfed by money going into the pockets of the England football team, and i know who I'd rather watch, the real sporting legends

Spot on.
The only stain is the taint of drugs.
It was great to hear Gatlin being roundly booed by the (largely) Brazilian crowd when he was introduced prior to the start of the men's 100 m.
Well done to the Paralympic committee for having the bottle to ban the entire Russian team, something the IOC was too weak-kneed to do.
The GB swimming coach reckons we were robbed of at least 4 medals by drugs cheats.
Until all sports introduce a zero tolerance policy towards the use of drugs & other illegal performance enhancements the suspicion will always be there.

The lottery investment goes into facilities - which are used by everyone in the long run, not just elite athletes - and high quality coaching. It's pretty much what the lottery fund was designed to do, and it's money generated from the public participating in something voluntary rather than coming out of central government.

Very little of it ends up in the pockets of athletes. Those that are full-time are mostly able to be so thanks to sponsorship, endorsements or prize money. IIRC even the Band A track and field athletes - the Jess Ennis-Hills and Mo Farahs of the world - get about £30k a year to cover living and training expenses from UK Sport. The rest of their income is what they generate commercially from their performances.

I'm sure I read recently that their performance award is reduced on a pound for pound basis once their annual income exceeds a certain figure - I think £65k was mentioned. If I've got that right, the likes of Ennis and Farah will have stopped being direct beneficiaries years ago.

Worth noting too that the paralympians receive awards on the same basis as the able-bodied athletes.

The least you would expect. Besides winning gold medals.....err....what more can these athletes do? If that's the ''least you would expect''.

Bizarre.

Good to see Murray put that pr!ck inverdale in his place

We spend huge amounts of money on sport that form part of the olympics - what is bizarre is that we seem surprised when we win loads of medals. Are we surprised that the GF is won by teams spending to the cap? or that the PL is won by teams with the biggest wage budget or that SKY win the TDF on a regular basis?

USA cycling have one FT employee GB have a whole raft of coaches, conditioners, scientists, equipment managers - based on that who would you expect to win the most medals?

doing what you need to do to win medals, seems a very odd criticism or mitigation of winning medals.

However poor US cycling may be at organising themselves is pretty much irrelevant.

Its not like we are going out and buying the best cyclists from throughout the world. We are simply investing in ours and allowing them to reach their potential.

Just back up a second. Some people may, for whatever reason be suprised we win quite a few medals. Maybe they are just happy to watch our sportmen win.

Let's get back to the point, you said winning medals was ''the least you would expect''. What else would you expect? That's what they are there to do - win medals. That's what they are doing. The investment does it's job.

Cure for cancer? Solve world hunger?

I bet you're a right laugh to be with on New Year Eve, 60 seconds to midnight...."ok people just remember all the cr@p things that happened to you this year"

Or on somebodies birthday....."well done you're now one year closer to your death"

What I wouldn't expect is the surprise from all and sundry that we are winning medals - the surprise should be that we are not winning more given the huge budget/advantage our team has on other countries.

When Wigan were in their glory days did you expect them to win the championship - if so why?

When I finish a days work I think one day nearer retirement

Unlike you who would be telling them how they should think like you because you think you have superior opinion of every single subject

See, now you're getting it

I feel sorry for the Americans and Chinese, what with their small populations and having no money, yet still competing with the might of Britain.

For me it's GBs performance relative to counties of a similar standing to ourselves which is good to see. We are well ahead of the lines of Japan, Germany and France as countries with similar population and wealth

For those of you who think tiny-winy Britain have done ever-so well, because we're only a teensy-weensy country, as of yesterday the Olympic Medals Table per Capita stands as follows:

1. Grenada
2. New Zealand
3. Slovenia
4. Hungary
.........
16. GB
.........
35. USA
.........
60. China

There don't appear to be any figures for a table per investment, but I have a sneaking feeling (well certainty, really) that GB would be well down the list. A combination of the two (capita & investment), it seems to me, would be an appropriate way of measuring success.

^^^^^^^

So there we go folks, we can't enjoy GB's 41 medals because Grenada has won 1 silver medal. This forum , honestly.

Yep. In swimming very few qualify for funding and it's 20-25k. They basically live like poor students. To be fair though they spend so much time training they don't have time to spend any money, and they definitely don't go down the pub.

Yeah, i'm still unsure if SOH is on the wind up with that post.

In reality, GB being only behind the US in the table as far as Golds go and ahead of huge nations such as China, Russia, Brazil, Germany and Australia is something to be proud of. IMO anyway.

In the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta (the last ones before the athlete funding structure was revamped), Team GB & NI finished 36th on the medal table.

It won 15 medals in total, and just one gold (Redgrave and Pinsent in the coxless pairs rowing).

In the space of four Olympic cycles and with six days still to go, that has been converted into 16 gold medals and 41 in total.

You don't just achieve that by throwing money at a problem. You need to have the right people in place to make the difficult decisions on how that money is going to be best spent. The UK took the decision to invest in high performance facilities, coach education programmes and talent identification, and is reaping the rewards.

Just on a comparative note, in the four years leading up to the London games the US Olympic Committee (essentially the US version of UK Sport, albeit run entirely on private and corporate donations) paid out $795m to governing bodies and athletes directly. In a similar four year cycle UK Sport paid out around £540m, so the outlays are roughly similar. What the UK doesn't have that the US has - setting aside the population difference - is the privately supported collegiate sports infrastructure which produces many of their Olympic athletes. If you took what the colleges spend on NCAA sports programs and what the USOC gives out to governing bodies, the US spend would dwarf the UK one. Northern Kentucky University, on its own, has a $10m per year athletic budget. And that's not even one of the biggest spenders, by a long way.

So in terms of 'bang for your buck', GB is more than producing a return on its investment in Olympic medals. And having a high Olympic and world level profile helps to bring major events - like the World Athletics Championships in 2017 - to the UK. Would the Tour de Yorkshire have been such a success had it not been for the impact that GB Cycling has made on the public consciousness in recent years?

As I mentioned previously on this thread, no host nation has gone on to match or better their medal haul at the next Olympics, not even the USA after 96 or China in 08 but GB is giving it a good crack. Currently 1 ahead of the same stage from 2012, they may well fall a bit short in the end but they'll get close.

At the same stage in 2008 at our last 'away' Olympics we had 27, we currently have 41 so an increase of around 33% isn't to be sniff at because of money. Just in RL alone with the likes of Koukash we know it's one thing to have money, spending it wisely and getting the rewards from it is another matter altogether.

I'm all for a bit of jingoistic pride, but including Australia in a list of "huge" nations is a bit much (see below world lists), unless square miles of empty space is a factor.

by GDP by Population
UK 5th 22nd
China 2nd 1st (fair enough)
Russia 14th 9th (banned - correctly- from gaining medals in athletics)
Brazil 9th 5th
Germany 4th 17th
Australia 13th 52nd

It's simply a case of "you get what you pay for". I am not in the slightest unhappy about the investment in sport, but people showing shock & wonder at the level of performance/number of medals do not understand how modern sport works.
Perhaps some people still think the Olympics is a "Chariots of Fire" stiff-upper-lip, backs-against-the-wall story of one boy's/girl's dream to conquer against all odds. It generally isn't, it is identifying talent, body shapes etc & then churning them through coaching systems designed to create the perfect athlete for each particular discipline (ie investment).

P.S. If anyone can tell me what a dancing horse has to do with sport, I'd be delighted to know.

Not an appropriate analogy. Olympic nations do not have a salary cap.

Of course money isn't the only factor in breeding success in modern sport (Leeds RL 2004-2015 showed good examples of other factors), but IMO it sure is the most important factor (in non-capped arenas in particular).

Where on earth does my post suggest anyone shouldn't enjoy GB's 41 medals? I do not even imply it. I simply added perspective, which you among others apparently are not happy seeing.

Can you not still enjoy seeing our boys & girls winning medals in the knowledge that they have been paid for? Must you require to be kept in the dark as to the vast organisation that has been put in place (with Lottery money) to get us to this level of success?

As someone else has mentioned, perhaps I will now never see you or others on here posting about Wigan's unfair advantage pre-SL & how they simply "bought" trophies.