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"Broke countries"...
Beyond factual accuracy there, UK sport funding comes from a mix of government and national lottery. Its not a big expense (~90mn a year), but it's more than a lot of countries, hence the results in the medal table. GB saw a massive improvement in 00s through the use of the national lottery scheme, and also the fact that others spent a lot less in the sports they specialised in (rowing, track, sailing, equestrian). There was a very big financial push to make GB an Olympic power, and it has worked.
Doping ofc played a role (same masterminds as team sky), but the most important element was the injection of cash and huge improvement of infrastructure (both physical and organisational) across the country. All of this is well documented, too. Besides, Atlanta was a bit of a (negative) outlier. At the end of the day, sports are a money game, and the UK are reaping rewards of big spending from 00s onwards
well no, up to 96, Olympic sports in the UK were run in very amateurish and disorganised way, in what we might disparagingly call the stuffy suits & blazers era.
athletes who won medals back then, did so because they were often exceptional talents or maverick outsiders willing to do things differently than their sports admin liked them to do. They excelled inspite of the systems meant to help them, rather than because of them
But 96 changed things, because it was embarrasing to the government of the day that a country of 60million people with enough money to spend on sport, with enough talent & coaches, could only win 1 gold medal, when countries of similar population and sporting outlooks with less money achieved alot more.
and they created UK sport as a kind of copy of the Australian institute of sport,who would hand out government grants of money, also boosted by money taken from ticket sales of a national lottery they setup at the same time so as to make the public feel involved in the expected success to come, to a set of revised/modernised sports admin bodies whose sole job was to focus on winning gold medals at major sporting competitions like world championships and the Olympics, and who would fund athletes to go full time professional.
I mean literally before that we had gold medal winners who worked in supermarkets as their day job, and trained in the evenings or time off, or were often from the army because the army allowed officers to basically train full time as physical education instructors.
so they professionalised the whole way the UK did the Olympics, and instantly you started to see results, because if you talent spot individuals, give them the capability to train in proper environments full time with proper coaches the results do eventually speak for themselves.
obviously by the time of 2012 that system was working well but they pushed alot more money into it to make it the most successful games the nation had ever had, because thats just what you do when you host these things.
the impact of that is still being felt now as youve got a generation of athletes coming through who saw 2012 and were inspired enough to take up sport professionally.
as Ive said before its financial doping to an extent, whether thats fair or not, though the budgets are decreasing now from what they were, the more sports there are the harder it is to fund them all, and theyre very much on a success only guarantees money footing, which can drive sports governance into making decisions only about which sports and athletes to back.
I think in alot of the competitions in this Olympics so far, the just missing out on a win, or finishing 4th, or not even making the finals is in some ways the result of that.
there have certainly been UK athletes whove failed doping tests since 96 for sure, its not all about how they transformed the sporting governance, but for the vast majority of it , it really is just about taking the games seriously rather than just well its that thing they have on the Beeb every 4 years.
Yous lot get your view of Britain from Oliver Twist and 1980s football hooligan films I swear
But it was more ridiculous than Ben Johnson 1988? It was more ridiculous than Chicken at the 2007 TdF who was removed by his own team for being too blatant. Pan turned at the 50meter mark in just 22.28 then somehow a lactic acid piano didn't fall on him in the 2nd half.
Pan said after his radioactive win .......
Hmm, where have we heard that before? Remember it is a slow pool.
Don't forget also that the UK quite understandably isolated specific sports which had relatively good expenditure/reward ratios, vis-à-vis targeting sports with a lot of medals available, and with relatively shallow fields of competition. Track cycling was a perfect storm for them in that respect; especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall (because Eastern Bloc nations were always strong in the vélodrome) there were not huge numbers of countries targeting track cycling with a lot of funding, because the majority of the money in cycling was - and still is - on the road, but for most Britons especially back then before the successes led to a huge increase in the attention given to the sport, the Olympic medal is a currency far more widely understood than any achievement in road cycling other than winning the Tour de France; in addition, on the track there are a lot of different disciplines paying medals, and even more helpfully, trends in the Olympic program also suited the Brits, with the changes in the program meaning more focus on events where the incremental improvements in aero and similar that came from their higher budget would have a disproportionate effect, like the Team Sprint, while races heavy on tactics and learned wisdom like the Points Race and the Madison were marginalised and endurance track was all thrown together into the omnium. This maximised the amount of races coming down to pure physio and aero where the superior tech and budget would make more of a difference, and de-emphasised the races where these advantages could be overcome by race smarts (and as has been shown with the likes of Laura Kenny, Britain still had athletes who could win in these formats anyway).
Throw in a few healthy bits of open abuse of the system, like Philip Hindes admitting to deliberately crashing to provoke a restart because they botched their Team Sprint final, and Dave Brailsford, Shane Sutton, the blurred lines between the commercial Team Sky and the national federation's competitive arm, and all the other reasons to be cynical, of course, but track cycling was specifically targeted as a means to get Britain up the medal table precisely because it was a sport with a wider pool of medals available than it had field of competition.
I remember reading about China's approach in the years building up to the Beijing games where they had a similar strategy, to expand their medal count beyond the areas they usually dominated, for example they apparently saw female weightlifting as a relatively less competitive field internationally and set up a program to develop potential medal winners there. As with the UK and their track cycling one can then look at doping etc as possible contributors to winning but without having the competitors and facilities in the first place you aren't even a contender.
Having lived in various countries I find it hard to care about anyone's medal table bragging rights, but I guess the UK were always going to move on from their 'Eddie the Eagle' days at some point! And they've certainly done that.
I don't find it difficult to understand. It comes back to national pride. National pride can be a very powerful tool. National pride is the norm and is almost universal. It is what led to the rescue of allies against all odds at Dunkirk in WWII. National pride is strongly evident in the opinions in this forum.
The UK was humiliated at the Olympics for a long time. Then London 2012 got things moving. Australia was similar. In 1976 Australia hit a low ebb at the Montreal games. It was that disaster which the public demanded better which led to the AIS. Sydney 2000 provided another huge boost and it remains popular for sports funding to be kept at current levels.
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ManicJack
BANNED
National pride is the most base level and problematic level of pride imaginable.
Why is it problematic? Every country has it. It is very normal. It is more a source of good than bad. That is what we see every four years at the Olympics. National pride wins wars against the odds. When there are no longer national borders there will no longer be national pride.
ManicJack
BANNED
Absolutely. I think attributing GB's Olympic success to doping rather than bags of cash and a McKinsey-style corporate strategy is mistaken. Of course, the jiffy bags etc. show it wasn't purely clean, as does Cracknell openly admitting he would cheat to win. That said, it was still funding, infrastructure, and strategy as the central part.
Armchair Cyclist
Moderator
Mod's hat on:
No sanctions or deletions, but let's all avoid getting farther into the discussion of the pro's and con's of national identity.
No sanctions or deletions, but let's all avoid getting farther into the discussion of the pro's and con's of national identity.
Well the French continue to be suspect as a whole lot of asterisks (and obelisks). All four of the riders in the road race were better than you'd expect of them.
The water in that pool must be more toxic than the Seine after those guys swam in it...
Sara Errani, 37, was popped for doping in 2017. Now she’s an Olympic champion. To be fair, that was some of the most mediocre tennis I’ve seen.
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