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The British Olympic team suffered a significant drop in gold medals at the Paris games even while increasing its total medal count, a mixed result that follows concerns about funding pressures in UK sport.
Team GB finished on Sunday with 65 medals, one above the haul in Tokyo three years ago and towards the top end of the stated target range of 50-70 announced last month.
However, the 14 gold medals in Paris marked the lowest number of British Olympic champions since the 9 in Athens two decades ago. British athletes won 22 golds in Tokyo, and 27 in Rio in 2016.
In terms of total medals won in Paris, the UK came third behind the US and China. Ranked by gold medals, Team GB was in seventh place behind the US, China, Japan, Australia, host nation France and the Netherlands.
The drop in gold medals comes after both Team GB and UK Sport warned ahead of the Paris games that inflation and a shortfall in funding had put the future prospects of the team at risk.
Olympics and Paralympic programmes are funded through UK Sport, a government agency that also handles spending for hosting big sporting events in the UK, such as the Euro 2028 football contest. The National Lottery provides 60 per cent of UK Sport’s funding with the rest from the government.
In the run-up to Paris, Olympic sports received £246mn from UK Sport, up from £221mn in the Tokyo cycle. But adjusted for inflation, funding for Olympic sports has fallen around 17 per cent since 2008, according to a Financial Times analysis.
Rising costs have forced sport federations to make difficult decisions, such as whether to fork out for expensive training camps and international competitions that help prepare athletes.
“It’s probably fair to say that inflation has hurt everywhere. It’s made for some really challenging choices for a lot of the sports”, Sally Munday, chief executive of UK Sport, told the Financial Times on the eve of the games.
Rival nations, such as France and the Netherlands, have increased spending on Olympic sport and pushed up wages for top coaches, she added, while Brexit had made travel and hiring from overseas harder.
Team GB still scored some notable successes. The rowing team bounced back from a miserable showing in Tokyo, notching up eight medals, while Keely Hodgkinson’s victory in the women’s 800 metres and Alex Yee’s triathlon gold were among the high-profile wins.
Several athletes came agonisingly close to topping the podium in Paris. Swimmers Adam Peaty and Matt Richards both missed out on gold by just 0.02 seconds in their finals, while rule changes were largely to blame for Emma Wilson’s failure to win in windsurfing.
“One of the challenges we’ve got is that we’ve become really bloody good at Olympic and Paralympic sport, and we’ve been consistently bloody good”, said Munday. “And the challenge with that is that a lot of people now think it’s easy. But the reality is that it’s not easy. It’s as hard now as it’s ever been.”
UK Sport’s Olympic and Paralympic funding runs out in March next year. A new funding arrangement for the cycle leading up to the Los Angeles games is set to be negotiated as part of the ongoing government spending review.
Munday said UK Sport was seeking a “small uplift” in the next settlement.
Speaking to the FT ahead of Paris, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association Andy Anson said some sporting federations were already planning to cut the number of athletes they fund ahead of LA 2028 because of squeezed finances.
In a statement on Sunday, Dame Katherine Grainger, chair of UK Sport, said Paris 2024 marked “another thrilling chapter of Great Britain’s Olympic success” and congratulated the team on delivering “continued, consistent” results.