A columnist for Australia’s Courier-Mail newspaper wrote on Saturday of his despair at the trouncing the UK had given its long-term sporting rival in Rio. “We’ve got four TVs covering four different sports at once in our office and it seems like at least one of them is playing God Save the Queen at any given time,” he complained.
It might be hard to recall now amid a medal rush that might yet top the 65 won in London, but three Games ago it was Australia fourth in the medal table and Great Britain languishing.
Now, roles are reversed at a Rio Games that has been has been a compelling, chaotic sporting celebration. Even as the athletes have dazzled, concern at the modus operandi of the International Olympic Committee and the dark forces of doping have bubbled to the surface.
Yet from the velodrome to the swimming pool, from the diving board to the gymnastics arena, it has been a giddy rush of success for the British athletes in Rio and those watching back home. Talented individuals are key, but underpinning their success has been a system that ensures the cycle repeats itself.
It has also created a winning habit. When the Great Britain women’s hockey team went to a shootout in the final, it was their Dutch opponents’ shoulders that slumped.
Ironically, it was partly through importing the Australian model that UK Sport, which poured £347m of lottery and exchequer funding into Olympic and Paralympic sport over four years, has underpinned British success.
The sense that these are ordinary people doing extraordinary things, that the imbalance in the profile of women’s and men’s sport has temporarily broken down, that hard work and dedication pay off – all are worth celebrating loud and long.
It has been a pleasingly apolitical triumph, the history of which undermines those on both sides of the Brexit debate trying to claim it as their own. It was John Major who turned on the lottery funding in 1997, following humiliation in Atlanta. But it was Gordon Brown who hugely increased investment in 2006 and the coalition that, in 2012, extended funding to Rio and the Conservatives that extended it to Tokyo.
Yet there is no doubt the remorseless “no compromise” model also raises difficult questions, even as Britain improbably tussles with China in the medal table. The nagging fear we are chasing success for its own sake is hard to shake. For some, it carries connotations of a cold war arms race and rivals mutter darkly about “financial doping”.
There should be renewed debate about whether funding should be flexed to find a place for sports, such as basketball, unlikely to win a medal but for which elite success would still be a fillip at the grassroots. But we should not be coy about celebrating. Watching that women’s hockey team explode with joy and then articulately explain how they wanted to inspire girls to feel differently about sport, it was hard to argue this was not money well spent.
Instead, the challenge must be to replicate elite success at the lower levels. Before London 2012, this newspaper documented the vandalism wrought on school sport by Michael Gove. Since then, some new money has gone in to primary school sport but severe cuts to local authority budgets have laid waste to facilities. A new sport strategy last year sought to introduce some vision where it was previously lacking, but the means must be found as well as the will.
Just last week the government came under fire for its “embarrassing” childhood obesity strategy, while across the country decaying facilities are closing and intractable but easily solvable problems such as opening up school facilities out of hours remain.
The divergence between the surge in participation in cycling and running among the relatively well-off and lagging figures among lower socioeconomic groups remains stark.
History shows it is not elite success that chiefly inspires young people into sport, though having positive role models helps, but having access to affordable, accessible facilities and engaging coaches at school and in their community. It remains a stark statistic that more than a quarter of the British team are privately educated.
The worst thing that could happen would be for this glorious run of medals to be used by flag-waving politicians as a Team GB-branded fig leaf for failing to do anything about the wider state of British sport. Instead, they must nurture the shoots as well as the tallest blades.
