Team GB’s gold medal haul is set to fall 23 per cent in Paris, according to forecasters, who predict hosts France could pip them to third place in the official rankings.
Gracenote, which has been previously pessimistic in its predictions for home hopes, maintains, however, that Britain “can sustain” a 60-plus overall medal tally.
Gold medals for Britain will fall from 22 at Tokyo 2020 to 17 in Paris, the analysis company predicts. An overall tally of 63 medals is within sight, however, as “British success over the past three Summer Olympics has been built on having medal winners in at least 20 sports”.
The forecast comes after elite funding body UK Sport said earlier this month that a record haul of up to 70 Olympic medals is “within our grasp”.
Team GB finished the last three Olympic Games with respectively 64, 67 and 65 medals to place in the top four of the medals table.
Another 60-plus performance would keep Team GB among the ‘superpowers’ of Olympic sport, although the United States and China are again expected to dominate the medals table in the absence of a team representing Russia.
The Gracenote tally puts them at third in its own virtual table on medal tallies alone. But, with the Olympics prioritising gold medal tallies, the formula would leave Team GB behind France in the official table should they prove correct in a fortnight’s time.
Host nation France will “increase its medal total significantly, nearly tripling its number of gold medals in comparison to the Tokyo Olympics”, Gracenote believes. The forecast projects the United States to win the most medals overall with 112, which would mark the team’s eighth successive placement at the top.
China is projected to finish second on total medals but could challenge the United States for first place on gold medals.
Australia is expected to be fifth, behind France, on the total medal table, with 54 forecast – the country’s most for 24 years, since winning a record 58 when hosting Sydney 2000.
Despite the smallest cohort of athletes since Beijing in 2008, Team GB expect to succeed across a wider range of sports than ever before. UK Sport has not, however, set exact medal targets, arguing that it places excessive pressure on individual sports and athletes.
The British team of 327 athletes will again include more women than men – 174 to 153 – for an Olympics that will have exact parity in the number of events available to both men and women for the first time.
“I’ve never been more confident in our athletes and our cohort of athletes – it’s just an incredibly talent team – [and] this is the most sophisticated high performance system in the world,” Mark England, the Team GB chef de mission, said earlier this month. He specifically highlighted the emergence of teenagers like the 800m runner Phoebe Gill and skateboarder Sky Brown alongside returning Olympic legends like Adam Peaty, Charlotte Dujardin and Tom Daley.
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