Olympic Investment

Didn't you know, medals are priceless?

The money comes from the lottery, doesn't it? I'm happy enough for it to be spent on sport, as this should cut the NHS bill, but only if spread around a little more. As it currently stands, if the money wasn't spent on the Olympians, it still wouldn't be available for grass roots, so I'd rather sailors get it than any other middle class sport.

Better would be inner city basketball, apparently, if you want to change lives.

Money been around far longer than EPO.

But look back 20 years and think how sh*t GB was at the Olympics. Something had to be done, didn't it? Better to put great coaching teams in place than start state sponsored doping. Cheaper too, I expect.

Although GB topped the sailing medal table we only seemed to have two stars and Hannah Mills in particular did well with 8th place worst result whilst the men's 470 seemed to be worse than club sailors - overline and out of race when already having a 20+ discard. Also our 49ers capsizing in medal races brought smiles to a club sailor.plus 49X hitting the committee boat. One wonders what the coaching has been about

In terms of medals, 2016 was lowest number since 1996 when we won two and we don't seem to have much strength in depth and much worse than Sydney and Beiling; in Sydney sailin won 3 out of the 11 golds and this time 2 out of 27 so lottery money having little impact or is it poor coaching? As other GB sports win more medals there is a risk sailing will see its budget cut and with athletics it seems one of the poorer performing sports in 2016 espcially based on previous performance. Seems much of the money goes on our fulltime sailors plus spending so much time in Rio. As davidyacht points out hard to see how many countries can compete which is why it was great the Laser came in to the Olympics.


Edited by attenborough - 21 Aug 16 at 9:17pm

Three was minimum with total of 48, whilst maximum target was 6 out of 79. Final total was 67 so on that basis sailing should have had 5 and some sports actually exceeded their maximum target.