Witnessing Team GB’s amazing successes at Rio this summer, it is easy to forget that it is only 20 years since the Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games, where the team’s performance was described as one of the lowest points of British sport. A single gold medal meant that Great Britain finished a lowly 36th in the Atlanta medal table – below the likes of Kazakhstan, Ethiopia and Algeria. Quite a contrast to the 27 golds, which earned the team second place in the Rio medals table.

Team GB’s transformation from Olympic also-rans to having the “best high performance system in the world” in just two decades has been described as one of the great success stories of publicly-funded sport. Much of the credit for Team GB’s journey from Olympic obscurity to the summit of sporting excellence has been placed on elite sports quango UK Sport.

The body was established in January 1997 – in the aftermath of the disastrous Atlanta Games – and tasked with taking charge and improving high performance sport. Shortly after its launch, the organisation was given authorisation to distribute lottery money and in the two decades since then, UK Sport has created a system which is now envied around the sporting world.

OLYMPIC RAGS TO RICHES
It is estimated that the UK government was spending around £5m per year on Olympic sports prior to the 1996 Atlanta games – which is equivalent to having a £20m four-year “cycle” of funding.

Following the launch of UK Sport, the amount of funds invested in high performance sport nearly tripled for the next Olympic Games. In total, £58.9m of lottery funding was spent on elite sports between the setting up of UK Sport and the opening of the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000.

The increase in funding delivered immediate results in terms of sporting success. At Sydney, Team GB achieved 28 podium finishes and ranked 10th in the overall medal table – a position they achieved again at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. Encouraged by the outcomes – and with the prospect of London hosting the 2012 Olympic Games – UK Sport began to set its sights even higher.

In December 2004 the quango announced that it would be overhauling the way it allocated funding in order to concentrate on those sports which would ensure even more medals at major Games. It was around this time that the term “no compromise” was added to the UK Sport lexicon.

“The new strategy is more focused than in the past,” then chair Sue Campbell said in November 2004. “The impact of funding will be diluted if too many athletes are supported. It is a tough, no compromise approach that will strengthen the best, support the developing and provoke change in the under performing.”

INCREASED FUNDING
While it tightened the criteria for funding in order to further improve results, there were two other key turning points which helped UK Sport establish its role as the guardian of elite sport funding. In July 2005, London won the bid to host the 2012 Games, strengthening the case for making more funds available to provide a strong Team GB for the home games.

Then, in April 2006, a decision to simplify the funding streams ahead of the London Games gave UK Sport responsibility for all performance-related funding – from talent programmes to podium athletes. Until that point, all talent identification, nurturing and development programmes had been the responsibility of the individual sports councils of the four home nations, with UK Sport solely concentrating on the funding of elite athletes.

This meant that the amount of Lottery Funding which UK Sport was responsible for radically increased. The quango had invested £71m during the Athens 2004 cycle, but taking over the development and talent level activities and programmes meant that for Beijing 2008, the amount of money being channelled by UK Sport exceeded £235m. For the London Games, the figure jumped to £264m.

SETTING THE BAR HIGH
In many ways, the London 2012 Games was a watershed moment for British elite sport. The unprecedented success of Team GB athletes inspired the whole nation and resulted in the government pledging increases both to Olympic (5 per cent increase) and Paralympic (43 per cent) funding, resulting in an overall increase of 11 per cent on the London 2012 cycle. In total, a record investment of £274m was made to support Team GB’s preparations for the Rio 2016 Olympics.

Following the changes, in December 2012, then UK Sport chair Baroness Sue Campbell said: “London 2012 was just the beginning, not the end, for Olympic and Paralympic sport in this country – and we plan to continue to make this funding work as hard as it can to help our best athletes achieve medal success at the highest level.”

The record investment was accompanied by an ambitious target – for Great Britain to become the first nation to be more successful in the Olympics post hosting, in terms of number of medals won. The bar was set high for Rio 2016, but so was the level of support in order to clear it.

TARGET PRACTICE
As we now know, Team GB smashed its medal target for the Rio 2016 Olympics and achieved its goal of becoming the first nation to surpass its home Games medal haul. In the process, Great Britain sensationally finished second in the medal table, above global powerhouse China. Of the 366 British athletes at Rio, more than a third (130) came back with a medal.

But what was the cost of each medal at Rio? Which sports have the “cheapest” medals and which require more funding in order to deliver success?

Shooting might not be the biggest sport, but when it comes to cost effective podium finishes, it is top of the bill. At Rio, two bronze medals came at a cost of £3.95m over the four-year cycle – meaning that each “cost” the equivalent of £1.98m.

The success of gymnasts, such as double Olympic champion Max Whitlock, not only means that they have become household names, but that funding in the sport can be seen as money well spent. At Rio, the gymnastics team exceeded its medal target of three to five by securing seven podium finishes. As the sport received £14.6m of during the cycle, it meant that each medal came at a cost of just £2.09m.

At the other end of the scale are hockey and sailing. The women’s hockey team’s victory at Rio might have been one of the highlights of the Games for fans, but success came at a cost. More than £16.1m was ploughed into the sport by UK Sport during the cycle, making the single gold the most expensive of all of Team GB’s medals. The hockey team does, however, consists of 16 players – each of whom receives individual funding – so when calculating average costs, there’s an argument to divide the cost among all 16.

Had the men’s hockey team finished in the top three, as expected, then sailing would have finished as the sport with the most expensive medals at Rio. A total of £25.5m was invested in sailing over the Rio Game cycle, but with three medals – at the lower end of UK Sport’s expectation of securing between three and six medals – the two golds and silver ended up costing £8.5m each.

There were also four sports into which UK Sport invested during the Rio cycle which failed to secure a medal. Out of these, modern pentathlon (medal target of 1 to 2) and  fencing (target of one medal) can be said to have underachieved, while archery and weightlifting had no medal targets for Rio – and delivered none.

SPORTING SUPERPOWER
Since its launch, UK Sport has poured a total of £1.138bn into setting up systems and supporting athletes – £904m of which has been invested in the Summer Olympics alone. It is almost impossible to argue that the organisation hasn’t achieved what it was set up to do – to radically improve Team GB’s performances on the world sports stage.

The details of the next cycle for Tokyo won’t be disclosed until early 2017, and it remains to be seen whether the UK will greenlight an increase in funding.

While the “cost” of medals isn’t among the criteria used by UK Sport to make its funding decisions, using it to compare sports does offer a way of assessing each sport’s efficiency. With the average price of a medal at Rio standing at £4,288,524m, sports such as gymnastics, taekwondo and cycling could point out that their medals cost significantly less.

Liz Nicholl, UK Sport chief executive, says Team GB’s success in Rio has ensured the team paved the way for future success at Tokyo. “We made sporting history with 67 medals across 19 sports,” she said. “To win more medals than in London and to be ahead of China is an incredible place to be – it’s spectacular in fact. Even the sporting superpowers have not increased their medal haul after hosting a Games. We are one of those sporting superpowers now.”