Section:GDN 1N PaGe:38 Edition Date:190724 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 23/7/2019 20:43 cYanmaGentaYellowb
- The Guardian Wednesday 24 July 2019
(^38) Sport
Tokyo 2020 One year to go
Medals tally will
not be the only
focus of Team GB
Paul MacInnes
The slogan of the British Olympic
movement used to be straightfor-
ward and decidedly unsentimental.
Now, as the countdown to Tokyo 2020
reaches a year to go, “no compromise”
has been replaced by a new and gentler
slogan: “ Medals and more”.
After the unprecedented success
in Rio three years ago, when Team GB
brought home 67 medals from their
most successful Games for more than
a century, it is probably sensible to
manage expectations of a repeat per-
formance. So when UK Sport and the
British Olympic Association talk about
next year they do not put numbers on
their targets and speak in broad terms
of reaching the “upper echelons” of
the table. Quite what they mean when
they talk about “more”, however,
remains largely unknown.
A few clues as to this new direction
were shared at a briefi ng in Bisham
Abbey last week. Th e National Sports
Centre is where Katharine Grainger
once kept a small room while she was
training with her sculls. Now Britain’s
most successful female Olympian is
the chair of UK Sport and is presid-
ing over a shift in policy that looks
to maintain the medal success of the
past decade but broaden the scope
of focus beyond a four-year Games
cycle. There is also an external aspect
to the strategy which, in Tokyo, will
mean Team GB aiming to become the
“second-most favoured team” and
performing de facto acts of diplomacy.
“We are more sophisticated than
just a single binary medal target now,”
says Chelsea Warr, UK Sport’s director
of performance. “The best descrip-
tion I can give is ‘medals and more’.
This is medals plus plus. We want
to see Team GB and Paralympics GB
in the upper echelons of the medal
table. We want to see more medals
and more medallists to inspire the
nation. Of course we want to do well
and, actually, we will. The team will do
a really, really good job. But I think it
would be a bit of a tragedy if we judged
the whole success or failure of the high
performance on medals.”
Warr’s emphasis is now on a more
long-term approach, one that will be
part of the new UK Sport “blueprint”
for athletes that will come into eff ect
after the Tokyo Games. It will see a
shift in the focus of funding from a
four-year cycle to eight years, in part
a response to a backlash against the
current model which denies funding
to sports deemed not to be genuine
medal contenders. (It also reinforces
a British strength; no country is bet-
ter at getting medallists to repeat their
success at the next Games). In another
new initiative there will be a renewed
emphasis on athletes using their posi-
tion as role models to have a greater
infl uence on the grassroots.
“One of the things we learned in our
public consultation last year was that
the nation wanted to keep winning but
also to leverage the impact of those
incredible moments a bit more,” Warr
says. “Mostly that is through our ath-
letes and the stories they can tell. Their
messages about overcoming adversity
and working as a team, their ability to
set massive, audacious goals and pur-
sue them are great messages for every-
one in society to relate to. So those of
us in the high performance system are
asking how we can use these stories in
a much wider way.”
Spreading the good news will not
be limited to these shores. One of the
observations the British Olympic A sso-
ciation made about the experience of
Rio – and the home Games of London
- was the positive impact that good
relations with the local population
can have on per formance. Make a
good impression while you are there,
went the logic, and the crowds in the
stadiums will get behind you.
“We don’t want any of our sports to
go into Tokyo without giving some-
thing while they’re there,” says the
BOA’s chef de mission, Mark England,
charged with organising Team GB’s
presence in Japan. “The hockey team
was in Hiroshima just last week, our
swim team gave huge support to the
Yokohama schools network. Making
Britain the ‘second most-favoured
team’ is absolutely a stated mission
of ours. It’s hugely important to us.”
This strategy will, England hopes,
be borne out by the logistics. Team GB
will be based in Tokyo’s neighbour city
of Yokohama for the Games, with 85%
of the athletes residing on a new cam-
pus 40 minutes’ drive from the Olym-
pic Village. A team of local volunteers,
dubbed “Go GB”, has been set up to
off er support , there is a partnership
with Keio University in Tokyo, which
will provide accommodation and
training facilities , and an elementary
school will become the Team GB centre
for training in the run-up to the Games.
In return the British plan not only to
ingratiate themselves with the locals
but to leave a “legacy” of refurbished
real estate and sporting equipment.
If some of this sounds like outreach
in a time of diplomatic uncertainty,
then Britain’s Olympic nabobs are not
denying it. If it is also a case of doing
more with less in an age of austerity,
then these publicly funded bodies
have no choice but to go along with
it. Quite how far the “leverage” of
Team GB’s success can go remains to
be seen but another strong Olympic
performance 365 days from now would
certainly not hurt.
Team GB’s recent hauls
1996
Atlanta
1 8 6152000
Sydney11 10 7282004
Athens9 9 12 302008
Beijing
19 13 17 492012
London
29 17 19 652016
Rio de Janeiro27 23 17 67Despite concerns about extreme heat,
ballooning costs and accommodation
shortages, organisers of the Tokyo
2020 Olympics and Paralympics are
resolutely upbeat with one year to go
until the opening ceremony – and not
without some justifi cation.
Asked about the biggest challenges
organisers have overcome so far a
spokesperson, Masa Takaya, said
that “Tokyo 2020 has not really faced
any major issues”, adding the Interna-
tional Olympic Committee and Inter-
national Paralympic Commit tee are
“very satisfi ed with our preparations ”.
That assessment requires down-
grading to minor issues such as the
scrapped original stadium plan,
a replacement design without an
Olympic cauldron, plagiarised logosthat were also scrapped, a bidding
corruption scandal and a budget
on course to quadruple from initial
projections.
Cynics might say vote buying and
cost overruns are as Olympic as east
African long-distance runners and east
European gymnasts, and none of this
has dampened enthusiasm from fans,
sponsors and broadcasters in Japan or
around the world.
More than 7.5 million people in
Japan registered for the fi rst ticket
lottery, making every event mas-
sively oversubscribed: 90% of appli-
cants are estimated to have come away
empty-handed in the fi rst round in
June, and two more rounds have been
scheduled for later this year.
Then there are the hundreds of
thousands expected to come from
around the world to a country already
showing signs of struggling to cope
with a massive tourism boom.Tokyo upbeat IOC satisfied
despite overcrowding fears
Gavin Blair
Tokyo Laura Muir is
a medal hope at
Tokyo but she
and other British
athletes will be
expected to be
diplomats too
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