Olympic sports: Why LA potential, not Paris medals, holds key to funding

As ever at an Olympic Games, some sports out-performed expectations while others fell flat.

Great Britain’s athletics team won 10 medals, although just the one gold from Keely Hodgkinson, while rowing recovered from a drastic Games in Tokyo when they won just one silver and one bronze that left people questioning the amount of resources pumped into the sport, with eight medals, three of them gold.

Rowing received the second highest amount in the Paris cycle which runs from 2021-2025, of £22.2m, a shade more than athletics and a shade more than they received pre-Tokyo despite their disappointing performance in Japan.

But other sports have really fluctuated on the back of performances at an Olympics.

Badminton, for instance, saw its funding cut drastically post-Rio despite Huddersfield’s Marcus Ellis winning a bronze medal alongside Chris Langridge, and only got £665,000 in the run-up to Tokyo after an appeal.

That improved to £3.1m for the Paris cycle but that sport would ordinarily now be worried for its future support after sending only a team of three to Paris, neither of which progressed very far at the Port de la Chappelle Arena.

UK Sport distributes The National Lottery’s Olympic funding among the different sports and in a change to previous cycles, Grainger has revealed “a very different model of investment” is in place for Los Angeles 2028.

Former rower Grainger, who competed at five Olympics, winning gold in London, said: “There’s an absolute assumption by everyone, understandably, that funding is decided on the back of results. Almost like you’ll be rewarded if you do well and punished if you don’t do well.

“It’s a very different model of investment now. All the sports have been told a suggested amount already, pre-Games.

“So the results in Paris are of use and of interest, but will not be directly affecting the funding going forward. It’s all about future potential. So even if a sport wasn’t successful at these Games, if the conversation has been had, that actually in LA it could be successful for a very good reason, then the finances will be secured.”

Team GB’s medals tally was spread across 18 different sports and Grainger said UK Sport’s strategy was “very much aimed at the breadth of sport”.

“There’s an argument that if you go narrower and just focus on a few sports, you can be very successful and some nations do that very well,” she said. “We feel we’ve got a responsibility to go for as wide a range as we can. That’s more of interest to the public – you get more support from the public.

“This is public investment, it’s lottery money and Exchequer money and it needs to go as far as it can.

“Not everyone will relate to every sport, but if you’ve got 18 sports that you’re successful in, there’s something for everyone.”

Grainger said UK Sport had targeted between 50 and 70 medals and a top-five finish in the overall table and described Team GB’s haul as “a huge success”.

“One or two gold medals can be the difference between where you finish – that’s why it’s not the real target for us,” she said. “The real aim is the breadth of medals. Sixty-five medals, normally when you get that you’re in the top five.”

Grainger was speaking at a National Lottery ‘ChangeMaker’ event at North Paddington Youth Club in London, where she was joined by Team GB medal winners including boxer Lewis Richardson.

Richardson is planning on turning professional after winning a bronze medal in the ring, but his result was an outlier on a poor return from the Sheffield-based GB Boxing squad, which received £11.4m in funding in this Olympic cycle.

A programme that made national stars of Audley Harrison, Amir Khan, Nicola Adams and Anthony Joshua produced six medallists out of 12 competitors in Tokyo.

But the truncated post-Covid cycle into Paris hindered them badly and they could only send five boxers to these latest Olympics, of which four were eliminated in the first round, although each had grounds for complaints about the judges’ scoring.

But after a gender row in Paris, and the fact its place in the Los Angeles Games is uncertain and not to be determined until the middle of next year, one of the staples of British sport and the Olympic programme faces an uncertain future.