Where are the extra medals?
if there’s 21.5% more medals to be won… 🙂 🙂 seriously though, good news. always good to back a winner. i see they’re throwing money at basketball too… 😕 😕
Think you make a good point, British Cycling invested its last lot of money wisely when it came to ensuring a good harvest of medals concentrating on events with the least number of variables involved in winning.
Power events where if you post a PB or produce max watts and your PB is better than everyone else’s – you win. They were also lucky that in two of the events that are not just about power and are much less predictable in their outcomes, BMX and road racing, they had two of the talents of their generation in Nicole Cooke and Shandze Reade. There may be more variable at play in a road race than the track sprint, but if you have the best talent you’re always in with a chance.
At the moment you can’t see anyone beating the Brits in the power events on the track, Reade will probably be well up for the BMX, Cooke should still be at the top of her game, but on the road in a one-off race that’s no guarantee of winning ditto for Cavendish if he rides the men’s road race.
To get the return being asked the British cycling team have got to win all the events they won in Beijing plus two more. So what else is there? The Madison – pretty much a lottery, the points race (men’s and women’s) – again a massive amount of variables, men’s BMX, and Mountain biking… hmm, maybe.
That is asking a lot, but you wouldn’t bet against the set up at British Cycling delivering again. They must have known that winning big in Beijing would raise expectations for London, but that’s the price of success – which is a nice problem to have.