Beijing Olympic Gallery
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The Olympic and Paralympic Games are the biggest sporting spectacle that exist – the world’s best athletes have one opportunity every four years to take their place on the podium. The Beijing Games will be the culmination of four years training and preparation.
It will be an unforgiving environment where fitness and instinctive and technical skill must combine with mental toughness to allow teams and individuals to prevail.
That is why UK Sport - in its role as the nation's high-performance sports agency - has supported our most promising athletes in 24 Olympic and 20 Paralympic sports in their bids for medal success. With the Olympic Games set to get underway on 8 August, 2008 (and the Paralympic Games on 6 September), UK Sport is confident that its targets of 8th place in the Olympic medal table and retaining 2nd in the Paralympic table will be met.
With London the next host of the Games in 2012, the Beijing Games have taken on added significance as a staging post to the improved performance targeted in four years time, buit they remain massively important in their own right.
An 8th place finish overall in the Olympic medal table would, boycotted Games apart, require the best medal performance by a British team since 1920. Individual medal targets – set by sports and signed off by UK Sport - suggest that the main contributors to Team GB’s Olympic medal haul will be the now traditional group of Cycling (6 medals), Athletics (5), Sailing (4) and Rowing (4). But with significant increased investment across the system now in place ahead of the London Games in 2012, 17 sports will travel to Beijing with ambitions for their athletes to reach the medal podium.
The total of medals targeted across the sports is 41 – however this is a ‘stretch’ target as experience from previous Games shows that, given the very tight margins between success and failure at this level, not every single medal will be won. UK Sport believes a conversion rate of 85% will be required to achieve the overall target: bringing 35 medals, around a third of which should be gold. Tenth place in the medal table was achieved in Athens with 30 medals, and nine golds.
For the Paralympics, the sports’ ‘stretch’ target is 112 medals. This converts to UK Sport targeting around 95 medals, of which around 35 will need to be gold to achieve 2nd place in the table – and almost exactly the same amounts as those won by our athletes in Athens.
You can also see some athletes talking about the Games and how important support through the World Class Performance Programme has been to them in UK Sport’s Video Library.
GB’s athletes have benefited significantly from National Lottery support of the World Class Performance Programme. If you have bought a National Lottery ticket you have made a difference by supporting our best athletes in their medal ambitions for Beijing and through to London.
