london olympics 2012
Niels De Vos the head of UK Athletics has set a ten medal target for the British Athletics team at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, he says the target is optimistic but the Athletics team should aim for more medals than British teams in other sports.
Britain have not won more than ten medals in track and field events since the Tokyo Olympics in 1968, boycotted games not included, but the British Cycling team won fourteen medals in Beijing 2008. However the GB Athletics team could only manage four at that tournament.
Britain won six medals at the recent World Championship in Germany, but ten will be a real struggle. However as DeVos claims, this is our home Olympics and we should be setting ourselves such targets. He said;
“We have to aim for the best we’ve ever done at our home Games. I’m perfectly happy to put a target out there that’s aspirational. We should be aiming to get a better return that we’ve had in past Olympics. I’ve based it on the number of finalists we’ve been getting in the past four or five years, which has been going up at each major championship.
At the last two major finals, the Worlds and the Olympics, we’ve had 25 finalists. Can we get to 10 medals? We got six at the Worlds, so there is a way to go, but it’s possible.”
“At the World Championships in Berlin we had a team of 60 and you could count on the fingers of one hand those who did not perform. That is very different from previous championships. For the first time since I’ve been involved they regarded themselves as a team, there was a sense of ‘we’re all in this together’.”
0 comments so far
There are no comments for this post yet. Why not be the first by filling out the form below.