When the Great Britain Olympic team won only one gold medal and finished 36th in the medal table at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, something had to be done to improve our status as a ‘great sporting nation’. Things did improve, as indicated by the gold-medal hauls in Sydney 2000 (11) and Athens 2004 (10), with top-ten medal table finishes in both.
However, the real breakthrough for Team GB came in Beijing 2008, where 47 medals were achieved, 19 of them gold, thus ensuring fourth place overall in the medal table. This was the best medal return for over 100 years. An important part of the success in Beijing, as well as London 2012, was the use of effective and systematic Talent ID programmes such as Girls4Gold and Pitch2Podium. All played their part in helping Team GB achieve its greatest level of success in modern Olympic times.
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