Contributing to Team GB at the 2024 Summer Olympics
Half of the members of Team GB who were educated at independent schools came home with a medal, writes Malcolm Tozer.
Team GB’s total of 64 medals won at the Summer Olympic Games of 2024 was comparable to those for the three previous Games, but the number of gold medals dropped to 14, about half of those won in London, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo. The slip from fourth to seventh place in the medal table was a disappointment but, overall, Paris was acknowledged as a successful Games.
As in the six Games since Sydney in 2000, former pupils of independent schools made a significant contribution. They numbered 45 men and 42 women, came from 65 different schools, and comprised just over a quarter of the 327-strong team. Twenty schools gained their first Olympians of the new century. No one type of school had more than its share, whether co-educational or single-sex, or day or boarding. Schools with multiple representatives were Millfield School (6); Plymouth College and Whitgift School (4); Radley College (3); Ballard School, Clifton High School, Ellesmere College, George Watson’s College, Heath Mount School, King’s College School, St Paul’s School, Stewart’s Melville College, and The Grange School (2 each).
Sports with the highest representation were rowing (19), hockey (14), athletics (13), and swimming (10). The order changes if the proportion of the total number of competitors in each sport is calculated: former pupils of independent schools made sizeable contributions to the teams in artistic swimming (100%), modern pentathlon (75%), rowing (50%), equestrianism and hockey (44%), triathlon (40%), swimming (30%), sailing (29%), golf, tennis and rugby sevens (25%), and athletics (20%).
Three-quarters (75.9%) of the 87 men and women from independent schools reached the top eight positions in one of their events; this matched the standard at previous Games. On average, they finished better than fifth place in the final round of their competitions. Sportsmen and sportswomen educated at independent schools may have won only slightly more than their fair share of places in Team GB, but they were clearly over-represented both in finals and in the top placings. They did particularly well in cycling, equestrianism, rowing, sailing, and swimming.
Their total of 44 medal-winners was just one short of the record since 2000. Half of the independent school group went home with a medal, and they provided over a third (35%) of Team GB’s medallists. Each member of a medal-winning group, for example relay squads in athletics and teams in hockey, receives a medal.
The culling of less successful sports since London in 2012 has made Team GB more efficient, as have stricter standards of qualification to reduce the number of competitors from London’s 542 to Paris’s 327. Recognition that groups of athletes have a greater chance of winning medals than individuals has also helped, whether a pair in artistic swimming, an eight with a cox in rowing, or a hockey squad of seventeen: all get a share of any medal won.
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