The wonderful performance of Team GB in the summer Olympics is deeply gratifying, even if from a coldly statistical point of view it could have been anticipated. Not long ago the England football team covered themselves in whatever is the opposite of glory in the European Championship, for which Scotland failed even to qualify, leaving only Northern Ireland and Wales to return with a modicum of satisfaction – at least when measured against an expectation of complete failure.
If in football the English national motto seems, of necessity, to be “It’s not winning that matters but taking part”, in the wide range of events in Rio de Janeiro it was indeed winning that mattered for Great Britain. In the months of preparation, British athletes had been welded into a team with a strong unifying ethos. Sporting success at world level is about the marginal advantage of small differences, and this British team spirit clearly supplied at least a small difference, and in some cases, a lot more.