With just three days of competition left, Team GB is sitting proudly, and remarkably, in second position in the medal table. After the unprecedented success of London 2012, it seemed an almost impossible task to get close to that astonishing medal tally of 65.
When UK Sport set the target of winning 48 medals in Rio, it seemed optimistic, yet Britain’s athletes have confounded expectations, smashing said medal target and making Rio Team GB’s most successful away Games by some margin.
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Along with GB’s medal-winning fortnight has come the talk of Britain being a sporting super-power. There’s talk of how this Olympic success will inspire countless children to become the next Laura Trott or Jason Kenny or Adam Peaty. 
It may do- there might well be a handful of kids who pull on the British tracksuit at the 2024 or 2028 Olympic Games and cite Britain’s heroics in Rio as their inspiration. But more than likely, sport participation figures will be released in a year-or-so’s time and there will have been little improvement.
The problem is that too many people conflate elite sport and mass participation sport. There is almost no connection between the two and to continue to pretend that there is a link is much of the reason that inactivity remains such a pressing issue.
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Team GB hasn’t rocketed up the medal table in Rio because we are now a nation of sports-mad fitness freaks; we have reached the heady heights of second place in the medal table because of one reason- money.
Without the hundreds of millions of pounds that is pumped into sport at the very top level, GB would not have this success. Yes, every single one of GB’s medallists is hugely talented and has worked like a bear to get to this point.
But lets stop pretending that this success means that Britain is changing and let’s stop pretending that spending more than the majority of our rivals on the best coaches, the best support staff, the best technology and the best facilities is not a huge factor. 
As has been widely reported in the past week, Britain finished 36th in the medal table at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996. Then the National Lottery came in and began funding elite sport.
For the Sydney Olympics in 2000, just under £60 million was invested in Britain’s top athletes. For Rio, that figure had risen to over £264 million. Yes, Laura Trott is the best female track cyclist in the world and Katherine Grainger has displayed longevity in rowing that few can match but let us not forget that the sports that GB dominate are minority in the extreme.
As legions of armchair fans on Twitter delighted in sarcastically observing, it’s great to see all these kids from deprived areas out in the streets doing dressage after watching Charlotte Dujardin win gold a few days ago.
A report in the Guardian earlier this week calculated that each British medal in Rio has cost £5.5 million. Many of those medals were won in sports in which entire continents do not participate, mainly because the cost is so prohibitive. The aforementioned Dujardin wasn’t fending off many African riders in the dressage.
National Lottery funding is an absolute godsend for elite athletes- for one, it meant that I didn’t have to get a proper job until I was 30, but it has no impact at all on improving activity in the general population. Does that mean that the tax-payer is being ripped off? Probably. Without being a full-time athlete, winning an Olympic medal is almost impossible. British Cycling is arguably the most impressive and successful performance programme in the world- every British track rider will leave Rio with some silverware- and much of that success is down to the talent and dedication of the riders and staff. But UK Sport is not daft- when they began to pump money into elite sport, the events in which there is less strength-in-depth and a higher chance of multiple medals were targeted.
If success is judged purely by medals, then it’s not a bad plan. But until elite sport is seen as an entirely separate entity from general participation, the nation’s health will not improve. Until this rubbish about elite athletes inspiring a generation is let go of, Britain’s kids will not become fitter. Yes, a few will be inspired by Olympic success, the masses will not. Most watch the Olympics in the same way that they watch the X Factor- for entertainment and nothing else.
There will be differing opinions on whether the hundreds of millions invested in Team GB for the Rio Games was well spent- without it though, they would not have been successful. These few weeks will almost certainly have had little impact on participation, just as every Olympic Games fails to leave a participation legacy. Rio has been a phenomenal games for Team GB. But for 99.9% of the population, they are being failed by a system that thinks that Olympic medals paper over the cracks of sport being too inaccessible and expensive for the masses.
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