The numbers that prove Great Britain is enjoying its strongest era in athletics since the 1980s

Legacy is the buzzword attached to hosting an Olympics. Paris 2024 marked 12 years, or three Olympic cycles, since London hosted the 2012 summer Games.

There are clear sporting tangibles left behind: the Olympic Park, with the Olympic Stadium now operating as West Ham’s home ground, while the aquatics centre and athletics warm-up track are public facilities.

The 2012 Games had the motto “inspire a generation”. Great Britain’s performances on the athletics track in Paris prove this generation, who were children during those London Games, could be Britain’s best ever.

Success is generally reduced to medals, especially from sport-funding purposes, which can be a crude and binary way of assessing performance. It leaves little room for nuance and context. But medals definitely matter when you win them.

GB earned 10 athletics medals at the Stade de France, all on the track. This was twice as many as they took in Tokyo three years ago (and no golds there).

For total athletics medals, it was GB’s best Olympics since Los Angeles 1984 (16). Only USA (34) and Kenya (11) collected more than GB in Paris, with those two being historically successful athletics nations.

Medal tables are often filtered by golds, which puts GB much lower, as the only athlete to return from Paris as an Olympic Champion is Keely Hodgkinson over 800m.

Regardless, 10 medals was at the top end of what UK Athletics planned for when they launched their 11-year operational plan in 2021, ahead of the Tokyo Games. It is a 47-page document charting efforts to restructure and realign the sport at the top level. It has one clear target: “win more medals in more events”.

They detailed “a courageous, yet achievable aspiration” to take seven to 10 athletics medals in Paris, which was the same goal they set for Tokyo. Looking forward, the targets are going up: “being consistently top four in the athletics medal tables”, with ambitions of eight to 11 medals in LA in four years, and nine to 13 from Brisbane in 2032.

Hodgkinson (Adam Pretty/Getty Images)

A source close to Team GB, speaking on condition of anonymity to protect relationships, says internal projections — what they believed would happen — were eight athletics medals in Paris.

The best evidence of this being a generation rather than a handful of elite individuals — like GB had in 2012 with Mo Farah (5000/10000) and Jess Ennis-Hill (heptathlon), and further back with Dame Kelly Holmes (800/1500) — is GB’s relay success.

They took medals from all five relays in Paris, the only nation to do so: the 4×400 mixed relay (an Olympic event since Tokyo), men and women’s 4×400, men and women’s 4×100. Prior to Paris, GB’s past five relay medals came across four Games, stretching back to 2008.

(Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

Success is a virtuous cycle. The women’s 4×100 team won European gold earlier this summer, interchanging their leg orders between the heats and the finals. There was bronze for the men’s 4×400 at the 2023 World Championships, and a bronze for the 4×100 men in the World Championships the year before that, with the women’s 4×400 taking bronze there, too.

Having the fitness and conditioning to run the times required is only part of it. Having quartets and relay groups who have repeatedly performed together at major championships is essential.

Relays are won and lost in the hand-offs — GB might have taken gold in the women’s 4×100 in Paris, finishing only seven hundredths behind the US and ahead at 300m, but for a slow final handoff.

All in, the five relay squads comprised 24 athletes, 10 aged 25 or younger. GB had the quality, depth and experience, across all relays, to use certain athletes in the heats, then sub in faster ones for the final, allowing them to be fresher. That has underpinned the success of the USA and Jamaica.

Dina Asher-Smith, the lead-off in GB’s 4×100 women’s team, ran the fastest opening leg in the final and put the silver down to a decade of work: “I love how the championships are giving everyone medals and letting the full squad get their moment because this is truly a team effort, not just us four and those two (who ran the heats). We’ve worked so hard as a women’s relay squad since 2012”.

(Kevin Voigt/GettyImages)

The nature of championship racing can only be learned from experiencing it, where athletes often have to race twice in three days to first reach the final, with finals typically the day after the semi-final.

Four of GB’s five individual medallists were at Tokyo in 2020, with the exception of 1500m bronze medallist Georgia Bell, while 11 of the 24 relay athletes had been to at least one previous Olympics.

Physically and psychologically, it’s an entirely different racing style — for middle and long-distance especially — to the one-off time-trialling of the Diamond League circuit, with pacemakers and wavelights.

“When you’re racing your third race in four days, it becomes a bit more of a war of attrition,” GB’s Jake Wightman told The Athletic before Paris. He then missed the games through injury.

“You see guys look a little bit tired and maybe not have as much endurance through the rounds. You get casualties through every single round — you just don’t know what’s going to happen”.

Wightman also spoke of success being a “snowball”. He was the 1500m world champion in 2022, then Josh Kerr won that title the following year, before taking 1500m Olympic silver in Paris, an upgrade on his bronze from Tokyo.

Keely Hodgkinson had a similar progression in the 800m, taking silvers in her first three global championships, before winning European gold earlier this summer and then Olympic gold in Paris.

It is reminiscent of Roger Bannister running the first sub-four minute mile in 1954, and then numerous athletes achieving the same feat soon after. Sometimes there are psychological barriers to break.

With the caveat of this being an era of ‘fast’ tracks and carbon-plated shoes enhancing performances, GB came away from Paris with eight athletics national records. They achieved only seven combined in the past five Games.

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Matt Hudson-Smith (400m), Hodgkinson (800m), and Kerr (mile) had all set national records earlier in the calendar year. It is a case of timing, peaking correctly, managing to avoid injury and race tactics in the final making it quick.

That trio have taken three different approaches to their training process. Hudson-Smith trains with what he calls a “group of champions” in Florida, alongside Steven Gardiner (former 400m Olympic and World Champion) and GB’s Victoria Ohuruogu, one of the women’s 4×400 relay team and now an Olympic, world and European medalist.

Hodgkinson is based in Manchester, where she grew up, training under Trevor Painter in an expanding group which is packed with British talent.

Kerr went to the NCAA, running for the University of New Mexico. It is the American athletics equivalent of how academies work in English football. Nicole Yeargin (University of Southern California) and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake (Louisiana State University), of GB’s relay teams, also went through the NCAA system.

Asher-Smith and Daryll Neita were fourth and fifth in the women’s 200m, with Neita finishing fourth (four hundredths behind bronze) for the best British performance in that event for 64 years.

(Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Like Hudson-Smith, the pair train outside the country. Asher-Smith split with long-time coach John Blackie in 2023 and moved to Florida, while Neita trains in Italy among three other British sprinters, including Jeremiah Azu (first leg of 4×100 team), under Marco Airale.

Louie Hinchliffe, attending Houston, is the standout recent example of a Briton moving to the NCAA. He became the first European man to win the NCAA 100m final earlier this summer. Hinchliffe made the semi-finals individually in Paris and was the second leg of the 4x100m bronze-winning relay team.

Amber Anning is another Briton in America. She was part of the Arkansas team that smashed the 4x400m collegiate record this summer. Anning was fifth in the 400m final in Paris, the fastest race in history, then she anchored the 4x400m relay team to bronze.

British athletics funding, from the National Lottery, stayed consistent across the prior four-game cycles going into Tokyo, around £20m. It is one of the most-funded sports — and GB’s most successful sport for medals in Olympics history — along with rowing, cycling and sailing.

Those three sports are naturally more expensive in terms of equipment, but there is a general feeling that athletics in Britain, especially compared to football and cricket, is underfunded.

That Britain have overachieved their medal targets at the 2023 World Championships, the 2022 Commonwealth Games and 2022 European Championships, and now this Olympics, might encourage additional funds.

All this success comes at a time when selection policy has been cut-throat. Team GB took 49 track athletes to Paris, fewer than at any of the past three games and with notably limited field representation, but still had 22 track finalists and were only without final representation in six events.

Their squad for Europeans in June, and the indoor World Championships in Glasgow early in 2024, were criticised for being deliberately small.

The ultimate test now is if GB can sustain and build on this success. They may benefit from the competition backlog athletics is still experiencing from the pandemic, with European and World Indoor Championships both in March 2025. The latter, in Nanjing, China, was delayed from 2023. Another World Championships, in Tokyo, is next September.

For now, GB can revel in their success. Hudson-Smith summed it up after taking the 4x400m relay bronze on the final track night at Stade de France: “I need a beer, man.”

(Top photo: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images)