Performance director Stephen Park says medals are getting harder to come by, as money tightens for British Cycling
The Great Britain Cycling Team has set a medal target below recent standards for the 2024 Olympics, performance director Stephen Park has revealed.
At the Games in Paris this summer, Team GB is hoping to achieve 10 medals across the road, track, mountain bike and BMX disciplines.
This would be the squad’s lowest medal haul in two decades, having topped the cycling table at each of the last four Olympics, with 12 medals in Tokyo, Rio and London, and 14 in Beijing.
Speaking to CyclingWeekly, Park said the downgraded target is a matter of “being realistic”.
“We’re hoping that we will be in a position to be competitive for 10 medals,” he said. “I think we’re in a good place to do that, across all the disciplines. I think the difference over the last five or six years has been about trying to broaden our reach across all of the disciplines.
“That has been a strategy that we’ve adopted on the basis that it’s harder and harder to win in any one of the disciplines.
Historically, the focus was pretty much exclusively on track, with a bit of road in the pre-Rio years.
“In that space, some of the advantage that we’ve had has been eroded and the margins are far smaller.”
At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, Team GB found success with its first-ever medals in cross-country mountain bike and BMX, sealing gold through Tom Pidcock, BMX racer Beth Shriever and BMX freestyler Charlotte Worthington.
Park is confident the trio will be up to defending their titles in Paris, but stressed that they still have to be “the best in the world on that day – or if it’s BMX freestyle, you’ve got one minute for your run. You’ve got to be good for a minute.”
Fierce competition
“I think people might say, ‘Hang on, if you had 12 medals last time, why would it not be as least as many this time?’ To be honest, my view is that people who think in that way don’t understand how hard it is to win Olympic and Paralympic medals, and they don’t understand how much every other nation wants to win.”
Team GB’s cycling programmes secured record funding for the current Paris Olympics cycle, with UK Sport providing over £29 million, more than any other sport received.
This funding goes towards a number of areas, such as competition fees, staff and athlete salaries, equipment development, and running costs for British Cycling’s facilities, like the National Cycling Centre in Manchester.
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