So the Olympics are over and love them or hate them they truly are an amazing sporting spectacle.However, this time round I never caught the Olympic fever because of the overlap with my holiday in the US, and I feel guilty about that because I missed out on a lot of great spoting moments. So as my tribute to our sportsmen, women and animals that shed blood, sweat and tears during the past 4 years to make us proud to be British I’ll have a roll of honour here to celebrate their success

The official medals table tells a great story of how Great Britain finished second to the all powerful Unisted States of America and Rio 2016 was, undeniably, an amazing Olympics for Team GB and whilst the gold medal tally is down one, from London 2012, overall we got more medals improving on the London 2012 tally of 65 to Rio’s 67 medals and improved our ranking from 3rd in 2012, behind the US and China, to that second spot.

But there are lies, damned lies and statistics and I realised that our little nation, or group of nations, actually did much better than most countries on that list despite our size and relatively small population. Then I got thinking about how successful we were per person and decided to check to see what the medals table would look like if we factored in population. the result is shown below.

The results are only the top 10 nations but of those Team GB rank top in gold medals with 1 medal for every 2.3 million citizens, sadly we didn’t finish top in overall medals, that honour went to Australia. Other countries leap frogged the mighty US team too, Germany, South Korea and France all performing better than the human resource pool available to the US.

However America still ranked 6th on the list ahead of the Russians, Italians, Japanese and Chinese who all performed statistiically worse than the Americans. The Chinese haul of medals looks impressive however their gold medal work out at only 1 medal for every 53 million citizens, which would give Team GB a lowly one medal. That really puts the Team GB performance into perspective, as we denied the odds and beat the world, well almost. Could we ever challenge the United States’ dominance atop the Olympic medal list? I doubt it purely because of their commitment to sports and their popultion being 5 times that of Great Britain but we’re closing the gap and hanging on there with our true bulldog spirit.