Many Rio residents could not afford tickets to events, leaving them feeling on the sidelines of the city’s biggest undertaking.
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They remained dominant in table tennis and won seven gold medals in diving, but even there their rivals seemed to be closing the gap.
Day 13: Jade Jones retained her taekwondo title with a thrilling win over Spain’s Eva Calvo Gomez, the 23-year-old lifting coach Paul Green high in celebration after two stunning head kicks in the final round saw her to a 16-7 win over her -57kg rival.
As well as their lowest gold medals tally (26) since Atlanta in 1996, when Jiang Zemin was president, China were also left smarting on a couple of occasions. “Overall, these have been a terrific Games – the venues have been spectacular and the volunteers were very friendly and did a fantastic job”.
Ukraine’s previous worst team finish in the Olympics was in Sydney – 21st place.
And Jo Roswell-Shand, who retained her team pursuit title from London 2012, said: “For me the moment that stands out is when I rose up on the bank with three laps to go and went to slot in behind the rest of the girls”.
When China emerged from Mao Zedong’s tumultuous Cultural Revolution and re-entered the world of worldwide sports in the early 1980s, it was the unlikely success of the national women’s volleyball team that injected the scarred nation with a much-needed shot of objective and optimism.
Fewer than a third (32 per cent) of Britain’s 130 medallist attended fee-paying schools: a reduction of 4 percentage points since the London 2012 Olympics, when 36 per cent of Team GB’s medal-winners were privately educated. Among the top 10 athletes with the most medals won at the 2016 Summer Games, eight were members of the USA swim team.
Farah s heroics and other astonishing performances took the spotlight off the long list of security scares and logistical problems which were a regular feature of South America s first Olympics. The British won 67 medals in Rio, 27 of them gold. With five golds and one silver, the 2016 Games marked the fourth straight in which Phelps led all multi-medalists across all nations and sports dating back to 2004.
Team GB’s stars have received the royal seal of approval for their Rio performance as Downing Street announced there will be no cap on honours for Olympic medal winners.
The showjumper became Team GB’s oldest Olympic medallist since 1912 as he won Britain’s first ever individual showjumping gold after a dramatic final.
The previous record for US medals at a fully attended Olympics was 110, set at Beijing eight years ago. But the significance in Rio were the sheer amounts of hardware. This would actually push China into third by the United Kingdom, the first time China has finished outside the top two in 16 years and compares to the country’s medal haul of 100 medals and 51 golds in Beijing eight years ago.
“Her happiness, starting from the bottom of her heart, fully demonstrated her spirit to continue to challenge herself and achieve excellence”, said Liu. “When I got to the spotlight of the Olympic Games I knew it was just me out there but I had four years of support and hard work behind me to help me succeed”. In London, Chinese athletes still took away 38 gold medals and were second only to US Olympians. The U.S. finished with 46 gold medals and 121 medals overall, its 51-total-medal margin over second-place China the largest in a non-boycotted Olympics in almost a century.
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The Americans now enjoys their pride, as they have topped the medal race for the fifth time in six stagings of the Games. That was before Phelps, 31, had even won his first Olympic medal.
