Team GB are set to receive a heroes’ welcome when they touch down in the United Kingdom following their best Olympics in more than a century.
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Posts on social media by team members revealed athletes’ fun on the flight from Rio to London, which had 77 bottles of champagne on board.
A Boeing 747 carrying 320 athletes and support staff will land at Heathrow airport at 9:55am on Tuesday in a gold-nosed British Airways aircraft with “victoRIOus” emblazoned on the side.
Pictures from inside the plane showed a party atmosphere as the athletes cheered and belted out the national anthem.
Team GB has been guaranteed a funding increase across the next eight years in a bid to build on the phenomenal medal haul at the Rio Olympic Games, with plans already being put into place to make Tokyo 2020 even more successful.
Several British competitors defended titles won in London, notably Mo Farah who again took gold in both the 5,000 metres and 10,000 metres and so became the first man since Finland’s Lasse Viren in 1976 to complete Olympic long-distance running’s “double double”.
A large number of athletes, including Carlin, who now lives in Bradford on Avon, arrived at Heathrow shortly before 10am.
Rowing gold medallist Helen Glover tweeted pictures from the “flight of a lifetime”, including one of gymnast Max Whitlock holding a pose and balancing on two chairs.
Swimmer Adam Peaty, who started the gold medal rush on the first Sunday of the Games, said: “We are in such a bubble”.
Kayak gold medal victor Joe Clarke tweeted a selfie from the top of the plane stairs with the caption: “What a reception! We hope you have all enjoyed the experience as much as we have back home”.
Team GB chef de mission Mark England hails the country’s performance at the Rio Olympics as the greatest sporting achievement in British history.
In her message, Her Majesty wrote: “I offer my warmest congratulations to the athletes of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Commonwealth, for their success at this year’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro”. I think the nice thing about sport is it does unite people and it lifts people.
Just over 35% of British athletes who went to Rio returned with a medal – including every single track cycling member. I think we all felt that nearly couldn’t be replicated, it couldn’t happen again, it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment.
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Robertson added: “This is a very competitive business – the time margins that separate success and failure at Olympic sport are tiny – but set against this, nobody ever thought that we would do better in Rio than we did in London and by the same token there is no reason, given the fundamental structure of British Olympic sport and the way it is geared to deliver medal success that we shouldn’t have a very, very good games indeed in Tokyo”.
