Katie Ledecky and Simone Biles were next with five each, again all but one of them gold.
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“We’re making sporting history – 67 medals, almost 130 medallists, across 19 sports”, said UK Sport chief executive Liz Nicholl.
“Finally, the public desire for golds has returned to normal”, said Lu Yuanzhen, a professor of sports at South China Normal University who has long argued that a mature nation should have a more relaxed attitude toward wins and losses in athletic competitions.
The advent of UK Sport’s National Lottery-funded World Class Performance Programme in 1997 was the first step in helping Britain achieve extraordinary success in subsequent Olympics.
The Mayor of Tokyo, Yuriko Koike, will receive the Olympic flag symbolizing the conclusion of the Rio Olympics and the start to the 2020 Summer Games.
The Games have been New Zealand’s most successful by total medal count, with 18 medals including four gold.
“We’ve all felt and seen the impact of this success on ourselves and on the United Kingdom”.
Liu said inexperience, in particular, had cost China, whose team was young with three-quarters of them competing at their first Olympics.
Even if there is more acceptance that every year won’t bring a haul of gold, there is still a sense of alarm, and many don’t like that China sits behind the United States and Great Britain in the race for golds.
And 10 teams – including the independent team – won their first golds, including Monica Puig in women’s tennis for Puerto Rico. “GB women’s football, for example”.
He also said the country would continue its strong anti-doping stance and would improve its education and supervision of athletes, after Chinese swimmer Chen Xinyi was disqualified from the Games for use of the diuretic hydrochlorothiazide. “I will definitely miss the sport, miss the Olympics because it’s the biggest stage”, the charismatic Jamaican said.
Much of the Rio money went on the holding camp in Belo Horizonte – widely regarded to have been the best any team here enjoyed – and in finding solutions to Rio’s various accommodation and transport “challenges”. John Major’s “greatest achievement was to change the face of sport” in the country, IAAF President Sebastian Coe, the double-Olympic middle-distance champion, has said.
In the midst of it worst economic recession since the 1930s, Brazil’s opening and closingceremonies relied more on the country’s unique talents and natural beauty and less on expensive technology.
Theresa May, who said she had been watching the Games when she could, paid tribute to the “determination, dignity and true sportsmanship” of Team GB.
“We do it to make Britain an active, proud and happy nation, and that is why the government adds to the pot with exchequer funding”.
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“That’s what we want, of course”.
