With the Riots in London confining me to my home today, I sought comfort on the internet and eventually found myself reading an article on the internet, in which the author mentioned that he thought that Great Britain performed way below expectations at the recent World Championships in Shanghai. After reading this blog, and one from The Swimmer’s Circle entitled “Is The U.S Really Losing Ground To The Rest Of The World?” in which Braden Keith discussed whether the US had performed below their own standards, I decided to see if Team GB had really performed worse than they should have done in Shanghai.
Purely for the purpose of this blog, I will only focus on the medals that were won in the swimming pool, and not from the rest of the events at the World Championships. Since the inception of the World Championships in 1973, Great Britain has medalled in all of the Championships apart from 1, in 1994. Looking at this from a completely statistical point of view, Team GB wins 3.79 (≈ 4) medals of any colour at any World Championships. Using a statistical method called Standard Deviation, we can find out by how many medals Team GB should expect to deviate by. For example, with a Standard deviation of 1, Team GB should expect between 3 and 5 medals of any colour in the pool. However in the case of Team GB, they have a standard deviation of roughly 2.62. So at any World Championships, Team GB should expect to win between 1 and 6 medals (or more precisely, between 1.16 and 6.41 medals).
In the case of Rome 2009, Great Britain managed to win 7 World Championships medals of varying colours. This was a particularly good Championships, as it was over the upper bound of the expected medals. In Shanghai, Team GB managed 5 medals. This was still above the expected mean, but still within the bounds expected. So to say that GB had a bad World Championships because we didn’t win as many as we did in 2009, is a bit of an understatement. Great Britain may have not hit the highs of 2009, but they still performed better than they should have been expected too. We even managed to maintain the same placing that we achieved in Rome.
As a country, we are mostly fiercely patriotic. We seem to always expect better of our countries’ sports teams, even if we manage to win major titles. This is a trait which being British, I admire in myself and others, but there are still times where we can go over the top on this. While this trait makes us fiercely competitive, and always expecting our teams to be better, what most of us fail to remember is that Great Britain is effectively an island. We aren’t connected to the European mainland, so we can’t share our resources with other European countries easily, and we can’t share their resources or ideas, about training, coaching, strategies, tactics, etc. We are effectively isolated and we have been doing excellently well to stay competitive with the rest of the world in many sports. Our football team is ranked in the Top 10 in the World, England are ranked highly in cricket and rugby as well, and as Team GB, we rank pretty highly at the Olympic Games as well. Even though Team GB still won 5 pool medals in Shanghai, we could have won more. Adam Brown was less than 2-tenths off of a medal in the 50m Free, Fran Halsall was less than 1-tenth off a medal in the 100m Free, even though she posted a semi-final time which would have placed her a close third behind the tied winners. Team GB should be proud of their acheivements in Shanghai, but there is always room for improvement.
