How does Great Britain’s haul of 64 medals, including 29 golds, compare to other recent host nations’ performance?
There can be little doubt that greater recent investment in elite sports is the main cause of Great Britain’s impressive performance at these Olympics an uptick in performance compared with Beijing 2008 would have been expected regardless, because of a well-documented “host-nation effect” that sees the home team performed significantly better than it usually does.
One of the economists who have studied the factors that effect nations’ Olympic performance, Daniel Johnson of Colorado College, found that the benefits of hosting are not one-offs. His work describes both a “pre-hosting effect” that benefits the host nation of the next Olympics, and a “legacy” or “post-hosting effect” that sees the hosts of the last two Olympics continue to outperform expectations.