The Paris Games concluded with Tom Cruise dropping into the Stade de France from its roof and an Olympic medal haul for Great Britain that was bettered only by the sporting superpowers of the USA and China after 19 days of sublime athleticism.
As the Olympic baton was handed to Los Angeles 2028 at a spectacular closing ceremony that included a dash of Hollywood flare, Andy Anson, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association, admitted to frustration that a relative scarcity of gold medals had left Team GB at seventh on the official medal table, its lowest position since Athens in 2004.
Gold medals are key in the official table and with only 14 of them, compared to 22 in Tokyo or 27 in Rio in 2016, Team GB was only the third-highest ranking European nation behind the fifth-placed hosts France (16 golds) and the Netherlands (15 golds) in sixth.
Anson admitted it was something to mull over but with 65 medals in 18 sporting disciplines – unmatched by any other country bar the top two – the total remained an improvement by one compared to three years ago and equal to that of London 2012.
“It’s frustrating to be seventh in the medal table, but we’ve got to celebrate first the number of fantastic moments, the way athletes have won their medals,” Anson said. “It’s about this continual fine-tuning figuring out what can be done better to move forward. The middle bit of the medal table below the United States and China feels incredibly competitive.”
There had been a return to form in Paris in some traditionally strong disciplines such as rowing and new ground was made with Ellie Aldridge becoming the first Olympic gold medallist in kitesurfing.
Kate Shortman and Izzy Thorpe won Britain’s first Olympic medal in artistic (formerly synchronised) swimming and Toby Roberts became the first medallist for Team GB in sport climbing, winning gold in the boulder and lead combined.
“When you win in 18 sports, something has gone right,” Anson said. “The breadth of success is incredibly important in terms of the resonance it has around the country and the impact it has on communities and getting people back into sports.
“There were near misses, but also Adam Peaty had Covid when he was swimming and Kate French had to pull out of the modern pentathlon with a gastric issue. You can’t do anything about that and Katie Archibald tripped up in the garden and broke three bones in her ankle [before the Games]. For her not to be here is sad, but Katie is probably the best in the world at women’s endurance cycling.
“UK Sport, the national governing bodies and ourselves will sit back when we get home and say: ‘Is it sport by sport, individual issues or something more systematic?’”
The USA finished the Paris Olympics top of the medal table once again, although it required victory in the final event, women’s basketball – a title the Americans have won at every Olympic Games since 1996 – to squeak ahead of China on the last day.
The final table had the USA and China tied with 40 golds, with the Americans on top as a result of having won a total of 126 medals (44 silver, 42 bronze) to China’s 91 (27 silver, 24 bronze).
Japan (20 gold) and Australia (18 gold), enjoying their most successful Games, came in third and fourth, followed by the French and the Dutch.
Britain’s tally was boosted by two late bronze medals on the final day for Emily Campbell in the women’s +81kg women’s weightlifting and Emma Finucane in the women’s individual sprint in the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome.
Campbell, who lifted a lifetime best to get to the podium, entertained the crowd with an impromptu cartwheel in the South Paris Arena as she became the first British weightlifter to win two Olympic medals in more than half a century, having taken a silver three years ago. “The field was tough today, the level compared to Tokyo was so much higher,” she said.
Finucane, who already had a gold in the team sprint and a third place in the keirin, became the first British woman in 60 years to win a hat-trick of medals in a single Olympics since Mary Rand in 1964, when she took bronze in the women’s individual sprint. “Obviously, I would have loved to win that gold medal, but gold and two bronzes is more than I could have dreamed of,” the 21 year-old said.
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Bryony Page, who won gold in the gymnastics trampoline, and Alex Yee, who triumphed in the triathlon, were Team GB’s flagbearers at a closing ceremony that invited an audience of more than 71,000 people to imagine a world without an Olympics by plunging them into darkness, and then putting to music its rediscovery in the city of light.
Others chosen by their countries to walk the national flags into the stadium included the two boxers embroiled in the gender eligibility row, Algeria’s Imane Khelif and Lin Yu-ting, representing Chinese Taipei (Taiwan).
The story arc of the artistic director, Thomas Jolly, hinted heavily at Paris having delivered a rebirth of the Olympics after the Covid-impacted experience of three years ago.
There was a record attendance, with 9.5m tickets sold to spectators from 222 different countries. The organisers said 62% of the ticket purchasers had been French. The largest buyers internationally were from the UK, the US, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
The closing ceremony, entitled Records, included the medal ceremony for the women’s marathon in a nod to Paris being the first to have parity in terms of the number of men and women’s events.
It started with Léon Marchand, the 22-year-old home hero of the pool, who won four gold medals, set four Olympic records and then helped the French team to win bronze in the 4x100m medley, picking up the flame in a lantern from the Olympic cauldron in the Tuileries Garden to take it to the stadium.
There was one small glitch on the night when the athletes were invited into the stadium after an early light show but ended up on a stage where the French indie group Phoenix were due to play. “Dear athletes, please leave the stage”, the announcer asked.
They moved on and the show went on, concluding with a hand over to LA that featured Cruise dropping down on a wire from the roof of the stadium to the Mission Impossible theme song, before taking the Olympic flag from star gymnast Simone Biles, putting it on the back of a motorcycle and driving out of the stadium.
There were then performances in LA from the American rapper Snoop Dogg and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers played over the stadium’s big screens.
The International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, who is standing down next year, said that at a time of conflict the Games had created a “culture of peace”. Tony Estanguet, head of the organising committee for Paris 2024, said that a nation of “diehard moaners” had found itself unable to stop singing.
Earlier on Sunday, Sebastian Coe, the former middle distance runner and current president of World Athletics, signalled that he plans to run for Bach’s job. He said: “The opportunity has arisen and clearly I need to think about it. I would consider it.”