Team GB was celebrating its best start to an Olympic Games in over four decades as Anna Henderson claimed silver in the women’s road race time trial and divers Yasmin Harper and Scarlett Mew Jensen took bronze in the aquatics centre in Paris.
A British team had not won a medal on the first official day of an Olympics since 2004 and had last taken two of them back in the Moscow Games of 1980 but gutsy performances and a little luck delivered early success and raised fresh hopes of a record haul this summer.
It was from the 80,000 people packed in the Stade de France that the loudest, most full-throated cheers were heard, however, as the lightning-quick feet and apparently infallible judgment of their star Rugby sevens player Antoine Dupont delivered the French team their first gold medal of the Games by creating one try and scoring two against Fiji.
Earlier in the day, heavy rain had forced organisers in Paris to postpone the skateboarding and delay the tennis but Mew Jensen and Harper were free to try and secure a first women’s diving medal since 1960 for Britain in the pool, as Tom Daley watched on and knitted in the stands.
The Chinese pair of Chang Yani and Chen Yiwen, unbeaten at global level since 2022 in the women’s 3m synchronised diving, had been able to secure gold with ease and the United States team of Sarah Bacon and Kassidy Cook took silver.
It looked like Australia’s Maddison Keeney and Anabelle Smith were also set fair for third place but a slip by Smith that saw her fly off at an angle from the board pushed them into despair and fifth position.
“We knew that Australia needed to mess up, basically”, said Mew Jensen, 22, from London. “So for that to actually happen, we were very shocked, because that’s a very easy dive for them. They’re very talented, very experienced.”
Harper, 23, from Sheffield, added: “We knew that it was going to be tight. To watch them not perform on the last round – I think I knew straight away that it wasn’t enough.
“I think in diving, you can kind of tell where or whereabouts the score is going to be at.
“So for us, I think we knew, but at the same time, you’re still waiting for that scoreboard to pop up and show whether we’ve done it or not.”
Smith, who cried into a towel as she climbed out of the pool, later admitted: “I screamed underwater.”
Soon after, it was the turn of Henderson to claim some Olympic glory. She was beaten to gold with ease by Australia’s veteran Grace Brown but then edged out the US’s Chloé Dygert to silver by less than one second in the women’s cycling time trial after the American crashed on the treacherously slippy roads of central Paris.
Henderson, 25, from Hemel Hempstead, said: “I can’t believe it. I had a small feeling I could make the podium today and squeeze out some of the other riders, but I can’t believe I’ve come second behind someone like Grace.
“I burst into tears when I found out I was second. I just can’t stop smiling. It was a bit confusing because the TV was really far behind and then I couldn’t see the board here. I knew I had a medal which was an amazing thing in itself, then it was whether it was silver or bronze.”
It had been predicted that the female athletes in Team GB would fare particularly well this summer and the opening results will give confidence that the upper end of the 50 to 70 medals forecast by UK Sport can be achieved.
The 30 medals Britain won in Athens went up to 51 in Beijing, while the 65 in London was eclipsed by the 67 in Rio. The 64 medals picked up at the Covid-delayed Tokyo games had been regarded as a slightly disappointing haul albeit achieved in difficult circumstances.
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Team GB’s men’s hockey team got their campaign off to a flying start with a 4-0 victory over Spain but hopes of an early British gold in Paris will focus on Adam Peaty, 29, who after easing through to Saturday night’s semi-finals of the 100m breaststroke as the second-fastest qualifier in 59.18 sec in the swimming heats, told reporters: “The whole field was a bit slow.”
“The headspace is very good”, he added of his approach to Sunday’s final. “If anything, too relaxed, it doesn’t feel like we’re here at the moment but getting that swim wakes up the mind. I think that’s just experience knowing I don’t have to spend the energy here.”
Peaty’s main obstacle to securing a third consecutive Olympic gold is Qin Haiyang who was among 23 Chinese swimmers who tested positive for a banned substance before the Tokyo Olympics but was allowed to compete after the anti-doping authorities accepted China’s explanation that the kitchen at their hotel had been contaminated.
“It’s always in the mind of an athlete,” Peaty said, on being asked about doping in the sport. “You definitely want a fair game, you want to win fair and be around people who do the same and live by the same values. But at the same time, you know, we’ve got a job to do and you can’t let it be a cloud in front of the road.”
There was general relief on the part of the organisers that the Games got under way without any further major incident, after the sabotaging of French railway system and the at-times spectacular but decidedly soggy opening ceremony on the Seine had suffered from the inclement weather.
The head of the SNCF rail company Jean-Pierre Farandou said he hoped the transport network would be back to normal by Monday but 160,000 of the 800,000 people due to travel this weekend had faced cancellations.
Nearly one third of trains were cancelled in northern, western and eastern France and one in four Eurostar services between London and Paris also failed to depart.
France’s interior minister Gérald Darmanin said the investigation into those behind the attack was progressing.
He said: “We have uncovered a certain number of elements that allow us to think that we will soon know who is responsible for what clearly did not sabotage the Olympic Games but did sabotage part of the holidays of the French people.”