[ttwarrior1]

Apr 21 - 6:00 AM				2012 OLYMPICS - TOTAL GOLD MEDALS - GREAT BRITAIN
				OVER 21½

Team GB will win 27 gold medals at London 2012, research predicts

• Sport Industry Research Centre forecasts 56 medals for GB
• 'Host nation advantage provides a quantifiable benefit'


Hang out the bunting and strike up the national anthem. British athletes will enjoy their best Olympics for more than a century and challenge for third in the medal table in London, according to academics who successfully predicted China's record medal haul in Beijing. The Sport Industry Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University has predicted Team GB will win 27 gold medals at London 2012, and 56 medals in total.
The report calculates that home advantage will equate to an extra 15 medals for Team GB than would otherwise have been the case. The British Olympic Association has said it is reluctant to set a medal table target, seeing "no performance advantage" in doing so and instead talking about fourth as an "aspiration".
But elite sport funding agency UK Sport has said Team GB is on course to equal the fourth place achieved in Beijing, arguing that it is only right to account for the public money that has been poured into high performance sport in the UK over recent years.
The 2008 Games represented Team GB's best performance for a century, with 47 medals in 11 sports including 19 golds. In its report, which combines "regression analysis" of previous performance with the effect of home advantage, the SRIC also predicts British athletes will win medals in 15 sports and across 18 disciplines.
That haul would equate to a wider spread of medals than at any Games since London first hosted the Olympics in 1908.
The BkofAma chief executive and Team GB chef de mission, Andy Hunt, said earlier this week it would be "ludicrous" if they were deemed a failure for failing to secure fourth in the medal table. But the analysis suggests they should be setting their sights on third.
In 2008, the university's forecasters predicted that host nation China would end the Games with 46 gold medals. They ultimately won 51. Professor Simon Shibli, co-author of the report, said that it was possible to quantify the impact of hosting the Games on performance. "Host nation advantage provides a quantifiable benefit, which will result in a larger medals' haul than if the Olympics were held elsewhere. Influences such as home crowd support, familiarity with venues, the right to contest more events and enhanced scores in subjectively judged sports, such as gymnastics and diving, will positively affect Team GB's performance," Shibli said.
He said that 27 gold medals should "comfortably secure" the fourth place medal table finish targeted by UK Sport and the BkofAma and give the team a "fighting chance" of overhauling Russia to finish third.
Another of the ambitions for London, shared by UK Sport and the BkofAma, is to achieve "more medals in more sports" than any time since 1908. The analysis, based on the experience of previous host cities, shows that Britain's athletes are on target to achieve that goal as well.
In 2008, Britain's success was highly dependent on a small number of sports. Of the 19 gold medals, 16 were won in cycling, sailing, swimming and rowing. Across all medals, the top four sports accounted for 69% of all medals won.
While they are again expected to provide the lion's share of medals, the report's authors expect other sports to contribute based on the experiences of previous hosts and given the unprecedented investment.
In its conclusion, the report's authors argue that their findings prove that the traditional model of predicting success – using factors such as a country's size and GDP – is less valuable than considering the investment that goes into elite sport, including bidding for major events, and the development of a high performance system.
The report's co-author Professor Chris Gratton said: "Team GB's success will be further evidence that elite sport performance is a managed phenomenon, rather than simply being reliant on a country's demographic and economic dimensions. "The positive host nation effect identified indicates that winning the rights to host the games in the first place is an integral part of this management."
The amount of public investment in elite sport in Britain has increased hugely since the team secured only one gold medal in Atlanta in 1996. There was a further hike in 2005 when London won the right to host the Games.
Next month, UK Sport - which has invested around £500m of public and Lottery money over the current Olympic cycle - will publish medal range targets for each sport based on consultation with each, but will not break down whether those medals will be gold, silver or bronze.
The forecasters accept that it is difficult to equate medal performance with the final position in the medal table, because it depends on the performance of rival nations. It is mathematically possible, if highly unlikely, to win 27 gold medals and still finish 10th in the medal table.

[ttwarrior1]

How many medals will Great Britain win in the 2012 Olympics?

Author:Ray Stefani

British hopeful Jessica Ennis, heptathlete,in the World Championships in Daegu.Image by Erik van Leeuwen/Wikimedia.

Following methods used to estimate home advantage in team sports, Ray Stefani examines past Olympic home nation medal counts to estimate the home nation advantage and predict the number of medals to be won by Great Britain in the Summer Olympics in London, 2012.
HOME ADVANTAGE IN SPORTS
Even a casual sports fan realizes that the home team has an advantage, much of it created by that same fan. Fervent fans enthusiastically support every movement of the home team and criticize every adverse call by a referee. Naturally this affects the players and the results – though to different degrees in different sports.
A careful examination of home team win-loss record and margin of victory¹ shows decreasing amounts of home team advantage in order for rugby, Association football, Australian Rules football, American professional and college football, hockey, and baseball. National identify in international sports and territorial identity in domestic competition accentuate home advantage in Association footall2. There are three main home team effects in team sports^1,2: physiological, where the home team has traveled less far and is less fatigued; psychological, due to crowd support and territoriality pride; and tactical, in that the home team is more familiar with the playing conditions.
The home nation athletes in Olympic competition will clearly have all of those advantages. The host nation has yet another advantage: strength in numbers. The host nation is given automatic qualification in many sports that the nation might not otherwise have entered. Further, the national fervor following the awarding of the games may encourage many more athletes to enter competition than might otherwise have been interested, and elite athletes will try that much harder to make that country proud.
EVALUATING HOME NATION OLYMPIC MEDAL ADVANTAGE
How great is that effect? Table 1 below contains medal data for the last 12 fully attended Games (1956 through 2008, excluding the boycotted 1980 and 1984 Games). The first data column shows the total medal count (gold, silver and bronze) of the host nation (which we can refer to as y) while the second column of data shows that same nation’s medal count four years before being host (which we can refer to as x). The third column shows the host nation’s medal increase, y – x. Only one host nation won fewer medal at home than four years before. The USA won seven less medals in Atlanta in 1996 than it did in 1992 in Barcelona. The other host nations made four-year gains varying from three for Greece in 1996 to 37 for China in 2008.

Another British hopeful,freestyle swimmer RebeccaAdlington, won two golds atthe 2008 Olympics in the400m and 800m. Image byRockybiggs at en.wikipedia.

The loss of seven medals for the USA at home cries out for an explanation, which is likely political in nature. In 1988, East Germany competed for the last time as an independent country. The top three medal winners were the Soviet Union (132), East Germany (102) and the USA (94), for a total of 328 medals in the 241 medal events. In 1992, the Soviet Union competed for the last time as a unified country. The top three medal winners were the Soviet Union (111), the USA (108) and Germany (94), for a total of 313 medals in the 270 medal events. In 1996, the constituent republics of the former Soviet Union competed as separate nations, each with their own Olympic team. That meant that the total number of elite athletes increased, chasing about the same number of medals as in 1992 (271 medal events in 1996 compared to 270 in 1992). Further, with the powerful Soviet Union no longer the juggernaut it had been, athletes from other countries could compete with more hope of winning medals. The top three medal winners in 1996 were the USA (101), Germany (65) and Russia (63) for a total of 229 medals, 84 fewer than the top three nations won in 1996. Arguably, it was increased competition that led to the USA winning seven fewer medals than in 1992. Notice that in 1996, the USA gained 22 medals on Germany relative to 1992, so there was a significant relative gain by the USA.
Two regression methods were applied to the y and x values in Table 1 to estimate the home nation medal advantage. First, what could be called a zero-order regression was applied to the model y = h + x + e. The goal is to find a single additive home medal advantage h, minimizing the sum of the squared errors e. Simply, h is the mean value of y minus the mean value of x, which, from the third data column in Table 1, gives h = 13 medals. The average absolute smoothing error was 7.7 medals.
Also, a first order regression was applied consisting of an additive h and slope term c for the model y = h + c x + e. Again minimizing the sum of squared errors, h was 14.5 and c was 0.95. The average absolute smoothing error was 7.6 medals. The two models had nearly the same form and errors. Had c been 1 with h = 13, the two models would have been identical. 88% of the variance was explained by the models. Now we can estimate the medals to be won by Great Britain in 2012.
LONDON 2012 AND BEYOND
By simply adding 13 medals to the 47 won in 2008, Great Britain is projected to win 60 ± 11 medals. Using the first order model instead, Great Britain is projected to win 59 ± 11 medals, nearly the same. Table 1 shows another benefit of being the host nation. The average host nation won seven fewer medal four years after being host, which was six medals more than four years before being host. That residual gain is likely due to the continuing benefit of infrastructure built for the Games. Also, many of those additional athletes enticed into competition by the Games remain in competition four years later.
Ray Stefani is a professor emeritus at California State University, Long Beach with over 40 years of experience at sports performance analysis.

[ttwarrior1]

tried to tell everyone, wish i went all in

[beefcake]

I bet it..easy winner!!! Take Brazil in 4 years!!

[onacloud]

TT no one cares about your copied and pasted articles, and the air bets.

[no1here]

Why lie? You don't have $5.00 anywhere none the less $500.

[ttwarrior1]

Lie? I have more money then you'll ever dream of having? Made the bet on DSI, bookmaker,
http://www.timeanddate.com/countdown...n=&sec=&p0=814

[InTheDrink]

What a fukkin weirdo

[ttwarrior1]

yeh no1here is a weirdo, especially boeing that does nothing but troll and wait for me to make a thread. rumor is he does searches for my name 30 times a day. Wow

Will you be said when no1here is no longer around.