Team GB cuts Olympic medal target to 'realistic' 10

Performance director Stephen Park says medals are getting harder to come by, as money tightens for British Cycling

- Tom Davidson

The Great Britain Cycling Team has set a medal target below recent standards for the T 2024 Olympics, performance director Stephen Park has revealed.

At the Games in Paris this summer, Team GB is hoping to achieve 10 medals across the road, track, mountain bike and we've BMX disciplines.

This would be the squad's lowest medal haul in two decades, having topped the cycling table at each of the last four Olympics, with 12 medals in Tokyo, Rio and London, and 14 in Beijing.

Speaking to Cycling Weekly, Park said the downgraded target is a matter of "being realistic".

"We're hoping that we will be in a position to be competitive for 10 medals," he said. "I think we're in a good place to do that, across all the disciplines. I think the difference over the last five or six years has been about trying to broaden our reach across all of the disciplines.

"That has been a strategy that we've adopted on the basis that it's harder and harder to win in any one of the disciplines.

Historically, the focus was pretty much exclusively on track, with a bit of road in the pre-Rio years.

"In that space, some of the advantage that we've had has been eroded and the margins are far smaller."

At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, of the ge that ad has coded" Team GB found success with its first-ever medals in cross-country mountain bike and BMX, sealing gold through Tom Pidcock, BMX racer Beth Shriever and BMX freestyler Charlotte Worthington.

Park is confident the trio will be up to defending their titles in Paris, but stressed that they still have to be "the best in the world on that day- or if it's BMX freestyle, you've got one minute for your run. You've got to be good for a minute."

Fierce competition