Great Britain dramatically improved its results at London 2012 by winning far more medals than they had at any other previous Olympics. They did that however by spending a considerable amount of money, most of it from the National Lottery. UK sport for example has a £125 million annual budget and so for example, the medals that they did not win in Archery, because they never won any, cost £4,4 million and I mention that figure because South Africa invested approximately R33 million altogether in our Olympic efforts and Great Britain spent in excess of R50 million on Archery alone and never won a single medal!

They did fantastically well in cycling, having won 12 medals, but they also spent £26 million to win those 12 medals. The four medals they won in gymnastics cost £10,7 million, the 9 medals they won in rowing cost £27 million, the 5 medals they won in sailing cost £22 million and in swimming, where like South Africa, they won 3 medals, they spent £25 million. It shows you what can be achieved with money and of course we live in a developing nation where we cannot possibly spend that amount of money on sports as opposed to education (where we don’t seem capable of delivering the textbooks taxpayers pay for), but you have to marvel at what, for example, our swimmers achieved on a total budget of R33 million across all sports, when the British athletes had, in our money, more than R300 million allocated just to swimming alone!