Wednesday, 27 August 2008 00:00 | and posted in Sport
Great Britain won 47 medals, including 19 golds, in its best medal haul in a century at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. You'd be hard pressed to have missed that news, but did you know that 18 of these golds were won sitting down...!!! GB dominated the cycling, sailing and rowing with only track star Christine Ohuruogu on the GB team to win standing up!
8 gold medals, plus 4 silver and 2 bronze were won by GB's cycling team alone - which means had our cyclists raced as a separate nation they would have finished up tenth in the medal table!
As it was, only the huge countries of China, USA and Russia did better than Great Britain in the medals table as we finished an overall fourth. The final medals table looked like this:
The 2008 Beijing Olympics were dominated by three success stories - Hoy, Phelps and Bolt:
Chris Hoy (cyclist) was the first Britain to win three gold medals at an Olympics for 100 years. Subsequently, Scotland's new and only world-class track cycling facility (or velodrome) being built for the 2014 Commonwealth Games has been named after him. I particularly liked this quote about Hoy from Dutch rival Theo Bos, who said, "It's like he has swallowed a motorbike."
American swimmer Michael Phelps won 8 gold medals breaking Mark Spitz's 36-year-old record of seven gold medals in a single Olympic Games. Phelps, who swam 17 times over nine days and set world records in seven finals, won the 400m medley, 200m freestyle, 200m butterfly, 4x100m free relay, 4x200m free relay, 200m medley, 100m butterfly and 4x100m medley.
Usain Bolt was the other "name" of the Olympics. He became the first runner since Carl Lewis in 1984 to win both the 100m and 200m races at an Olympics. He is also the first to ever break world records in each.
The British medallists (click on the image to see a larger version):