Thema: Commonwealth Candor & Candy

The Great Britain swimming team heads to the European Championships in Paris next week with a wake-up call in its kit bag after an Australian rout at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

Athletes from England, Scotland, Wales and Jersey celebrated just four golds in their 32 medals overall. In contrast, Australia, whose six podium sweeps alone accounted for more than half the home nations’ total, won 31 of the 42 events (make that 32 golds, counting the Chalmers-Armbruster snap in the 50 'fly) and 60 of the 126 medals on offer to Olympic-programme swimmers.

Official medals tables include para events and are therefore not comparable to historical counts in the history of the Commonwealth Games. Even Australians, who need no acts of ignorance or wilful blindness to help them with the numbers, overlooked true comparison when declaring their Glasgow 2026 school "the greatest ever", forgetting Thorpey and mates in 1998 and so on and so forth.

Greatest? No, they're not. Great result. Yes. No question. "Greatest"? No. The only statistical measure that allows genuine comparison - percentage - proves otherwise (see graphic below). A secondary measure would be number of World and Games records, for example:

• Manchester 2002 - 1 WR, 22 GRs (15 AUS; 6 ENG; 1 ZIM)/ 38 events;
• Glasgow 2026 - 15 GRs (counting 2 for the 50' fly because of the snap for gold in record times (10 AUS; 3 RSA; 1 CAN; 1 SCO)/42 events.

The medals percentages in our graphic looking at 1998 through to 2026 represents a brutal collapse in British performances - in home-nation guide - at Commonwealth level.

Glasgow 2026 is below the low-tide mark of 1998, when Commonwealth results in Kuala Lumpur raised a red flag on the way to Britain’s crisis point at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney.

Team GB swimmers returned home from those Olympic Down Under 26 years ago with no medals in the Olympic pool for the first time since 1936. As a result, the Australian Bill Sweetenham was brought in to revolutionise Britain’s performance programme.

His work had a rapid and profound effect, and at the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester home-nation swimmers improved their share of gold from a little shy of 16 per cent to 29 per cent, and from 24 to 32 per cent of overall medals. Australia felt the impact, and that upward trend continued under the leadership of Rebecca Adlington’s coach, Bill Furniss after his charge lifted two golds at the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

• By Glasgow 2014, the gap between Australia and Great Britain home nations had narrowed significantly: 53.3% to 46.7% on gold count and 54 to 46 on overall medals. A high point for the Brits in the past 40 years.

A steady decline to 2022 was followed by the latest drop in British waters, the hosts, Scotland faring the best among the Brits.

It's not unfair to describe the latest Games as a thumping wake-up call.

It's also a reminder to Aussie flag wavers, including media, to try their very best not to live only in their own time. The greatest Commonwealths on medal share for the Dolphins belongs yet to the era of Ian Thorpe, with 78 per cent of all golds and half of all medals at KL 1998.

Glasgow took Australia almost back to its same dominant position 28 years later.

Below for paid subscribers and sent out in our newsletter, are the stats covering a clear rise and fall between the two years before Sydney 2000 and to years out from LA2028, comparing Australia and Great Britain home nations* within the overall results (*minus Northern Ireland, which swims as Ireland in all other competitions and its results in those wider waters are unrelated to Britain's).

We follow the numbers with reasons to be cheerful, which include hope in the green shoots we watched as they sprouted in Glasgow two weeks after a raft of fine results from numerous British programs at the European Junior Championships, the age-related reasons why Olympic waters both reflect the realities of relative positions such as those we're focussed on in this FORUM, and why even good stats and facts should never be used as a predictive tool come the hour.

Yes, there'll be things we expected, as well as much that we may not have expected.