The Olympics is now well underway now and the USA lead the medals table with 19 medals (five golds), followed by China in second on 13 (five golds) and Australia are a distant third on 7 medals. Team GB have made a reasonable start with one Gold, thanks to the brilliance of Adam Peaty, who also smashed his own World Record in the 100 metres Breaststroke Final. Jazz Carlin grabbed silver in the 400 metres freestyle and the two bronze medals were won by Ed Ling in Trap Shooting and Daley and Goodfellow in the 10 Metre platform diving.
It could have easily have been a bigger medal haul for Team GB, but slight margins and some bad luck meant the men’s Gymnastic team missed out on a bronze for the team event, as did James Guy in the 200 metres freestyle and the women’s Rugby Sevens team also missed out on bronze losing to Canada in the third place play-off match.
However, yesterday presented Team GB with the chance of making up for these narrow misses and hopefully by the time you read this article Siobhan-Marie O’Connor, who qualified fastest for the 200 metre Individual Medley final, will have won a medal along with the women’s Gymnastics’ team. Not to be outdone in the swimming Scotland’s David Scott broke the British record in qualifying for the semi-finals of the 100 metres freestyle yesterday and hopefully by the time you read this article he will have made the final and be in with a chance of landing another swimming medal for Team GB.
Team GB’s rowers will also be in with a chance of improving the medal haul on Thursday after Alan Sinclair and Stewart Innes finished second in the semi-finals of the men’s coxless pairs, but it’s sure to be a fight for silver and bronze for the Brits as red hot favourites Murray and Bond for New Zealand made it an incredible 68th straight win in the same semi-final.
The womens double sculls final will include Grainger and Thornley who finished second to Poland in their semi-finals and their medal chances were improved considerably by the shock exit of favourites New Zealand at the semi-final stage. The men’s double sculls final will also have a British representative as John Collins and Jonny Walton finished third in their semi-final behind Norway and Croatia, but unfortunately the men’s coxless four could not make it a clean sweep going out at the semi-final stage.
There was a massive upset in the men’s Rugby Sevens yesterday when Japan, who many will remember caused a huge upset against South Africa in the Rugby World Cup, continued their giant killing exploits beating New Zealand 14-12, who also lost their star player Sonny Bill Williams to injury. Team GB got their Olympic campaign off to an impressive start thrashing Kenya 31-7 and at the time of writing they were due to face Japan at 9pm last night.
