In the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta (the last ones before the athlete funding structure was revamped), Team GB & NI finished 36th on the medal table.

It won 15 medals in total, and just one gold (Redgrave and Pinsent in the coxless pairs rowing).

In the space of four Olympic cycles and with six days still to go, that has been converted into 16 gold medals and 41 in total.

You don't just achieve that by throwing money at a problem. You need to have the right people in place to make the difficult decisions on how that money is going to be best spent. The UK took the decision to invest in high performance facilities, coach education programmes and talent identification, and is reaping the rewards.

Just on a comparative note, in the four years leading up to the London games the US Olympic Committee (essentially the US version of UK Sport, albeit run entirely on private and corporate donations) paid out $795m to governing bodies and athletes directly. In a similar four year cycle UK Sport paid out around £540m, so the outlays are roughly similar. What the UK doesn't have that the US has - setting aside the population difference - is the privately supported collegiate sports infrastructure which produces many of their Olympic athletes. If you took what the colleges spend on NCAA sports programs and what the USOC gives out to governing bodies, the US spend would dwarf the UK one. Northern Kentucky University, on its own, has a $10m per year athletic budget. And that's not even one of the biggest spenders, by a long way.

So in terms of 'bang for your buck', GB is more than producing a return on its investment in Olympic medals. And having a high Olympic and world level profile helps to bring major events - like the World Athletics Championships in 2017 - to the UK. Would the Tour de Yorkshire have been such a success had it not been for the impact that GB Cycling has made on the public consciousness in recent years?

So Mo Farah wins the double double. Well whoopdy f*cking do. That's the least you would have expected considering it's his job to train for these events.

[iThe least you would have expected[/i

The absence quite correctly of Russia from most sports obviously helped our medal haul.

Without doubt, although their cheating probably reduced the number we should've won last time round.

Or helped China's, or America's, or Austrailia's, or Germany's, or France's etc. Russia being absent from many sports helped other nations just as much as ours and as pointed out above, robbed other athletes at previous games. We could've had more in swimming if the controversial Yuliya Efimova wasn't allowed to compete after failing two previous drugs tests, including one earlier this year.

Quite impressive what Alistair Brownlee did for his brother last night.