(ATR) Two years before the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo, the Japanese Olympic Committee set an ambitious target for hometown athletes: 30 gold medals.
The JOC came up with the 30-medal count, according to Kyodo News, after meetings with national sports federations during the past two months.. The JOC has long had a goal of being among the top three country among those competing at the 2020 Olympics.
The best previous performances for Japan came in 1964 and 2004 when it won 16 gold medals in both Games. In Rio de Janeiro, Japan took 12 gold medals, sixth place out of the 205 participating countries.
Meanwhile Australia’s most decorated Olympian spoke out to say that gold medal targets may not be a good thing for athletes.
Ian Thorpe, five-time Olympic gold medalist and 11-time world champion, is calling national bodies to stop setting gold medal targets as it strains athletes.
"It puts an immense amount of pressure on athletes around something they have no control over...what I’d prefer to see happen is we know the athletes represent our communities, they’ll represent the diversity of this country and they’re going to represent it well to the best of our ability and that will lead to gold medals," Thorpe said at a forum in Canberra organized by the Australian Institute of Sport.
The Australian Olympic Committee has set, but not met, a target of a top-five finish in the medals table at the last three Summer Games and individual sports continue to make targets.
Before Rio 2016, the Australian Olympic Committee predicted Australia would win 13 gold medals for an overall tally of 37. The Australian team returned with eight golds and a total of 29 medals.
Thorpe is hoping to influence change on athletes’ mental health and performance after taking on a role with the Australian Institute of Sport. In a 2012 autobiography, the former Olympian revealed that he struggled with "crippling" depression throughout his career, self-medicating with alcohol and considering suicide on more than one occasion
Written by Javier Monne
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