How analyst Oliver Summers tracked Britain's medal performance during the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games Predicting Olympic medals is almost a sport in itself. Before the opening ceremony, before the first event, before the first podium finish, academics, economists and sports analysts will publish their expected country rankings and predicted medal totals. But throughout last year's Paralympic Games, Oliver Summers was working away on his own predictions; predictions that only a select group would get to see. Summers is a data analyst for UK Sport and was appointed lead Paralympic analyst for Great Britain during the Rio 2016 Paralympics. Speaking at the Royal Statistical Society Conference in Glasgow in September, he described his work to first calculate medal probabilities for each British entry, and then - with each recorded win or missed opportunity - to monitor whether the team as a whole was on course to hit its target. The goal of ParalympicsGB was to return from Brazil with 121 medals - one more than it achieved when Britain hosted the 2012 Games. At first that might not seem overly ambitious, but Summers explained that host nations often fail to better their home performance four years later. In total, there were 1600 medals available across 11 days of Paralympic competition. The GB team had 264 athletes competing in 19 out of 22 sports, putting a maximum of 349 medals in reach. Summers needed to know how likely it was that each competitor would win a medal in their chosen event(s), so he asked the experts - the coaches who were training the athletes - to report the likelihood of a medal win. Expert knowledge has its advantages: coaches know their sport and their athletes well. But the responses were also subjective, and Summers noted that within the coaching system there were different levels of understanding of probability, which required some work to address.
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