PARIS — Forecasts for how Team GB will fare on the medal table at Paris 2024 vary as widely as the path of a slalom canoeist.

Experts Gracenote forecasts 17 golds and Sports Illustrated as many as 30, with UK Sport’s own range set cavernously from 50 to 70 medals.

However, there are some events in which GB will be undisputed favourites.

Keely Hodgkinson – Athletics (Women’s 800 metres)

Hodgkinson is the face of these Olympic Games in the mould of Jessica Ennis-Hill at London 2012, and everything points towards her getting the gold medal that status demands.

A number of factors need to bend in an athlete’s direction to arrive at the Olympics with such heavy favouritism, but it really feels like her time has come after three successive silver medals at major global championships.

Hodgkinson damaged her knee and hamstring in a freak accident in late 2023 and was sweating on her own fitness as recently as January, only to make a full recovery.

The 22-year-old has found phenomenal form and her stunning world-leading 1:54.61 at the London Athletics Meet has led to hope that she could rattle Jarmila Kratochvilova’s dubious world record.

Getting across the line first is the only priority in Paris, however, with Athing Mu’s fall at US trials proving anything can happen in middle-distance running.

Joe Clarke – Canoe Slalom (K1 and Kayak Cross)

Canoe slalom is one of the most unpredictable sports at the Olympics.

As the whitewater whistles by, one missed gate can be the difference between gold and stone dead last.

Enter Clarke, the favourite son of the surprise canoeing hotbed that is Staffordshire and Stone, returning to the Olympic stage after eight years away.

Clarke roared to victory in the K1 event on debut at the Rio Games in 2016, banked his MBE and Question of Sport appearance and was seemingly set fair for a period of dominance.

True to form, the sport didn’t play ball. Clarke missed out on selection altogether for Tokyo, losing out to Bradley Forbes-Cryans in an internal race for the single spot.

Powered by a new perspective after becoming a dad with son Hugo born in January 2023, Clarke won World Cup gold on Father’s Day that year and carried incredible form through the season, crowned double world champion in London in September.

The 31-year-old is the man to beat against the clock and a podium favourite in the new kayak cross discipline, a chaotic made-for-TV race where five boats crash down the course at the same time.

Emma Finucane – Track Cycling (Sprint)

Until recently, women’s sprinting was seen as the “weakest link” of British cycling.

The glory brought by two-time Olympic champion Victoria Pendleton gave way to acrimony and a high-profile falling out between coach Shane Sutton and Jess Varnish that ended in an employment tribunal. The upshot was that Team GB failed to qualify a women’s sprint team for Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020.

A unique cocktail of factors has combined to form a very different picture for Paris.

The event has shifted to a three-rider discipline, the programme fell into the hands of an inspirational coach in Australian Kaarle McCulloch and in Finucane, they landed upon a generational talent.

An endurance rider on the road who morphed into the quickest in the world on the track, the Welsh speedster became Britain’s first women’s sprint world champion in a decade in Glasgow last summer and did the same at European level in February.

The keirin is always difficult to predict and GB will hope to topple Germany in the team sprint, but Finucane will take some beating in the individual sprint.

Team Eventing – Equestrian

There has only been one story in town when it comes to equestrian this week and Charlotte Dujardin’s withdrawal means a likely gold in team dressage has fallen by the wayside.

But three-day eventing, consisting of dressage, cross-country and showjumping, will be the first equestrian discipline to feature at Chateau de Versailles and Team GB have fantastic prospects.

With Britain totally dominating the global scene, two or three different teams could have been named and they all would have been favourites to take top step, with Tokyo gold medallist Oliver Townend missing out and 2022 world champion Yasmin Ingham named only as an alternate rider.

Laura Collett and Tom McEwen took gold with Townend in Tokyo and they both return to the Olympic stage.

Collett put in one of the best three-day performances ever seen to win Badminton in 2022 and McEwen claimed individual Olympic silver three years ago.

They are joined by 2023 Badminton winner and double European champion Ros Canter in a fearsome triumvirate that look impossible to beat.

Joe Choong – Modern Pentathlon

This will be Joe Choong’s third and final Olympics.

The well-spoken 29-year-old has been a vocal opponent of the marginalisation of horse riding from modern pentathlon and he has no truck with the prospect of obstacle course racing at LA 2028.

Choong has only grown as an athlete since winning gold with a Games record score at Tokyo 2020 and is well-positioned to end his Olympic career by retaining his title.

In 2023, he held all major titles in the sport after winning back-to-back World Championships and securing Olympic qualification with gold in Team GB colours at the European Games.

Choong can be expected to help the nation end the Games on a high with his final taking place on the penultimate day of competition.

Lightweight Women’s Double Sculls – Rowing

Imogen Grant and Emily Craig are as close as you get to a racing certainty to win Olympic gold.

As part of a miserable regatta for Team GB in Tokyo, Grant and Craig fell short of a podium by one-hundredth of a second with the latter hanging a picture of the photo finish on her bedroom wall.

It isn’t everyone’s idea of healthy motivation, but it has certainly worked.

The lightweight double has won 10 consecutive races, across World and European Championships and World Cups, all by clear water with no nation able to lay a finger on them.

Grant, whose rowing journey began when she signed up for a taster session in exchange for two free drinks in Freshers Week, completed her medical degree at Cambridge in 2023 and the pair were named World Rowing Crew of the Year that same year.

Glory in Paris surely awaits and with their event scrapped for LA 2028, their names ought to go down in history as the last Olympic champions in women’s lightweight rowing.

John Gimson and Anna Burnet – Sailing

There is lots of ammunition for Team GB’s sailing squad to maintain their record in the sport.

No nation has won more Olympic sailing medals than Great Britain and podium chances abound across boat classes at Marseille Marina.

Windsurfer Emma Wilson, kite foiler Ellie Aldridge and Michael Beckett in the ILCA 7 all enter the Games in fine fettle and will be expected to reach the rostrum.

When it comes to the strongest chance of gold, that probably lies with Gimson and Burnet who are as consistent as they come in Nacra 17 despite the vagaries of life on the ocean wave.

The pair dream of upgrading their silver from Tokyo and are a couple on and off the water, planning to marry right after the Games.

Standing in their way will be Italy’s Ruggero Tita and Caterina Banti, their training partners, and best friends, with whom they have gone one-two at the last three World and European Championships.

Sky Brown – Skateboarding

Brown is as tough as nails. Aged 11 in 2020, she suffered terrible injuries and nearly died in an accident at Tony Hawk’s skatepark, an incident that would have broken just about every other child in the world.

Such adversity has become part of the Hollywood movie that has been her life so far and she went on, aged 13, to become Team GB’s youngest-ever Summer Olympic medallist with bronze in Tokyo.

Brown has won two X Games and a world title since then, becoming Britain’s first-ever skateboarding world champion.

Disaster threatened to strike when she tore a knee ligament earlier this year, threatening her ability even to qualify for Paris.

Men’s 4x200m Freestyle – Swimming

It takes alchemy to produce as many world-class male 200m freestyle swimmers as Great Britain have in recent years.

Quite simply there is no nation better at swimming four lengths of an Olympic pool and every expectation is that this fact will be proven emphatically at Paris 2024.

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Ask the athletes why and they will simply say that they spur each other on, the white heat of domestic competition producing a string of outstanding performances.

GB can call upon the 2023 world champion in Matt Richards, who underlined his status as the coming man of British swimming with a stunning victory in the 200m at April’s Trials.

After illness struck him down in 2022, Duncan Scott is very much back and that means Tokyo gold medallist Tom Dean did not even qualify to defend his title.

Add into the mix the redoubtable relay performer James Guy at his final Olympics and you have a cocktail of talent ready to break the world record, which was set in 2009 by an American squad featuring a certain Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte.

Alex Yee – Triathlon

This will be the first Olympic triathlon without a Brownlee since Athens 2004 but thankfully, Britain has a very capable standard-bearer in Yee.

A former track runner, Yee blasted to the second fastest-ever Parkrun with 13:57 in 2018 and has cut a swathe through the swim, bike and run sport since switching focus in 2019.

The Lewisham native won individual silver and mixed relay gold on debut in Tokyo and won’t have the privilege of being an underdog this time.

Having won last year’s test event on an Olympic course that looks set to produce another run race, Yee should have too much for reigning champion Kristian Blummenfelt of Norway who is attempting a devilishly difficult step back down from Ironman to Olympic distance.

His closest challenger is likely to be Kiwi Hayden Wilde, but this is far from a two-horse race, with the host nation able to field the last two world champions in Leo Bergere and Dorian Coninx.

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