Who did okay? Sadly and appallingly – who let the country down? Why didn’t we finish higher? Why aren’t we as good as South Korea or Great Britain?

Well these are the facts.

There were just over 300 gold medals on offer.

There are more than 200 nations taking part and 87 demonstrated on the day that they were able to produce a medallist. Do the maths on that.

Any Australian who thinks a haul of 29 medals, eight of them gold isn’t good enough is being a bit tough – and mean.

How would we feel if we came from another great sporting nation like Finland, the home of Olympics greats like Nurmi and Viren, whose foray into Rio yielded just a single bronze?

What about Chile, a country of 18 million which takes it sport very seriously and has been in the Olympic movement since the beginning with no medal at all?

On the mostly commonly accepted medal tally table Australia finished tenth. Each of the nine countries ranked higher have populations at least double our 25 million and all invest seriously in sport.

The US and Japan have their university programs, Great Britain and Italy benefit hugely from generous national lotteries, China, Russia and France multi-faceted state run systems whilst South Korea and Germany have significant corporate clubs and investment.

It is true that some of those snapping at our heels like the Netherlands and Hungary have smaller population bases but they take their sport just as seriously as we do.

The reality is that each Olympic Games occurs on just 16 days once in every four years. To jump on the dais the athlete or team has to be on their game at that time and have luck on their side as well.

Chloe Esposito made the most of her Olympic experience – winning a surprise gold medal for Australia in modern pentathlon. She will be rightly remembered for that but the planets aligned well for her when the reigning Olympic and world champions drew horses that would not jump.

Stories can easily be found for fellow Aussies whose luck went in the opposite direction. That’s the Olympics.

Much is and will be made of the comparison with Great Britain – because it is easily made. So let’s begin.

The result of the last Games host was super – 67 medals, 27 of them gold. In the Games after Australia hosted their Olympics in 2000 we won 50, 17 gold – with 40 million less people to pick a team from.

Can we emulate our Rio effort in the future by doing things differently?

Some thoughts on that next week.