Britain’s stunning medals success in the Rio Olympics may have been a cause for elation at home — but in parts of Europe it has met with sneers, incredulity and withering criticism of UK sports policy.

Great Britain achieved its best Olympic performance in more than a century, garnering a total of 67 medals, including 27 golds. It ended the Rio games second in the overall medals table after the US and ahead of China.

Some fellow Europeans were impressed. Others were sceptical.

Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, for example, singled out Team GB’s spectacular success in cycling, which it said “has led its rivals to wonder if there isn’t something fishy going on with the Brits”.

The paper also had harsh words for the Britain’s “no compromise” approach to funding, which allocates money to sports with a realistic chance of earning medals and has withheld it from disciplines that failed to meet their medals target in 2012.

“It made no difference how popular the sport was with the public, how suitable it was for the mass market,” the paper said. “Volleyball and table tennis were excluded from funding programmes, despite their broad appeal and wide take-up in the population.”

The article was headlined: “No compromise: why the Brits win more often in Rio than China, and what a high price they pay for it.”

There was a similar reaction in Spain, where the El País daily described Britain’s pursuit of Olympic glory as “brutal and heartless”, stating: “Every medal is the product of calculation, not the spirit of a nonconformist athlete.”

Perhaps even more irritating to British sports fans was the approach taken by the European Parliament. In a tweet it airbrushed out the Britain’s performance, instead congratulating the whole of the EU on the 325 medals it had collectively won.

That earned this terse response from one @JDrewer: “If you want to know why the Brits decided to leave the EU, this tweet pretty much sums it up.”

David Fuller's view

Oh dear.  How thoughtless of our Olympic athletes to deny their critics of schaudenfreuda which could have been satisfied by a post-Brexit crisis of confidence. 

(See also: Treacy Crouch: The heroes of Team GB have inspired the nation – we must harness that feeling for good)