I hope to see with 100+ athletes again and I think it is very possible but we'll see.
Water polo we will certainly qualify our men's team. Between men's basketball, women's water polo and women's basketball (we have many good young players so I'm not sure if 2024 will be too early or 2028 more realistic but you never know), I think we can get another 1-3 teams although men's basketball and women's water polo are always one game away and then choke. Same thing happened this year.
I don't think we'll qualify a full team in artistic swimming again (which is so sad because our girls didn't get to compete in Tokyo because half of the team got covid) but we will definitely qualify a duet.
Many sports like cycling, judo, taekwondo, table tennis, fencing, wrestling we will probably qualify 1-3 athletes in each sport like usual. Weightlifting and archery we are hoping for 1 in each just as in Tokyo.
Tennis we had 2 in Tokyo, hoping for another 1-2 in Paris but we will see. Petros Tsitsipas is close to top 200 in doubles and Valentini Grammatikopoulou is getting close to top 100 in doubles so maybe they can join our other two players. Grammatikopoulou/Sakkari would've made it this year if they stayed on the alternates list until the last minute. They had a higher combined ranking than Brazil and Chinese Taipei 2 but then again so did dozens of other potential teams from other countries that also weren't on the list.
Some sports we haven't been in the Olympics since 2012 (beach volleyball, canoeing, diving) or 2008 (boxing). Of those I think we have the best chances in boxing and diving, hopefully to get about 1-2 in each of those sports.
Sailing we had 8 in Tokyo and that's usually about what we have so I think it will be the same in Paris, somewhere between 6 and 11 sailors or so for us.
Swimming we had 17 in Beijing, 14 in each of London and Rio, and 12 in Tokyo so we keep going down but I think we can go up again to about 15-18 in Paris. The problem is women's swimming has gone downhill. That is where we see decreases. We had 7 in Beijing, 6 in London, 4 in Rio and 2 in Tokyo. I don't think it is possible to keep going down, the only way is up so I am hopeful some of our young girl swimmers will do better.
Shooting we usually have 2-3 shooters (at least the last few Games that's how it was) but the sport has grown a little and we have some young athletes that came close to qualifying for Tokyo, so I think in shooting we should aim for 4-5 quotas for Paris and based on results it seems realistic.
Gymnastics we only had 1 athlete in Tokyo after having 9 in each of Beijing, London, Rio. A lot of this is because we didn't qualify in the rhythmic group as we usually do, and no other individuals qualified in artistic or rhythmic even though some were expected to. I think 3-4 is realistic for Paris.
Rowing we also went down with only 4 athletes, we had 10 in each London and Beijing. But the ages of our rowers in Tokyo were 20, 20, 22, and 24 so we have a very young team and I expect more in Paris.
We had 20 in athletics which was the lowest we had in a while, but most expressed desire to continue to 2024 except for two who will retire in 2022, but both of those athletes only qualified after withdrawals anyways (Tsiamis and Vasiliou). We have some up and coming athletes, also a lot of female race walkers and with the new 35km team event I guess that will give us more quotas. So maybe we can aim for 30 in Paris?
I will say this for Greece should be our targets:
36-Team Sports (men's water polo + two other teams in basketball/water polo)
1-Archery
2-Artistic Swimming
30-Athletics
2-Boxing
3-Cycling
1-Diving
2-Fencing
4-Gymnastics
3-Judo
15-Rowing
10-Sailing
5-Shooting
18-Swimming
2-Table Tennis
2-Taekwondo
3-Tennis
1-Weightlifting
3-Wrestling
So in total that equals 143. Probably seems very optimistic but time will tell.
@Ted @maestro @George_D