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That sounds very impressive but, in reality, it just involves totting up the number of world championship medals every nation won in 2009, then making them into a big list.

Team GB , with two gold medals ( and ) and two silver medals in .

The inference from those 2009 medals is that we should expect similar in , but the BOA has shown itself keen to slightly underplay its hand when it comes to Olympic predictions: it and . Here it looks as though, with four 2009 world championship medals under its belt, the organisation has decided three Olympic medals will be enough.

But looking at the British squad in detail (see below), I don't think we should be satisfied with that three-medal target, particularly with the caveat that medals may be of any colour. The squad would walk away with three if they simply performed to their current world rankings, rising to four if they reached 2009 world championship levels.

Chemmy Alcott - she's got the mascot, now she needs the medal

However, athletes all aim to raise their game at the Games, and the air has been rich with the sound of optimistic British athletes in recent weeks and months. will tell anyone prepared to listen how sure she is of an alpine skiing medal; the British are confident; are well-placed to steal a medal in the ice dance; and has long been rated a chance in the snowboard cross.

Five medals in total, two of them gold is the personal target I believe the British team can reach. That would be hands-down , but the BOA has been keen to push its new motto of "better never stops" and now seems a good time to demonstrate it.

Maybe I'm buying into the hype too much. What do you reckon? Even if Britain does bring five medals home, don't start getting excited about the medal table. Assuming two are gold, GB would probably still finish 14th - it would take four golds to have a hope of breaking into the top 10, according to the BOA's own statistics.

Not that working out those figures is the most taxing statistical operation. It's one plenty of people have come up with before, providing a quick method of setting out the lie of the land before an Olympic Games. It ignores athletes who were injured or otherwise engaged at their sport's last world championships and is hence far from perfect, but creating anything more detailed starts to get incredibly involved.

Luciano Barra, former head of the Italian Olympic Committee, has been at this game for years. He issues regular updates for both the Summer and Winter Games - you might recall we spoke to him before Beijing 2008, and his projection was for fourth-placed GB.

Britain duly finished fourth with 47 medals, well ahead of their official target and impressively close to Barra's projected tally. But he will be the first to admit there's a large amount of luck involved: many of the British medals came from events where Barra had Britain down to get nothing, and vice versa. These tables are only good as a rough gauge, and they can never precisely predict what is going to happen.

However, it is fascinating that the BOA and Barra, conjuring the same end product from the same figures, have two different nations topping their medal tables.

Barra has the United States down for overall victory with 13 gold medals, whereas the BOA reckons Norway and the US will tie on 11 golds each, with the Norwegians sneaking it on the basis of two extra silvers. (See below for their two tables in full, and an explanation of why the tallies differ.)

That discrepancy alone goes to show you can't sustain much of an argument with these pre-Games projections. But beyond the medal table minutiae, there are some facts and figures from the British team heading to Vancouver which do tell a story.

TEAM GB: VITAL STATISTICS

Size

This is the biggest British team since Albertville in 1992, to which 54 athletes were sent (there were 57 at Calgary in 1988, the biggest contingent in recent history). By comparison with other countries, Britain's squad is the same size as that of Ukraine, and slightly larger than the teams being sent by Poland and Slovenia.

Twelve of GB's 52 athletes get a send-off outside Somerset House in London

The US has the largest team (216 athletes) while hosts Canada have 201. Twelve countries - Albania, the Cayman Islands, Ghana, Hong Kong, Jamaica, Montenegro, Morocco, Pakistan, Portugal, San Marino, Senegal and Taiwan - are sending a lone athlete to Vancouver. (.)

Gender

There are 52 members of the British Winter Olympic team, of whom 28 are men and 24 women. Never before has Britain sent so many women to a Winter Olympics - at Nagano in 1998, the British team boasted just seven female competitors, alongside 26 men.

Age

The women are younger than the men, too: the average age of women in the team is 26, compared to 28 for the men. The youngest member of the team is, appropriately, 17-year-old cross-country skier - one-third of a cross-country team entirely made up of teenagers. The other two, and , were born within a day of each other in March 1990.

At the other end of the spectrum, Peter Smith, part of , is the oldest member of the squad at the age of 45. Smith was born in 1964, while Young was born in 1992 - the difference between the two is larger than the average age of the squad.

Five of the six eldest members of the team are curlers, which makes sense given the sport's fairly sedentary characteristics compared with other winter events. The two curling teams have an average age of 34 between them - only three Team GB athletes from other winter sports are older than that. And yet , who leads the women's curlers, is just 19.

Nationality

All 10 of the curlers selected to Team GB are Scottish, and in all there are 18 members of Team GB who were born in Scotland. A further 28 were born in England while figure skater is Northern Irish, snowboarder was born on the Isle of Man, and the remaining four were born abroad: men's luge competitor (US), snowboarder (Canada), former Wasps rugby star turned bobsleigh entrant (Zambia) and skier (Australia).

World ranking

In general, the team's Scottish-born members are ranked higher in their sports. Both curling teams are in the top 10 (the men are world number two, the women seventh), and ice dance duo are ranked fifth. The only competitors entering the Winter Olympics at the head of their field are the women's bobsleigh duo of - the former was born in England, the latter in Scotland.

The cross-country skiing team is noteworthy not only for its youthfulness, but also for its world rankings. Skiing's international governing body ranks 192nd in the world, 391st, and 409th (making him the team's youngest and lowest-ranked competitor). In general, the British skiing team is not well-ranked. , by far the brightest current skiing talent, is ranked 13th.

Experience

Ten of the 52 athletes have prior Olympic experience, four-man bobsleigh competitor being a special case having competed in athletics' 4x100m relay at Sydney 2000. , who appeared at Barcelona 1992 and Salt Lake 2002, was the last Briton to complete a Winter and Summer Olympic double (which suggests it takes exactly one decade to make the transition - and both went from athletics to bobsleigh). was, of course, the only medallist at Turin four years ago, in the skeleton, and she returns ranked second in the world in 2010.

Seven more athletes can count on the experience of not one but two appearances at the Winter Games: , , , , , and . Lockhart, of the women's curling team, is the only veteran of Nagano 1998 in the squad at the age of 44.

PROJECTED MEDAL TABLES
(Name, gold medals, silver, bronze, total)

Luciano Barra's medal table:
1. United States (13, 5, 10, 28)
2. Norway (11, 7, 7, 25)
3. Germany (9, 15, 4, 28)
4. Austria (8, 7, 3, 18)
5. Canada (6, 10, 13, 29)
6. China (6. 6. 1. 13)
7. South Korea (5, 5, 3, 13)
8. Switzerland (5, 4, 4, 13)
9. Russia (4, 3, 6, 13)
10. Netherlands (4, 2, 2, 8)
11. Finland (3, 1, 8, 12)
12. Japan (3, 0, 4, 7)
13. Italy (2, 3, 3, 8)
14. Great Britain (2, 2, 0, 4)
15. Poland (2, 0, 2, 4)

British Olympic Association medal table:
1. Norway (11, 7, 7, 25)
2. United States (11, 5, 11, 27)
3. Germany (10, 14, 4, 28)
4. Austria (8, 7, 5, 20)
5. South Korea (7, 4, 3, 14)
6. Canada (6, 12, 12, 30)
7. China (5, 5, 1, 11)
8. Switzerland (5, 4, 4, 13)
9. Russia (4, 3, 6, 13)
10. Netherlands (4, 2, 2, 8)
11. Finland (3, 1, 8, 12)
12. Japan (3, 0, 3, 6)
13. Italy (2, 3, 3, 8)
14. Great Britain (2, 2, 0, 4)
15. Poland (2, 0, 2, 4)

Why do the two tables differ?

Barra and the BOA occasionally use different competitions for their data, but I've found one or two apparent errors. (They may be correct - if you can explain them, let me know!)

The BOA has ruled out US Nordic Combined skier 10km individual large hill world title - Demong was disqualified in the team event, but not the individual, which may have foxed the BOA statisticians.

In short track speed skating, the BOA says it has taken the results from the 2009 World Championships in Austria. The US won the men's 5000m relay title there, but the BOA has given the gold to South Korea - who won at the World Team Championships in the Netherlands, later that month, but not in Austria.