After delivering Great Britain’s best performance at an Olympic Games for more than a century to finish second in the medal table, those responsible for the remarkable feat said the country was now a “sporting superpower” and could do even better in Tokyo.

The super-heavyweight boxer Joe Joyce delivered the 67th and final medal of a remarkable Rio Games to ensure that Britain became the first nation to better its performance at a home Olympics at the one that followed.

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Twenty years after Britain finished 36th in the medal table in Atlanta, a combination of national lottery funding and a ruthless “no compromise” approach to investment had propelled them to finish ahead of China in the medal table and, by two, beat the 65 achieved in London four years ago. Joyce’s silver medal was the 700th won by Great Britain across Olympic and Paralympic sport since lottery funding was introduced in 1997 and meant Team GB finished with 67. Of those 27 were gold, 23 silver and 17 bronze.

Liz Nicholl, the chief executive of the funding agency UK Sport, which has poured £274m into Olympic sport over four years, paid tribute to a “huge team effort” before a closing ceremony at which the team were to be led by the women’s hockey captain, Kate Richardson-Walsh, as flagbearer.

“It has been an outstanding performance, making history. Even the sporting superpowers have not increased their medal haul after hosting a Games,” Nicholl said, paying particular tribute to cycling and gymnastics. “We are one of those sporting superpowers now. We are up there ahead of China in the medal table. To win more medals than in London and be ahead of China is an incredible place to be. It’s spectacular, in fact.”

Most of the team will return to London on Mondaymorning on a specially chartered plane with a golden nose.

Nicholl said she was particularly pleased that so many new sports had come to the party, with Britain winning medals in more different disciplines than any other nation. “There’s been success in breadth and in depth. Nearly 130 medallists across 19 sports. More sports, more medallists than in London. And more sports winning gold medals than in London,” she said.

Immediately after the 2012 London Games, UK Sport vowed to win “more medals in more sports” than at those Games, when Team GB finished third in the table with 65. That aspiration was then revised downwards to a hard target of making Rio Britain’s best ever away Games, with at least 48 medals. But, with Mo Farah’s 5,000m gold on Saturday night, they ensured they would become the most successful British Olympic team since 1908 and meet the original goal.

The huge run of success has given rise to questions over whether a strategy with a remorseless focus on pouring the most money into those sports most likely to deliver medals has run its course. But, far from calling time on the medal race, Nicholl resolutely backed the “no compromise” high-performance system that has underpinned the uplift in success in Beijing, then London, now Rio.

“I think we’ve all seen and felt the impact of medal success on ourselves and on the UK,” she said. “Success in sport can inspire the nation, make everybody proud and unite the nation. There’s no doubt about that. We can all see it and feel it.

“Why do we invest in medal success? We invest in medal success to create a proud, ambitious, active, healthy nation. That’s why [the] government values medal success. That’s why the national lottery is targeted towards medal success. That is why the government adds value to that in terms of exchequer funding.”

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That investment, split 75-25 between Lottery and exchequer investment and totalling some £350m across the Olympics and Paralympics, equates to some £4.5m per medal in Rio and has already been guaranteed for the Tokyo cycle. Nicholl said that at least 40% of its investment was already targeted at athletes expected to win medals in four years’ time, while the British Olympic Association has already signed deals for a pre-Games training camp in Tokyo.

The British Olympic Association chief executive, Bill Sweeney, who is responsible for the team at Games-time, said it would be tough, but not impossible, to improve on the tally in four years’ time.

“We’ll have a much stronger domestic team than we saw here and for political reasons I think China will want to make a strong statement in Japan. The Australians won’t take this lying down either; they’ll want to come back, and you will have a full Russian delegation there,” he said.

“It will be a tough one to repeat. But the general feeling is that we have enough athletes going through to Tokyo. The system is in shape to carry on that success.”

Nicholl said individual sports would learn how much money they would get for the next cycle in December. “I’m not going to be any more specific about Tokyo potential other than to say we’re well advanced and we are confident we can build on the success here in Rio.”