The individual athletes don't directly care about that, but in the UK the funding for the whole sport's Olympic programme is dictated by how many medals are won

The individual athletes don't directly care about that, but in the UK the funding for the whole sport's Olympic programme is dictated by how many medals are won. It creates some interesting problems which vary between the different types of sport. Pre-games the programme is going to be set up so that all the athletes cooperate to make each other better and maximise the programme's chance of success, but the athletes are also internally motivated to minimise their opponents' chance of beating them at the games. In my experience there's plenty of meta-game going on all the time! (Disclaimer - I'm not an Olympic athlete myself, I'm just close to the programme socially in a particular sport).