Yesterday rowers Helen Glover and Heather Stanning won Great Britain's first gold medal. And the men's eight claimed a bronze with world champions Germany taking gold. Could the men's team have done better if they'd arranged their oars differently? Usually you expect to find rowers positioned in a symmetrical fashion, alternately right-left, right-left as you go from one end of the boat to the other. However, the regularity of the rower's positions hides a significant asymmetry that affects the way the boat will move through the water. Find out more in Rowing has its moments.

And if you prefer watching to reading, our sister site Maths and sport: Countdown to the Games features a video of a lecture given by John D. Barrow, which explores how to rig a rowing eight, whether a cox helps or hinders a racing boat, how the speed of a kayak or a canoe depends on the number of paddlers and what happens if you fall in.

Start of the women's 400 m freestyle at the 2008 European Championships. Image: Miho.

Some very exciting medals are going to be won in swimming today, including the women's 200m butterfly and the men's 100m freestyle. But we're unlikely to see the rush of record-breaking performances we saw in Beijing in 2008 — that's because in 2008 many swimmers benefited from controversial high performance swimsuits, which have now been banned. But how did these suits improve performance? Find out in By the skin of their suits.

Staying on the aquatic theme, the male divers are also competing for medals today and they'll need a good sense of balance to stay on those springboards. Our sister site Maths and sport: Countdown to the Games has a nice activity on balance and the mathematical concept behind it: inertia. It's aimed at higher GCSE and A level students.

Do more people in a boat help or do they slow it down? Image: Yanid.

We're getting very excited about the medals that will be awarded in canoeing and kayaking over the next three days. But here's a question: does having lots of paddlers helps or slow the boat down? The kayak with two paddlers has twice as many "engines" to power it, but it also has twice as much weight to drag through the water. Which is the dominant factor? It's something we should be able to work out using some relatively straight-forward maths. And indeed we can — you can find the answer here.

Lizzie Armitstead has won the silver medal in the women's road race. Image: johnthescone.

The first Olympic weekend is over! GB has excelled at cycling and swimming, snatching a silver and a bronze, and there have been other good performances too. Of course it's the taking part, not the winning, that counts, but let's face it: it's the medals, especially the gold ones, we all get most excited about. So while we were sitting glued to the telly watching the joys of weightlifting, archery and judo we started pondering some serious questions. Are all gold medals equal in value? How do poor countries perform compared to rich ones? How do the weather conditions of the day, for example the wind, influence an athlete's performance? What about the effect of altitude? And that of chance? Thankfully we remembered that two good friends of Plus have written an article looking at just these questions — so if you'd like to know some answers, read The maths of gold medals: Four Olympic thoughts.

Our sister site Maths in sport: Countdown to the Games also has some interesting content relating to some of the disciplines in which medals have already been awarded. There's an activity aimed at A-level students, exploring the effect of altitude on a weightlifter's performance, seeing that the weight of objects decreases as you move further away from the centre of the Earth. And, noting that some weightlifters are very big people indeed, we recommend the video of a lecture called David and goliath: Strength and power in sport, given by John D. Barrow, on the role of an athlete's size on his or her performance. But if weightlifting isn't your thing, you might prefer this key stage 3 activity, which comes with a nice little interactive applet, to see how an archer should adjust the sight to adapt to new situations. Who said that there was no maths in sport?