Sailor Tom Burton on Tuesday ended a three-day wait for the country's seventh gold medal of these Olympics when he won the men's laser competition on Guanabara Bay but there was more despair for team sports as the women's basketballers, the Opals, made a shock exit at the quarter-final stage at the hands of Serbia.

Should the men's basketballers, the Boomers, happen to lose their quarter-final to Lithuania on Wednesday it would be the first Olympics since the boycott-hit Moscow Games in 1980 where an Australian team failed to make the semi-finals.

Midway through the second week here Australia's overall medal tally remains well short of the official projection, including 13 gold, made by the Australian Olympic Committee last December, and in danger of falling short of the 35 collected in London, which was the nation's lowest at a summer Games since Seoul in 1988.

Australia still has genuine gold medal chances to come in the 50km walk, the men's and women's BMX and in canoeing and kayaking and other medal prospects in sailing, men's basketball, athletics and diving.

However, barring a late surge the deflating return will serve as a reality check amid aspirations, voiced by chef de mission Kitty Chiller in the weeks before competition, for as many as 15 gold medals and a top-five finish on the medal tally.

It is also expected to prompt fresh questions about the effectiveness of the funding model introduced after London and overseen by the Australian Sports Commission.

In all, $340m has been injected into summer Olympic sports via the ASC's Winning Edge program in the four-year cycle leading up to the Rio Games. Using the national lottery funding model adopted by Great Britain in the lead-up to its home Olympics as an inspiration the money has been distributed with an enhanced priority on winning and sports in which Australia has historically been strong.

But while Team GB, with £274m ($466m) pledged to their Olympic sports between 2013 and 2017 are still enjoying the afterglow of London by punching well above their weight here, the jury is still out for Australia's program.

Swimming was the most heavily funded in the four years before Rio with $37.9m and, while Australia's haul of three gold among 10 medals in the pool was below expectations of many, the more expensive cost-per-medal evaluations come elsewhere, such as rowing ($32.4m, three medals in Rio) and hockey ($28.6m, no medals).

The ASC and its high performance arm, the Australian Institute of Sport, argue strongly that such funding-to-medal calculations are a crude form of measuring success. 

Its benchmarking of sports, around which funding levels are determined, is based not only on the Olympics but other major events such as world championships, as well as projections for the future.

Matt Favier, the AIS director, told Fairfax Media in the lead-up to Rio that ensuring sports met improved governance and accountability standards was also central to the funding criteria, citing the post-London overhaul of Swimming Australia as a case study. The AIS also make the point that they have had an eye on the future by including many younger athletes yet to appear at Olympic level among the 1100 across Olympic and Paralympic sports who have received direct grants from an additional overall pool of $41m since 2012.

Favier believes the true assessment of Winning Edge will not be able to made until the 10-year strategy, launched in 2012, is closer to running its course. 

In an open letter ahead of these Games, defending a strategy that has had vocal critics including the AOC, Favier said that "Rio is not a referendum on the success of Winning Edge", and added that all indicators pointed to an improved gold medal count from London (eight), which could still prove to be correct."

"It has given our high performance sporting system a clear definition of success," he wrote. "We didn't set easy targets, instead we have bold aspirations, supported by peak bodies like the AOC. We are working towards a top-five Olympic finish."

That may have to wait until Tokyo.