Olympic sports face anxious wait
Author: BBC Sport
Date: 27 Jan 2005
Category: Articles
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Great Britain finished 10th in the medal standings at the Athens Olympics, but the National Audit Office (NAO) says there is room for improvement.
Gymnastics, triathlon, shooting, judo, taekwondo and weightlifting got a total of £12.4m but did not win any medals.
Funding levels for the 2008 Games in Beijing will be unveiled next week.
"Athens represented the end of the first full Olympic cycle in which we have benefited from lottery funding," said Liz Nicholl, UK Sport's acting chief executive.
"As such there was always going to be a lot to learn - both from what we did well and things we could have done better.
"There is no doubt that the advent of lottery funding has enabled us to take the package of support we can offer to our leading sports to a new level, as the results from Sydney and Athens clearly demonstrate.
"But British sport will collectively have to up its game again to improve in Beijing and UK Sport must play its part in full."
UK Sport, responsible for the distribution of lottery funding, handed out a total of £92.4m in the four years leading up to Athens.
The money went to national governing bodies for a full range of support services and to elite athletes on its World Class Performance Programme (WCPP).
In Athens, the top-five funded sports of athletics, swimming, sailing, rowing and cycling delivered 68% of the medals, including eight of the nine golds.
But underperformance in some sports led to an overall cost per medal of £2.4m compared to a targeted £1.7m.
The NAO review, published on Thursday, concluded that, while the target of a top-10 finish on the Athens medal table had been met, there was scope for improvement.
UK Sport's goal is for Great Britain to become one of the top-five sporting nations, based on Olympics, Paralympics and World Championships, by 2012.
But the report highlighted the weakness in using medal tables as a sole arbiter for performance criteria.
That's because athletes who underperform for whatever reason, or even miss out on medals by the narrowest of margins, could see vital funds withdrawn.
"High-performance sport is all about continuous improvement and that is why we both appreciate the input from the NAO review and have already taken action on most of its findings," said Nicholl.
In total, sport receives 16.67% of lottery income allocated for good causes, and of that, UK Sport gets 1.53%, which amounted to £20m in 2003/2004.
Ninety per cent of the cash goes on the WCPP, with the rest funding major international events such as the World Indoor Athletics and administration.
UK Sport is a non-departmental public body working within a framework laid down by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
