British athletes can continue the success of the Athens Games when they compete in Beijing, suggests Sue Campbell

The Athens Olympics have been hailed as Britain’s most successful Games since 1924. Great Britain’s medal haul of 30, including nine golds, eclipsed the 28 medals won four years ago in Sydney and cemented the nation’s place among the world’s top 10 sporting superpowers.

A series of performances – some expected, some extraordinary – have created new heroes and role models for the nation and heralded the next generation of sporting elite. As a nation, we can all take collective pride in the success of Team GB in Athens.
At UK Sport, our ambition is to sustain and build upon this success.

We want to help our athletes be the very best – helping them to win medals, set the highest standards and fulfil their responsibilities as role models. National Lottery funding has had a major impact on elite sport in this country and there is little doubt that it has contributed in part to British success in Athens.

After two successful Olympic Games, it is perhaps easy to forget the step change in performance that we have seen since the introduction of lottery funding for elite sportsmen and women in 1997. In Sydney and Athens we won a total of 20 gold medals – only one short of the total from the five preceding Games. In short, Britain is now winning medals at a rate previously unseen in the modern era. But this is not the limit of our ambition, nor of our ability – the good news is that we can become even better.

In the four years before the Games we invested £85 million of National Lottery funding in 17 Olympic and 14 Paralympic sports. Our World Class Performance Programme funds around 550 athletes directly via a personal award, so they can dedicate all their time to training if they wish to. It also, via the sports governing bodies, funds a quality athlete support system which includes top sports technicians and coaches as well as world class performance directors.

The Athens Olympiad was the first full Olympiad where performance sport has had the benefit of lottery funding. For the next Olympiad in Beijing our business plan and funding is now set at £98 million over four years. To put that into context it parallels the investment that some of our top rival sporting nations have been investing for some time – so to some degree, we are still catching up.

However, with the tantalising prospect of a home Games in London in 2012, we believe that in the next two Olympic cycles we can, in partnership with others, achieve long term, consistent sporting success.

So how do we achieve this? Our primary goal is to build on our World Class Performance Programme. To do this we will work in partnership with the home country sports councils, the British Olympic and Paralympic Associations and sports governing bodies to maximise our expertise and resources to provide the best possible support system for our top athletes.

We also want to develop our own world class expertise. In the past, lottery money has enabled us to attract the best performance directors from all over the world to work with our athletes. Our next task is to ensure that we are capable of developing a stream of coaches and experts here in the UK – using world best practice where appropriate, but not necessarily having to import it wholesale.

The 2012 Olympic bid places our international work in the spotlight. UK Sport’s international relations programme will continue to develop Britain’s influence in sport worldwide, as well as developing strategic partnerships with key sporting nations such as China to ensure that we learn from their success and bring some of that best practice to the UK to help our own athletes.

We will also continue to provide direction and support for the bidding and staging of major events in this country. The 2006 World Rowing Championships on Dorney Lake in Eton is just one of the many events already secured for the future.

In addition to sporting success, we believe it is important to maintain the highest standards of conduct in sport. As the UK’s anti-doping agency we implemented the most rigorous domestic testing programme the UK has ever seen in the lead-up to the Athens Games. Our experience is that the vast majority of athletes want to compete in a drug-free environment and we will be supporting in this by effective anti-doping education and guidance programmes, aided by the deterrence of an effective testing programme.

There is much to do, but we have already made progress and we are not complacent. With our business plan now in place for the next four years to Beijing, we believe that, in partnership with others, we can sustain a golden sporting era for the UK.

Sue Campbell is chairman of UK Sport

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