Running out of excuses: It's time to invest more in UK athletics

"Team GB" will be travelling to Beijing full of optimism and with the best wishes of the nation behind them.

Some will experience joy and triumph, others pain and disappointment, while new legends will be created and heroes born.

Realistically, though, many of our athletes will be going there more or less to make up the numbers, and while it may be the taking part that is important, we all wish to witness winning occasionally, too. No doubt there will be bright spots and we do possess some good chances to win gold medals, such as in the cycling, sailing and rowing, and hopes are high that the medal count will improve on Athens 2004 where we returned with nine gold, nine silver and 12 bronze medals.

However, is the problem that our athletes just aren't much good or is it the public and media that sets their expectations too high?

We could never hope to match the haul of the Americans (103 medals in 2004), for example, but when you consider the relative population of Britain with other countries we aren't actually doing as badly as we might think. If you divide the population of the countries comprising the top 10 of the 2004 medal chart by the number of medals won you get to see how those countries REALLY performed:

Australia: 500k
Russia: 1.5m
South Korea: 1.6m
Germany: 1.7m
Italy: 1.9m
GB: 2m
France: 2m
USA: 3m
Japan: 3.5m
China: 21m

With the exception of Australia, who out-perform everyone else by a country mile, we fared pretty reasonably compared with other countries. And while we might not be able to match America's total haul we can take comfort in knowing we did far better than they did per head of population!

But still, the nagging doubt remains that we could be doing better - after all, if Australia can manage one medal per 500,000 people, why can't we? In short, who is our next Kelly Holmes?

The answer would seem to be that we fail to invest sufficiently in our athletes and the facilities that they need. The margin between success and failure is tiny, yet we value investment in their training and development far lower than we value sharing in their success.

Much of the funding for our athletes comes from the National Lottery which is distributed by UK Sport. The total investment they have made in the build-up to this year's Olympics is £75m, which covers the four-year period since Athens. As part of the National Lottery's recently-launched "Love UK" promotion, they have declared that they raise £25m per week for distribution to the "good causes", of which UK Sport is one.

In other words, the main body of funding over a four-year period amounts to just three weeks worth of lottery receipts.

Of course, UK Sport isn't the only source of funds for our athletes but it does put into perspective the low priority that sports investment has in the country.

When you then combine that with a lack of investment of the sports infrastructure across the UK, you begin to wonder if it's a miracle that we manage to win any medals at all.

It goes without saying that there are many different things competing for a limited amount of funding, such as hospitals and schools and nobody wants to see anything go without.
But as we prepare to celebrate the success that our athletes enjoy perhaps we should also wonder if it isn't worth investing a little more in their development.