But it is hard to criticise its ingenuity in rising to this challenge.

 

Last year, insidethegames revealed that Lord Moynihan, BOA chairman, loaned the body £250,000 interest-free, in a year – 2007 - in which it ran up an annual deficit of £1.3 million on income from continuing operations of £7.1 million.

 

Now it has emerged that the BOA managed to secure a £25,000 donation from Manchester United, the current club world football champions.

 

The money – donated some time between July 2007 and June 2008 – formed a small chunk of the just under £1.8 million raised by the British Olympic Appeal to help cover the costs of fielding what turned out to be a phenomenally successful British team in last summer’s Beijing Games.

 

Contributors ranged from JPMorgan Cazenove, the illustrious investment bank, to the Post Office.

 

When he found time to speak to me during a tumultuous week at his new employer, Ipswich Town, Simon Clegg, the former BOA chief executive, explained that a number of football clubs had been contacted as part of a strategy to explore new areas of potential revenue-generation.

 

David Davies, a former FA insider who was also for some years football’s representative on the BOA, made many of the contacts on Clegg’s behalf.

 

I gather that Marcus Evans, Ipswich’s owner, was a particularly generous contributor.

 

It is worth pointing out that the appeal was chaired by Sir Roy Gardner, a former Manchester United chairman.

 

It will be interesting to see whether Big Football can bring itself to follow the precedent now set in future Olympic appeals.

 

With comparatively impecunious sports bodies such as the British Canoe Union, the Grand National Archery Society and the Scottish Hockey Union among those chipping in for Beijing, there is a strong argument that it should.

 

Particularly as Britain should actually be fielding two teams – although quite who will be playing remains unclear – in the 2012 Olympic football competition.

 

After all, with all due respect to United for reaching for their chequebook in time for Beijing, £25,000 is – what? – perhaps a day or two of a top Premiership player’s salary.

 

Word of United’s donation coincided with my first chance to meet Andy Hunt (pictured), the new BOA chief executive, who is one of a troika of recent senior appointments, along with Hugh Chambers, chief commercial officer, and Adam Parsons, communications director.

 

After a strongly-worded start in December when he hit out at the Government’s failure to “honour their funding promise to all our Olympic sports” while expressing deep concern that “the opportunity to find the Chris Hoy of table tennis or the Rebecca Adlington of volleyball in future Olympic Games has been put in jeopardy”, Hunt and his colleagues have, in recent months, adopted a strikingly conciliatory tone.

 

This has applied both to former World Cup-winning coach Sir Clive Woodward’s role in the grand Olympic scheme of things and the matter of filling the £50 million funding gap left by the failure to attract private-sector sponsorship to elite Olympic sport.

 

“My assessment coming in was we could do [one of] two things,” Hunt said.

 

“We could continue to throw rocks at Government for the shortfall…or we could find an innovative and creative way to bring together the partners that have rights that could be exploited to help fill that funding gap.”

 

The latest summary of Sir Clive’s role seems to envisage him working particularly closely with some of the eight sports worst hit by the funding shortfall: fencing, handball, shooting, table tennis, volleyball/beach volleyball, water polo, weightlifting and wrestling

 

“The critical thing for me with Clive (pictured) was making sure that we had a role in performance for [him] which actually was in harmony with the performance system driven by UK Sport,” Hunt said.

 

 

“Clive…with the support of [UK Sport performance head] Peter Keen, is actually now going to be undertaking the work that we are going to, I hope, fund through Team 2012 - to particularly focus on those sports that are underfunded.

 

“He is about to start work in one of those sports.

 

“Very importantly, when we have taken the Team 2012 proposition out to Olympic sponsors, they really want to back Clive.

 

“So Clive is a very important asset for the success of Team 2012.”

 

Keen’s theories, of course, received a stunning endorsement with Team GB’s Beijing medals haul.
Team 2012 is the new initiative under which all major organisations involved in supporting British elite sport have joined forces to pool their collective rights and align their fundraising ambitions through to London 2012.

 

The new partnership is between the BOA, the London 2012 organising committee (LOCOG), the British Paralympic Association (BPA) and UK Sport.

 

Sitting alongside Hunt, Chambers was crystal clear that the new scheme would be targeted only at existing Olympic sponsors.

 

“The idea of Medal Hopes [an unsuccessful predecessor scheme] was that it was specifically aimed at non-Olympic partners,” he said.

 

“The point about Team 2012 is that it is exclusively aimed at Olympic partners.

 

“I suppose it’s true to say that the catalyst for Team 2012 was Medal Hopes.

 

“The issue with Medal Hopes was that it was not a LOCOG-endorsed programme and within the context of this quadrennium there was the very real possibility that partners who got involved with that would be going head-to-head with LOCOG interests.

 

“And so we sat down literally at Christmas time - I met up with LOCOG - and we all agreed that there was an opportunity to actually pool together the resources of LOCOG, the BPA, the BOA and UK Sport.

 

“The intention is that we remove any confusion in the marketplace in terms of who has access to Olympic rights, who has access to elite sport and elite sportspeople.

 

“Together we can put together something that collectively is a compelling proposition.”

 

Personally, I still have my doubts both about whether all the big-name athletes will really play ball with a scheme that won’t necessarily directly benefit their sport and about how companies, most of whom have already shelled out heavily to become Olympic sponsors, may react when asked to put their hand in their pocket again.

 

But, with everyone now apparently committed to pulling in the same direction, the prospects of unearthing at least some of the missing £50 million have probably improved.

 

To me perhaps the most surprising thing about Hunt’s first few months at the helm was last month’s announcement that he would be Chef de Mission for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

 

After all, Moynihan told me last year that: “Even if you were Bill Gates you would not be able to do both the chief executive’s and the Chef de Mission’s jobs over the next four years.”

 

Hunt feels there is quite a lot of overlap between the two roles.

 

The Chef de Mission’s function, he argued, is “a CEO of Team GB”.

 

“A lot of what I am doing in the day job is actually acting as CEO of Team GB.”

 

He will also have strong support in the shape of deputy Chefs de Mission Woodward and Mark England.

 

He emphasised too that the same structure would “not necessarily” be deployed for London 2012.

 

Even so, I am now looking forward to seeing how Hunt gets on when he takes over at Microsoft in a few years’ time.

An archive of Owen’s material may be found by Twitter users at www.twitter.com/dodo938.

 

David Owen is a specialist sports journalist who worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering last year's Beijing Olympics