FINALLY, some encouraging news for Britain’s Olympic rivals.

 

On Wednesday, UK Sport will unveil elite funding allocations for Olympic and Paralympic sports for the four years starting next April and including London 2012.

 

It had hoped to be distributing about £350 million.

 

In fact, though negotiations are set to continue down to the wire, it will be lucky if the actual amount disclosed this week touches £300 million.

 

This is because £79 million that was supposed to come from the private sector has still not been raised.

 

Hugh Robertson, Shadow Sports and Olympics spokesman for the Tories, recently described the situation as “a cruel betrayal of our Olympic team”, which in Beijing produced an off-the-scale medals haul and finished a remarkable fourth in the medals table.

 

No doubt some of my more excitable media colleagues will greet the figures revealed on Wednesday with similar disdain.

 

More understanding needed

 

I can’t help feeling though that we carping critics ought to show a little more understanding.

 

For one thing, we are now in the middle of a pretty significant economic downturn which, though it doesn’t excuse how slowly attempts to raise private funding appear to have got under way, has certainly blighted the considerable efforts to play catch-up in recent months.

 

The economic turbulence has also made the task of coaxing a little extra out of the Treasury doubly difficult, although these efforts continue.

 

Second, there remains enough cash in the pot to ensure that the main contributors to that stand-out Beijing medals tally remain enviably funded.

 

Those Beijing exploits were achieved with total investment in summer Olympic sports of a shade under £236 million over that four year cycle.

 

Admittedly, that doesn’t include Paralympic funding, but there is simply no way that Beijing success stories such as cycling and sailing are going to be left high and dry.

 

As for big spenders which enjoyed less success, such as athletics, well, some pruning of individuals who are never likely to mount an Olympic podium is very much in line with the “no compromise” philosophy prosecuted to great effect by Peter Keen, UK Sport’s head of performance.

 

Third, some of the missing £79 million - though, I doubt, all of it - will certainly be raised, making it more than likely that some sports will in time receive supplementary payments in addition to Wednesday’s allocations.

 

Though these would be of limited help if, say, coaches had been let go to make ends meet at the start of the cycle, there will be cases where such extra money will still come in time to make a real difference.

 

It should be added that there is a further £70 million for centralised services that is not part of next week’s allocations, but where some savings might be possible.

 

This makes the scale of the present shortfall £79 million out of around £420 million, equivalent to just under 19 per cent.

 

Minnows most at risk

 

Where concern is justified is in the smaller sports, which have benefited from increased development funding in recent years even if an Olympic medal remains a long shot.

 

The archetypical British Olympic minnow is handball, which still hopes to enter both the men’s and women’s competitions in 2012 even though there was no such thing as a British handball team until three years ago.

 

Over the three years from April 2006, the sport is receiving £3 million - not a lot, but a step change up from the piffling £10,000 a year in public funding it received until then.

 

It has already made substantial progress - but could its elite development programme survive if the news is bad on Wednesday?

 

To answer this question, I called my old pal Paul Bray of the British Handball Association.

 

“We are thinking about scenarios,” he told me.

 

“We have a board meeting planned at the back-end of the week, once we know what has happened.

 

“The main thing for us is to try and keep the momentum going.”

 

One of the most expensive, and therefore potentially vulnerable, elements of the sport’s new elite performance initiative is a programme it set up two years ago at a handball academy in Denmark, a leading handball nation.

 

This has enabled top British players both to train intensively and play regularly against top-notch opposition.

 

A few have even joined the leading Danish clubs.

 

Progress would continue, just slower

 

Bray acknowledges that the sport has also now built up “quite a professional coaching structure in Sheffield” and that, if push came to shove, the Denmark-based contingent could be repatriated, with significant savings.

 

The cost would come in a dramatic slowing of the pace of improvement.

 

“If we returned the players to Sheffield, we would be training for a month, then getting on a boat, going to Denmark, playing three or four matches over the weekend and then coming back,” he says.

 

“That’s OK; that will advance us – but not as much as being in Denmark.”

 

“The Danish approach, as originally planned, is key to achieving our ultimate goal, which is to field two competitive sides in 2012 in our home Olympics.”

 

Legacy is these days the buzz-word of the Olympic Movement.

 

A great deal of hot air on the subject is spouted as a result.

 

But I can think of few better or more concrete legacies for Britain that might come from the 2012 Olympics than the creation, at long last, of competitive GB teams in this unjustly neglected sport.

 

I am a great admirer of what has been - and might still be - achieved through implementation of Keen’s unashamedly elitist approach.

 

But medals are not the only thing that matters.

 

For that reason, I hope and trust that Wednesday does not see the dashing of handball’s Olympic hopes.

 

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 the recent Beijing Olympics