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Great Britain

AS THE International Olympic Committee prepare to pay their visit to London this week to assess the British bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, at least one featured sport is in turmoil behind the scenes.

The organisational woes of British hockey are threatening to cast an additional shadow on the credibility of Sebastian Coe’s efforts to bring the Games to Britain for the first time in half a century.

Stunned by the inexorably rising costs of winning Olympic medals, Sport England announced that they would cut funding to those sports deemed to have been failures in the past, or unlikely to be successful in the future.

Their spending programme for the next four years will see an increase from £215m to more than £300m, with 27 medal-winning sports, ranging from badminton to canoeing, receiving more money. In contrast, despite high-profile medal-winners such as Denise Lewis and Kelly Holmes, athletics is deemed to have disappointed at Athens and, with gymnastics, karate and particularly hockey, will get less support from the public purse.

England Hockey’s funding, which will decrease from £3.5m to £2.75m next year, has been described variously as a 40% or a 60% cut. But it is 21%, and English hockey will still have more than £11m to spend over the next four years.

Roger Draper, Sport England’s chief executive, says the cuts are a direct reflection on performance in Athens, and is insisting on the "primacy of GB" over the home countries.

But England Hockey last week dissembled more misleading figures, claiming that hockey players in Scotland would receive up to seven times more money per head than English counterparts - nonsensical statistics.

Such bleating is unlikely to impress at least one delegate with the IOC evaluation committee.

Els van Breda Vriesland, president of the International Hockey Federation, is well aware of the wrangling going on. And she knows that, if London is to stage the Games in seven years, GB will have automatic qualification for the hockey tournament, as hosts.

Roger Self, new president of the British Olympic Hockey Board, has written to Simon Clegg, chief executive of the British Olympic Association, to express regret at "the many who seek to influence who have not considered all the relevant facts". Clegg’s comments on the refusal of Self’s board to allow GB to supplant the home countries in the hockey World Cup stopped short of a threat to withdraw the teams from the Beijing Olympics. But his impatience was clear.

However, Self - the gold medal-winning coach in Seoul - has just completed a detailed four-month review of the sport. He has confirmed the need for England to have "unfettered rights" to represent GB in the Olympic qualification process, but also acknowledged the considerable advantages of allowing additional players from England, Scotland and Wales to gain high-level experience in the World Cup tournaments.

Self has invited the BOA to sit down with the hockey board to thrash out a co-ordinated approach to delivering elite hockey, rather than conducting warfare in the media.

But it may be too late to convince Vriesland to vote for London 2012.

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