Funding, Performance and Participation in British Olympic Sports

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between sport funding, performance and mass participation. Elite sport development has become a key component in countries’ sport systems. National governing bodies continuously invest money and resources in developing effective sport structures for future current athletes. It could be suggested that with continuously rising sport competition, the British Elite sport funding system needs to be revised to optimize the support for elite athletes in more sports with potential to win medals and in that way increase competitiveness and dominance across a wider range of sports, as well as to minimize the threat for the nation to be surpassed by its rivals (Duffy et al. 2006). A historical database of funding (UK Sport), performance (Olympic medals) and participation (Active People Survey) statistics has been constructed. All Olympic sports from Sydney 2000 to London 2012 with Team GB representation have been included. Bivariate correlation was used to test the relationship between variables and results indicate no strong correlation to exist. We discuss the implications and limitations of our findings in the context of current sport policy in the UK before making suggestions for future research in this area