In the best stoic traditions which characterise the sport, athletics decided to grin and bear it yesterday when it was revealed as the biggest victim of UK Sport funding cuts.

It had £1.4m wiped from its budget for the London Olympics. UK Athletics will receive £25.1m between now and 2012. They got £26.5m to prepare for Beijing. This is a consequence of failing to meet the five-medal target set for Beijing. The cut, and the sacking of performance director Dave Collins, was predicted in our final bulletin from China.

Badminton is down by £200,000 and nine sports have had future support details withheld, pending a meeting in January, but all expect their support to be reduced.

This is because the Government despite having had two years to do so, has failed to make up a £79m shortfall, though they did chip in £29m, keeping the deficit to £50m.

This meant a last-gasp bail-out for hockey, basketball, synchronised swimming and wheelchair rugby. But fencing, handball, shooting, table tennis, volleyball, beach volleyball, water polo, weightlifting and wrestling face cuts. They won't learn precise figures until January, but are deeply concerned because current funds run out in March.

The Government hopes these sports can be bailed out by securing help elsewhere, but otherwise they've held back just £12.5m for nine sports which received £23.7 in the previous term to Beijing.

The British Olympic Association is aghast. UK Sport appears to have ignored its own policy directives. They promised a "no-compromise" strategy of rewarding performance, which explains athletics. But hockey and basketball received increases of more than £4m, despite hockey under-performing in Beijing, and basketball not even being there.

The BOA chief executive, Andy Hunt, said: "For those sports that have learnt today that they face an uncertain financial future, two years of planning and investment has been thrown up in the air.

"Whilst those sports may have fallen short of the medal rostrum in 2012, the promised government investment would have given them the opportunity to develop their athletes' talents and their resources as a whole.

"A wider base of participation is crucial to the long-term delivery of medal success and the BOA is deeply concerned 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."

Athletics bowed, uncomplaining, to the lash. Chief executive Niels de Vos said £25m would fully deliver all aspects of the World Class Performance Programme for athletes named on it last month. He even said he did not regard the loss of £1.4m as a cut.

"This is very good news for the sport and is a vote in confidence in UK Athletics," he claimed. "The potential of our sport is clear for everyone to see. As well as four medals in Beijing, we had 14 other 4th to 8th places."

Total UKS funding of £246.8m over the next four years will be divided among 19 sports, while Paralympic success has brought them an increase of more than £15m.

Seventeen sports, all of them successful in Beijing, have been given increases. Basketball and hockey have been staggeringly fortunate in receiving huge increases. Basketball got £5m - that's more than cycling, major success story of the Games, who get an extra £4.7m. The other big medal success sports were swimming (£4.9m), rowing (£1.4m), and sailing (£1.1m).

Judo, which received a slight increase despite a disappointing Games, surprisingly criticised the funding shake-down. The chief exec of British Judo, Scott McCarthy, said he was "disappointed that our funding has not increased, but we are realistic enough to accept that we did not deliver our target of two medals in Beijing, and in sport you must deliver to expect greater rewards.

"That said, we have serious reservations about the veracity of the model that greatly rewarded a number of sports who set targets of zero medals and delivered exactly that, and somehow received huge increases in funding.

"We expect a level playing field, both on the mat and in the corridors of power, and I am not sure we have seen that here today."

The American, McCarthy, identified basketball as the biggest anomaly. "There's also at least one sport that received a huge increase in funding and in reality this sport has no realistic medal prospects at all . . . I love basketball to death. It was my sport. So I know which teams are likely to win Olympic medals. I can name 10 or 12 teams Great Britain will never beat in 20 years. I want to see basketball funded, but this is an anomaly, and it is not the only one on the list."

It should be explained that there was no GB basketball team four years ago, so the squad could not qualify.

But UK Sport has left itself open to ridicule, rewarding disciplines with zero ambition: sports which correctly predicted they'd win no medals in Beijing. UKS is supposed to be encourage success, but this is the kind of auditing that has driven Britain's financial sector into bankruptcy. Let's hope sport does not follow.

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