12. In our 2006 Report UK Sport: Supporting Elite Athletes, we concluded that to make and to demonstrate best use of public money, UK Sport needed clearer goals and more reliable ways of assessing progress, including clear and unambiguous targets for medal performance at London 2012. We recommended that in the knowledge of the resources available to it in the run up to London 2012, these targets should be reflected in the targets it agreed with individual sports and reviewed in the light of performance at the Beijing 2008 Games.[15]

13. When we questioned UK Sport on what progress it had made in establishing clear and unambiguous targets, it told us that it describes its goals for medal table position at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games as 'ultimate goals', reflecting continuing uncertainties over performance and funding. It intended to convert these ultimate goals to high level targets after the Beijing 2008 Games, based on how sports had performed at the Games.[16]

14. We also recommended in 2006 that UK Sport should have a more rounded package of performance measures which went beyond medals won to look at other indicators of whether athletes were improving their performance, such as personal bests or world rankings. UK Sport accepted this recommendation and has since increased the breadth of the indicators against which it measures its performance, including by setting targets for the number of top eight finishes achieved by British athletes at major international events.[17]

15. UK Sport's own targets are set at 75% of the aggregate of the targets UK Sport agrees with each sport. This adjustment reflects the fact that the Great Britain team performed at about this level in terms of total medals won at the last two Olympic Games. For those years in which the Games are not held, UK Sport measures performance against these targets based on the achievements of elite athletes at major international events in the Olympic and Paralympic sports it funds. In both 2006-07 and 2007-08, UK Sport easily exceeded its targets, in many cases by more than 50% (Figure 3).

16. The ease with which UK Sport met its targets raises the issue of whether they were meaningful and stretching. The Department told us that the margins between success and failure were small. For example, 0.545 of a second was the difference between winning and not winning five gold medals at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. At the last two Olympic Games actual performance had been close to 75% of the targets set for sports, whereas in the Paralympics 90% of the medal target had been achieved in Sydney in 2000 and 85% in Athens in 2004. We proposed to the Department and UK Sport that the latter's performance target should simply be the aggregate of sports' individual targets. UK Sport said that it agreed fully with the C&AG's recommendation that the targets should be reviewed to ensure they were sufficiently stretching. Both the Department and UK Sport agreed that, in negotiating the new Funding Agreement covering the period April 2008 to March 2011, they would look to make the targets more ambitious.[18]

Figure 3: UK Sport's performance against targets for 2006-07 and 2007-08

	2006­07			2007­08
	Target		Actual	Target		Actual
	National Governing Body aggregate	Agreed between the Department and UK Sport		National Governing Body aggregate	Agreed between the Department and UK Sport
Number of medals won by Olympic Pathway athletes in agreed targeted event for each sport.	40	30	51	40	30	45
Number of Olympic Pathway athletes finishing in the Top 8 at the agreed targeted event	76	57	85	76	56	65
Number of medals won by Paralympic Pathway (including Fast Track Programme) athletes at the agreed targeted event for each sport	104	78	108	56	43	53
Number of Paralympic Pathway athletes finishing in the Top 8 at the agreed targeted event	85	64	101	34	25	38

Source: C&AG's Report, Figure 15.

17. The British Olympic Association had estimated that Great Britain would have finished seventh in the Olympic medal table had the Olympic Games been held in 2007. This might suggest that aiming for eighth in the Olympic medal table at Beijing was a soft target, but UK Sport considered that, while the British Olympic Association's ranking was based on evidence from world and European championship events, it was not 'Olympic evidence'. Moving from tenth at Athens in 2004 to eighth in Beijing in 2008 was still a huge challenge and it considered that the move to fourth place at London 2012 would require a further step change in performance.[19]

18. Following increased spending on elite sport, host nations can typically expect to win an extra six or seven gold medals at an Olympic Games and to win medals across a wider range of sports. UK Sport recognised, however, that work was required to maximise the host nation benefits as they would not happen automatically, especially against a background of increased spending on sports by other nations. Host nation status alone would not therefore be enough to achieve fourth place in the Olympic medal table at London 2012. If the relative performance of other nations were to remain the same as at Athens in 2004, UK Sport considered that the impact of host nation status, maximised properly, could be expected to move Great Britain to fifth or sixth in the Olympic medal table. [20]

19. UK Sport estimated that to achieve its goal of fourth place, Great Britain would need to win at least 17 Olympic gold medals, or at least eight more medals than Great Britain had won at Athens in 2004. UK Sport does collect intelligence on what other nations were doing to maximise their performance within sports and on how much they were spending on performance, but it was not always easy to do so as not all nations were open with information of this sort.[21]

16   Qq 16-17, 115-116 Back

17   C&AG's Report, paras 3.8-3.9 Back

18   Qq 10, 13-14; C&AG's Report, para 3.17  Back

19   Qq 93-94 Back

20   Qq 97, 101, 106; C&AG's Report, paras 1.13-1.18 Back

21   Qq 120-121; C&AG's Report, para 1.19 Back