Woodward Unveils £20m Vision for 2012 Olympians

Up to 25 British Olympians will receive bespoke support from as many as 10 specialist coaches in a £20m program announced by Sir Clive Woodward yesterday. Woodward, the British Olympic Association's elite performance director, has assembled a team of specialists in nutrition, physiology, medicine, conditioning, motor skills and sports science who will work with those selected at a cost of £150,000 per athlete a year.

Among the specialists who will work under Woodward are several who played a part in England's 2003 Rugby World Cup campaign, including Jonny Wilkinson's kicking and performance coach Dave Alred, the vision specialist Sherylle Calder, who worked for South Africa at the recent World Cup, and Dave Reddin, England's former conditioning coach.

The BOA hopes the cost of the scheme, which has caused some tension with the government's elite sport funding body, UK Sport, will come from existing London 2012 or International Olympic Committee sponsors. UK Sport had feared Woodward's program might duplicate or overlap with work already being done by performance directors in individual sports, but after a series of meetings this week and the intervention of the sports minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, both parties insisted they would work in harmony.

Athletes will be selected to join the Woodward program only with the approval of their sports' performance director, and the final decision will be taken by UK Sport's Mission 2012 panel, of which Woodward is a member.

Woodward and the BOA chairman, Lord Moynihan, insisted that UK Sport's concerns had been allayed."The most important thing is that this goes through Mission 2012 and anyone who goes on to the scheme will be signed off by all the stakeholders," Woodward said. "My brief from the BOA was to look at how we might provide talented young athletes, coaches, performance directors and their governing bodies with a service that could add value and complement the excellent work already being delivered by UK Sport and our Olympic governing bodies.

Woodward defended the cost of the program, which at £150,000 is more than double the £70,000 a year that UK Sport estimates it spends on each of its elite competitors on its Podium program. "The coaches on this program are not cheap - they are the best in the world and I intend to pay them the commercial rate. But I hope that we will see the work they do feeding down to the rest of the sport."

Lord Moynihan also addressed concerns that the BOA's funding needs might clash with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which is currently seeking ways to raise the £100m of private funding the Treasury requires it to contribute to its £600m budget. "We feel confident that it will be a different product to the wider objective of government," he said.

In a detailed presentation of his work with Melissa Reid, the golfer who turned professional yesterday after a year acting as a guinea pig for his ideas, Woodward set out his approach. Each athlete will be paired with a full-time coach - Reid was assigned to Lawrence Farmer, with 10 specialist coaches offering input, five working on the physical side of her preparation and five improving her skills.

It is a rigorous, massively detailed approach to athlete development and clearly replicates Woodward's philosophy with England's rugby team, which was to make major advances on the back of numerous small improvements. The first potential Olympic athletes to try the system, judo's Euan Burton, Billy Cusack and Karen Roberts, will start work in the new year.