Sir Clive Woodward's Talents Directed at Olympic Small Fry

From the Telstra Stadium in front of millions to the outer margins of British sport is a long way to travel and Sir Clive Woodward has taken a circuitous and at times controversial route. In November 2003 he was reaping the plaudits as Jonny Wilkinson's drop-goal famously sailed between the posts. Now he is tasked with investing a "very modest" sum in helping those sports at the bottom of the pile – handball, weightlifing, volleyball and water polo among them.

As a new funding cycle for Olympic sport begins, UK Sport will this week reveal just how it will spend the £304m due to be invested in the run up to ­London 2012. It was once assumed Woodward would be applying his experience to the brightest medal prospects. Instead he will be fishing in the shallowest of pools, helping sports that failed to get near the medals in Beijing – if they were there at all – back on their feet.

After months of speculation, Woodward, the British Olympic Association's director of elite performance, has revealed his talents, which have been looking for a home since those heady days of 2003, will only be applied to helping some of the eight sports that have had funding cut as a result of a £50m shortfall in cash for ­Britain's elite athletes.

He also missed out on the chef de mission role for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver – a position many expected him to win. Instead the new BOA chief executive, Andy Hunt, will take on the role and is likely to retain it through to 2012. Woodward will be one of four deputies. But if he is feeling marginalized, he is doing a good job of hiding it. "The chef de mission is the chief executive of Team GB and I'm pleased he's doing it. I want to concentrate on the performance side and the ­coaching program, which I'm ­absolutely ­passionate about delivering. There is no way I could do both jobs and this is the job I want to do."

After leaving rugby under a cloud, via largely unhappy experiences with the British Lions, and a brief stint at Southampton FC, Woodward pitched up at the BOA in September 2006, promising to overhaul top-level coaching. In light of the power struggle going on above him between the BOA and UK Sport over control of elite performance, Woodward's promise to lend expertise to a hand-picked group of athletes went down badly at the latter.

Those involved at the time say that Woodward did not appreciate the political subtleties of the landscape. His idea of focusing on an elite group of athletes was divisive when UK Sport was trying to prove the merits of its own programme, which ruthlessly targets those sports most likely to win medals. The changes that Woodward proposed had already happened under UK Sport performance director Peter Keen, they argued, making him a solution in search of a problem.

In Beijing UK Sport's position was strengthened by the golden haul won by sports that had benefited from its "no compromise" approach. Cycling and swimming, which indicated that they wanted nothing to do with Woodward's programme, were proved to be doing very nicely without him.

Woodward says he gets on fine with Keen. The pair sit on the Mission 2012 board that makes the key funding ­decisions and will jointly present to the national Olympic committee in June. "There was no conflict from my side," insists Woodward. "It was always higher up where the problems were." There was a "blockage" because "the major stakeholders were not in harmony", he says.

Woodward refocused his plan on coaching. The ambitious £15m scheme would recruit experts in a wide range of areas from psychology to sports science, nutrition to vision. But then came the global slump and a realisation that UK Sport would face a gap of £100m, later closed to £50m, in funding for the four-year period up to 2012. Woodward's scheme started to look like a luxury.

The BOA's coffers were bare. UK Sport controlled access to the athletes on the three days they are obliged to give over in return for lottery funding and the rights to Team GB and the Olympic logo had been signed away to the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games under an earlier deal. The crisis over the missing £50m and a gnawing realization that the opportunity provided by 2012 was in danger of being frittered away by internal squabbles focused minds. The new top team at the BOA – Hunt and the chief ­commercial officer, Hugh Chambers, a well respected marketing man,, insist they will put it back on a sound financial footing. More detail will emerge in June, when the BOA's full accounts are published, and Hunt promises they will show a "modest surplus".

In the meantime the key players have agreed to put aside their differences and come up with a new offering that aims to raise money to help bridge the £50m funding gap and fund Woodward's far more limited scheme. "There is a small tranche of money that will seedcorn fund the work in the first year. It will be specifically pointed at sports where it will give the biggest impact," says Hunt. According to Woodward, they are likely to be "three or four" of the eight that have suffered huge funding cuts as a result of the shortfall: fencing, ­handball, shooting, table tennis, volleyball, water polo, weightlifting and wrestling.

The new joint effort, which pools the rights and access of Locog, BOA and UK Sport and has the working title Team 2012, will offer Olympic sponsors the ­opportunity to "activate" their existing investment of up to £80m. It will offer access to a pool of athletes. Sponsors will not be able to attach themselves to specific ­athletes but will be assured the involvement of some of the biggest names. Woodward will also have a role, claiming that his projected coaching scheme is proving an attraction to potential sponsors.As well as access to athletes, proving contentious with some of the team ­members and their agents concerned it will cut across their own deals, Woodward says he will play a key role in raising cash. "Clive is a valuable asset to the organization that we can leverage to help raise funds," says Hunt. "One of the attractions of Team 2012 to the sponsors is the fact that Clive's program is part of it."

Woodward insists his diluted plan is not a step down and remains convinced it can become a template for the BOA post-2012. "This program can be the leading program in world sport. It's as big as that, once we get everyone on the same page," he says. "Some sports need help and others don't. You'd want [UK Athletics performance director] Charles van Commenee to ring you up and say can you come and chat to this person or that person. But we've got to prove it first and the only way we'll prove it is by going in and doing a sport properly."