The organisation that helped turn Britain's Olympic also-rans into world beaters has taken on its most difficult challenge yet – helping British tennis overcome decades of underachievement to triumph in 2012.
The Lawn Tennis Association has turned to UK Sport, the umbrella organisation that oversees Olympic performance and funding, to help apply the lessons of cycling and rowing to a sport that has an annual budget of £55m but invariably sparks an annual bout of soul searching every June as a string of British players crash out in the first round of Wimbledon.
Because they do not receive any public funding at elite level, tennis and football are the only two sports that have not historically been part of the Mission 2012 programme overseen by the UK Sport performance director, Peter Keen.
According to its "no compromise" principles, sports are encouraged to be ruthless in focusing on 30 different areas of preparation, training and performance. It is hoped the template, most famously perfected by Dave Brailsford's British Cycling programme, which yielded eight golds in Beijing, will help Great Britain to at least fourth in the medal table in 2012.
John Steele, the outgoing UK Sport chief executive, said: "There are some people who think that if you stick money into sport you'll see performance come out the other end. You can think of lots of examples where money has been put in and performance hasn't followed. In the current economic climate, part of our job is to make sure every pound spent, we derive maximum value from it."
Steele, who is moving to the Rugby Football Union, said tennis will be included in the Mission 2012 programme from the next quarterly update after the LTA approached UK Sport for help.
UK Sport, which is investing more than £400m of public and lottery money in elite sport in the run up to the 2012 Games, said in its latest progress report that the 27 Olympic sports and 18 Paralympic sports assessed were on track to hit its targets of fourth place in the Olympics medal table and second place at the Paralympics.
The Lawn Tennis Association has turned to UK Sport, the umbrella organisation that oversees Olympic performance and funding, to help apply the lessons of cycling and rowing to a sport that has an annual budget of £55m but invariably sparks an annual bout of soul searching every June as a string of British players crash out in the first round of Wimbledon.
Because they do not receive any public funding at elite level, tennis and football are the only two sports that have not historically been part of the Mission 2012 programme overseen by the UK Sport performance director, Peter Keen.
According to its "no compromise" principles, sports are encouraged to be ruthless in focusing on 30 different areas of preparation, training and performance. It is hoped the template, most famously perfected by Dave Brailsford's British Cycling programme, which yielded eight golds in Beijing, will help Great Britain to at least fourth in the medal table in 2012.
John Steele, the outgoing UK Sport chief executive, said: "There are some people who think that if you stick money into sport you'll see performance come out the other end. You can think of lots of examples where money has been put in and performance hasn't followed. In the current economic climate, part of our job is to make sure every pound spent, we derive maximum value from it."
Steele, who is moving to the Rugby Football Union, said tennis will be included in the Mission 2012 programme from the next quarterly update after the LTA approached UK Sport for help.
UK Sport, which is investing more than £400m of public and lottery money in elite sport in the run up to the 2012 Games, said in its latest progress report that the 27 Olympic sports and 18 Paralympic sports assessed were on track to hit its targets of fourth place in the Olympics medal table and second place at the Paralympics.
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