Bar Paula Radcliffe, Britain has no world-class athlete in the field

We’ve won the Olympics, now bring on the Olympians. Ah! Slight technical hitch, as exemplified at the weekend by the results in the Norwich Union AAA Championships in Manchester. The idea was that a stream of highly-motivated athletes would achieve and exceed qualifying marks and times for the World Championships in Helsinki this year and the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne next spring. But the idea and reality wildly diverged on the day.

Celebrations were held when Nathan Douglas, a 22-year-old from Oxford, triple-jumped further than Jonathan Edwards ever achieved in AAA’s competition, and also when Donna Fraser put her injury woes behind her to win the 200 and 400 m sprint double. But before we put her in gold shoes and imagine her repeating Michael Johnson’s feat before her home crowd in east London in 2012, we ought to recognise she will be 39 by then. Not quite stair-lift territory, but well beyond feasible medal-gathering age.

Of the rest, only 21 qualified for the available berths. There remain more questions than answers. Bar Paula Radcliffe, we do not have one world-class athlete in the field. It has all gone horribly wrong for athletics. For years this little island produced beyond reasonable capacity with its Sebastian Coes, Steve Ovetts, Roger Bannisters, Mary Peters, Mary Rands, Sally Gunnells. Now production, like many labour-intensive industries in Britain, seems to be shutting down.

The British men were recently relegated from the European Cup Super League, to be fortuitously reinstated because there happens to be nine running lanes in Malaga next time out. But there won’t be nine running lanes in the Olympics.

The IOC tend to cast a forensic eye over everything host city-wise and would certainly notice if the home team inserted white-vested no-hopers in extra lanes in the finals just to bump the numbers up.

The problem goes beyond the dearth.

British men produced only one individual track finalist in Athens ? Michael East in the 1500 m ? and there is no crop of slavering youngsters about to burst on the scene.

According to Brendan Foster, the Olympic medallist and BBC commentator, there are only two British men capable of running under 2hr 20min in the marathon. Twenty years ago there were 120. The figures make your head spin. Where have all the athletes gone? Some to the couches: physio’s and/or sun lounger.

The injury roster is phenomenal, including the decathlete Dean Macey, long jumper Jade Johnson, triple jumper Ashia Hansen and sprinter Abi Oyepitan. But there is also the suspicion that seven years of lottery funding has crucially invaded the thinking of would-be athletes and provided them with a comfort blanket and cushy perch from which to watch daytime TV.

But while athletes deserve their share of the blame, what about the coaches who fail to motivate them, the doctors who fail to treat them, a governing body which fails to inspire them, the system that fails to produce them and the government that failed to deliver Pickett’s Lock as a World Championship venue this year?

Obviously TonyBlair has now exonerated himself with (pressurised) whole-hearted support for the successful Olympic bid, but there are still gaping holes in the structure of athletics through which millions of schoolchildren are plunging: into football or obesity, take your pick.

Football is quite an issue. Not content with plundering athletic talent, the culturally-dominant sport has begun poaching doctors. The man who put Kelly Holmes back together, Brian English, is at Chelsea. The Australian wonder-fixer, Dean Kenneally, has gone to Spurs. Nobody blames them. Pay and conditions must be wonderful, but athletics really needs to hang on to its healers.

Then there are the little would-be athletes themselves.

Football offers ? 50,000 per week to be fairly second- rate, train two hours per day and go shopping. Athletics offers no fixed income, gut-wrenching effort and individual competitive comparison with battle-hardened east Europeans feeding a family of 12 or state-supported Chinese trained virtually from birth. In a way, you can only approve our children’s choice for its eminent common sense. But it has all changed now.

Britain has won the right to host the Olympics and we owe it to the tradition of the sport and the legacy ideal to get out there and make athletes of those with medal-winning potential. A key factor will be identification. So much depends on the schools where primary teachers are still dancing about in non-mandatory exercise sessions instead of seriously supporting imaginative, competitive sport.

The much-vaunted school sports co-ordinators, with links to other schools and sports clubs, are appearing in dribbles rather than bursts and it is useless to argue that high-grade talent can be sought out at secondary school level. By then, at 11, boys need to be surgically removed from their Play Stations and girls are beginning to worry about sweat.

Undoing the cultural damage of Big Brother is a nightmare by puberty; so much better to start earlier, at five. Inspiration is the next factor. To be fair to athletics, there are few sports more willing to trot out their stars, visit local schools and talk to the children.

If Kelly Holmes continues to dole out her medals to all those who demand to hold them, they will be worn down to slivers by 2012. The Paralympians are paragons of school visiting. Always for no financial reward and always to unbridled fascination. The only thing missing was something to shoot for. Now we have it. A home-grown Olympics.

We must not let the Games happen in a vacuum of knowledge. We must insert a sense of Olympian wonder into the curriculum. Perhaps children brought up on the exploits of Gazza will allow their fly-by-night attention to be caught by the majestic stories of Jesse Owens, Wilma Rudolph and Emil Zatopek. Perhaps Lord Coe will dust down his medals and write a few more speeches that change lives.

One more thing: drugs. The issue will need to grasped more firmly than ever before. The sport, so susceptible to chemical tampering, will need to exhibit an absolute commitment to cleanliness.

Drugs remain the darkest issue in athletics. Whether UK Sport’s newly-installed independent anti-doping scrutiny panel will be powerful enough to dispel all the fears remains very much to be seen.

Athletics is central to the Olympics. The 2012 London Games can be a triumph of architecture, planning, transport and security with a teetotal (by then) Charlotte Church providing the vocals. But if we don’t have the athletes to compete for medals, they will be one factor short of the historic landmark they deserveto be.

We have won the Games, now we have the harder task. To win children’s hearts and minds back to a sport they have deserted. That is not their job. That is ours.