大象传媒

I know a bloke who likes to say a little bit of him dies every time one of his friends has some measure of professional success. He works in the City so he probably means it.

It's an attitude many in the British Olympic family could sympathise with right now, because while Beijing was the very best of times for some, it remained . And with operating on a "use it or lose it" approach to funding, success has almost become a self-fulfilling prophesy, while failure, well, you just don't want to go there.

But "there" is exactly where British judo finds itself and the choices it is grappling with are the same choices all the other "under-performing" sports will have to address very soon.

So when , national head coaches and the link between the elite and grass-roots ends of the sport, you can guarantee archery, athletics, badminton, basketball and so on, are paying attention.

Going into Beijing, the agency that funds the majority of British Olympic sport, , issued a and wanted 17 sports to contribute to that total.

As it turned out, we smashed the target by winning 47 medals - 19 of them gold - for our biggest haul in 100 years. But . And of the 17 sports that had individual targets, only 10 met or surpassed them. Six of the seven sports that failed to meet their targets failed to medal at all, and three of those - , judo and - had targets of two medals.

It is this sense of failure within an otherwise golden bigger picture that underpins the (and shooting is undoubtedly having more privately).

Judo's case is perhaps the most interesting because the governing body appears to be the most ready of all those who struck out in Beijing () to come back swinging with a whole new game plan for London.

I spoke to chairman Densign White last week and was impressed with the breadth of his vision and determination to see it through. He struck me as somebody who has looked at what is working for our star pupils - being the undisputed head of the class - and decided it was time to start copying.

He recognises that winning no gold medals in 11 Olympic judo tournaments - and only one silver medal in the last four Games - is probably enough evidence of a need for a new approach.

The key aspects of that plan are adding a top-class head national coach (Frenchman Patrick Roux) to an elite support structure, which was already taking shape prior to Beijing, and moving it all to one facility, the British Judo Performance Institute in Dartford.

This centre, after a 拢5m redevelopment of the existing Dartford Judo Club, will house all of British judo's national coaches, support staff and, most crucially, top players.

That's the plan, anyway. Getting all of the latter to up sticks and move to Kent will be the tricky bit, particularly when it is obvious many of them value their own coaches and clubs far more highly than the BJA's.

Two of Britain's best judokas made this clear to me when I met them at the same function White was attending. Euan Burton and Sarah Clark did not sound like two athletes ready to relocate from their successful (on the world and European stage, at least) Edinburgh club to the brave new world being promised in Dartford.

The reason for the lack on confidence in the national set-up can no doubt be debated for days, and I'm sure White himself, who has been in the job for seven years, would feature heavily in that debate, both as an active particpant and as a topic of conversation.

Some might also argue that linking funding to performance is a risky business. After all, was an unpredictable affair. Reigning Olympic and world champions went out early and the highly-fancied, 13-strong Russian team also went home empty-handed.

But that doesn't alter the fact British judo has been under-achieving on the biggest stage for years. The team in Beijing was packed with medallists from , and numerous other countries had no problem converting potential into prizes. The Dutch, for example, won five medals with about a quarter of our population and a far smaller budget.

That said, judo is a "bigger" sport in the Netherlands. It has 150,000 regular players to the estimated 100,000 in this country, most of which are not affiliated to the BJA.

White is aware of this problem too. He knows he needs to grow the base of the pyramid as well as remodel its apex. With this in mind his organisation is tweaking its belt-based progression ladder to keep those less interested in competition involved longer. It is also concentrating more resources on selling the sport as a strength and fitness tool.

But White and everybody else in British judo (not to mention archery, shooting and all the other Olympic sports jealously eyeing et al's success) knows all of that grass-roots work gets much easier when you win an Olympic medal or two.

So expect to hear a lot more about these "let's come together/let's keep it local conversations" in the weeks and months to come - a little bit of soul-searching and air-clearing is no bad thing this early in an Olympic cycle.

Nevertheless, the clock is ticking, so I hope White wins his argument soon and without needing to put a chokehold on anybody.

If the wider British Olympic family can get things right now, there should be more than enough to go around for everybody to have to pretend to enjoy other people's successes.