UK Sport confident Britain will not experience a post-London 2012 dip

UK Sport's chief executive, Liz Nicholl, said that Britain will become the first country to avoid a slump in performance in the Olympics that follows a home Games. After again promising that Team GB were on course to exceed their performance in Beijing, finishing fourth in the medal table with more medals in more sports, Nicholl said planning was already well underway for Rio de Janeiro 2016. All the Olympic disciplines funded by UK Sport, which invests more than £100m per year in elite sport, will be asked to deliver a business plan for the next four-year Olympic cycle in February. The performance director, Peter Keen, said the body was determined to learn from the mistakes of previous host cities and start thinking about the next cycle before the final burst of frantic preparation for London 2012 kicks in. He said that no host country since 1988 had matched their total number of medals in the Games that followed. Australia in 2000 "got pretty much everything right except for the planning for the next cycle and the clarity of what would happen afterwards", Keen said. The Australians won 58 medals at home in Sydney in 2000 but only 49 in Athens four years later. Nicholl said UK Sport was working on the assumption that funding would be maintained at levels of at least 90% of the current investment for the next cycle. Government funding is guaranteed until 2015, although Nicholl also said the impact of the new Health Lottery on the National Lottery was also an unknown factor. While declining to set a medal target for 2016, Nicholl said that the "aspirational goal" should be to become the first host nation to maintain the same number of medals in the Games that follow. "In planning for Rio, we should talk about our ambition being to maintain the high of a home Games performance like no other summer Olympic sport nation has done before," she said. Keen said that the work being done with the sports would allow them to make decisions over attempting to retain key staff and maintain systems beyond 2012. "All the business planning and reflecting and thinking that is going on now, we believe should give people the confidence to make some critical decisions around the performance side," he said. UK Sport, unveiling its latest Mission 2012 update, said Britain's Olympic sports remained on track to beat the 47 medals achieved in Beijing. Of the Olympic and Paralympic sports funded by UK Sport, more have a "green" rating according to the body's traffic light system than ever before. Twenty-three Olympic and Paralympic sports are judged to be exceeding expectations overall, with athletics among them for the first time. The latest analysis shows that 13 summer Olympic sports are rated as green, with 15 at amber and none at red. UK Sport also confirmed that, with eight months to go until the London Games, no changes would be made to investment levels in any of the Olympic sports. "We absolutely believe we are on track for our high-level goal of top four in the Olympic medal table, second in the Paralympic medal table, and more medals across more sports," Nicholl said. "We take confidence from the number of greens. It is more than we have had before so that is telling us we are in a very good place. Overall we are in a really good place with 44 world championship medals in Olympic disciplines this year and 73 in Paralympic disciplines." More medals are expected to follow at sailing's world championships, now taking place in Perth.