Olympic Games 2012 medal haul will beat Beijing, promises UK Sport

With 500 days to go until the 2012 Opening Ceremony, the body responsible for Team GB has promised to beat its Beijing medal haul and record the best performance "in living memory". Around 6.6 million tickets will go on sale on Tuesday and UK Sport, which has invested £100m a year in Olympic sports since Beijing, said it would deliver "more medals, in more sports" than ever before. Peter Keen, the performance director, said a host of sports would be expected to step up and deliver "a load of ones and twos" to augment the medal hauls of those where Britain has recently excelled. "Some of the big boys are now pretty good at holding back and you've got some real wannabes who are coming up real quick," he said. Keen picked out taekwondo as one sport that had invested its development budget wisely and built a "performance pathway" that would deliver in London and beyond. "We're moving out of the comfort zone of sports we know well and do well and are able to translate those lessons into a wider number of sports while still retaining our performance in bedrock ones," he said. "That's a really good outcome and a really healthy one for the investment that has been made." UK Sport on Monday set a new target range of between 30 and 61 world championship medals this year to keep them on track for success in 2012. Its chair, Baroness Campbell, said that British Olympic sport was in "a very strong place", even compared to the same point in the Beijing cycle. "We've had unprecedented amounts of investment, we've got way better at targeting that and managing that money to have the results we want. We've got a really great set of world-class performance directors. We've got some of the best coaches in sport and our performances are better than they've ever been," she told the Guardian. "Nobody wants to add even more pressure to the athletes but I think they are in a strong place and our ambition would be that the British team makes the nation proud and performs the best they have done in living memory."