WATCHING incredulously as a distraught Paula Radcliffe crashed out of the Olympics marathon on Sunday, it was difficult not to reflect on the pitiful state of British athletics.

Despite the injection of millions of pounds of Lottery money over the past four years, UK track and field seems to be running quickly. Backwards.

At the Sydney Games in 2000, Great Britain scooped 11 gold medals. Our athletes won six gongs - two gold, two silver, two bronze.

With three days of the Athens Olympics left, Team GB has just two track and field medals - gold for the inspirational Kelly Holmes in the 800 metres and a bronze for Kelly Sotherton, the 27-year-old who defied expectations to earn a place on the podium in the heptathlon.

Many reasons have been given for the UK's failure to produce a generation of athletes capable of running, jumping and throwing at the very highest levels of competition.

But perhaps the most pertinent is the fall in the number of schoolchildren playing competitive sports.

Now Tony Blair has stepped in. The Prime Minister - who would surely be among the favourites if bandwagon-jumping became an Olympic discipline - has pledged to address the problem by investing £459 million in school sports.

He wants schools to reintroduce leagues and competitions, provide more extra-curricular sports and ensure more pupils have two hours of PE each week.

Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell - a gold medal certainty when it comes to Obsequiously Backing The Boss - declared it time to "overturn the politically-correct nonsense... that competition damages children."

Yet it was hard Left-wing councils, run in the 1980s by the likes of Ms Jowell, which demanded an end to traditional sports days and team games on the grounds they humiliated and demeaned kids. "Problem-solving" games were much fairer, they said.

As a nine-year-old, I vividly remember trailing in last in the 100-yard dash at my primary school's sports day and, a year later, completing an ignominious "double" by picking up the wooden spoon in the cricket ball throw.

With hindsight, I had perfected the kind of form displayed all too often by competitors wearing Britain's red, white and blue athletics vest. But at the time I didn't feel brutally crushed.

I put it down to the fact I wasn't much good at sprinting or throwing, and moved on to sports at which I was (slightly) better.

Many youngsters today don't get a chance to experience the rewards of competing and winning, or indeed to pick up valuable lessons from losing, such as learning graciousness in defeat.

Half of all schools have abandoned sports days.

At one primary in Yorkshire the children run 50 metres, one after the other, all receiving applause and all being handed a medal. "Madness," is how a teacher describes it.

Labour MP Andy Burnham this week wrote: "School sports cannot be about egg and spoon races with prizes for everyone. We can't celebrate an Olympic gold medal and yet agonise over whether competitive school sport is right or not. It is competitive sport that teaches young people the value of teamwork, discipline and loyalty, and develops the crucial life skill of performing under pressure."

Mr Blair should be applauded for his bid to put sport back into schools.

With childhood obesity soaring, it is a good thing to encourage young couch-potatoes to put down their PlayStations and pick up a football.

However, on half a dozen occasions ministers have pledged to bolster school sports - then failed to act.

The Government has also broken its promise to stop the Tory policy of selling off playing fields. Since 1998, it has allowed 200 to be sold.

But if the failure of Britain's athletes finally spurs ministers to match rhetoric with reality, then the future for forthcoming generations - whether as top-class sportsmen and women, or just ordinary well-balanced, healthy members of society - could be as gleaming as an Olympic gold.

Updated: 09:51 Friday, August 27, 2004