MIKE Whittingham’s official job title is director of High Performance as well as the Scottish Institute of Sport but he might as well just be known as the guy who will be held responsible
if no Scots win any medals at the London 2012 Olympics and the Glasgow
Commonwealth Games in 2014.

One year on from the painful merger between the Institute of Sport and parent body sportscotland, the Englishman – a former 400m hurdler and coach – is out-lining the increased difficulties he foresees in making the case for funding elite athletes against a backdrop of recession and competing pressures on the public purse. Not least of these is an equally pressing need for investment in rec-reational and grassroots sport, which may help Whittingham in the long run, but will do little to make his life easier now.

“You can’t play at performance sport,” he says. “Performance sport costs money. When you are publicly funded you have got challenges because of the recession and what is likely to happen over the next few years. We have a responsibility to work together. I do believe there is a firm commitment from the government towards what we are trying to achieve; they have already assisted greatly in giving us additional monies for Glasgow 2014 and I hope that will be continued right the way through because we need it. Performance sport is different from recreational sport. It needs a different environment.”

The institute building, set in the picturesque setting of Bridge of Allan, exhibits its usual calm, but like a swan paddling furiously underneath a serene sea, this is a period of feverish activity in the administration of elite sport in this country. The unparalleled opportunities offered by two home events in a two-year period (Sydney 2000 and Melbourne 2006 is the closest example) have lit a fire underneath the agency, and a new performance strategy is fresh off the presses to take us from 2009 to 2016.

Each of the institute’s 17 sports has been audited. Established coaches have been abruptly uprooted in disciplines which are deemed to be under-performing. And all this with the Winter Olympics in Vancouver looming in February, and the challenge of building a team who will ignore the intermittent safety fears and travel to Delhi for next autumn’s Commonwealth Games.

The new head coach in athletics is Canadian Laurier Primeau, who will work with Scottish Athletics chairman Frank Dick. Badminton is in the throes of the acrimonious departure of head coach Dan Travers and his assistant Rita Yuan Gao – who signed off by coaching Susan Egelstaff to victory in last week’s Bank of Scotland International Champ-ionships in Glasgow. Further upheaval is coming for other sports, but Whittingham’s rationale is that it is better to get the systems right now than discover problems two years down the line when it is too late to do anything about it.

“The Scottish government is really keen that we deliver the best prepared team in 2014 and what they are after is success,” Whittingham says. “Five years out I can’t afford to allow things just to tick along. It is going to be tough because you can’t just suddenly create talented athletes, but I think already we are beginning to see a few ideas.”

Few things are better at inspiring youngsters than a hero on the world stage to idolise, but those unhappy about using their tax in this manner are even less likely to approve if an athlete’s development is effectively “outsourced” to another country. Take, for instance, ice dance pairing and Vancouver medal hopes John and Sinead Kerr, who train in the US, or Sir Chris Hoy and Scotland’s elite cyclists, who mainly work out of the Manchester velodrome.

“Centralisation doesn’t work in performance sport,” Whittingham said. “We’ve got to make decisions around each athlete and each sport. We might find the canoeists have to be in Nottingham, the rowers down south, the cyclists in Manchester, and the Kerrs need to train on ice regularly and be supported in their environment. The bottom line, though, is that they are Scottish athletes and if and when they deliver they will credit us. It is what I call outsourcing. You just have to look at one of our board members, David Sole. He was a pretty good rugby player. How did he get better? He went to play for Bath.”

Whittingham doesn’t like talking about outcomes. He prefers to speak of processes. So many variables will come into play in the next 12 months let alone five years that living and dying by hard and fast medal targets seems nonsense.

But, nonetheless, he does have goals. By London 2012 the aim is for Scots to 
represent 10% of the UK team, which could mean more than 50 athletes, compared to the 31 who travelled to Beijing. The Glasgow Commonwealth Games must be the “best ever result” in the history of the Scottish team, which means in excess of the 33 medals the team won in Melbourne.

The goals for Vancouver (one medal, although he secretly hopes for up to three) and Delhi (to equal Scotland’s performance in Manchester of 207 athletes and 30 medals) are more realistic, but Whittingham recoils at the accusation that those events are inferior in importance. “There is no question of that,” he says. “Vancouver has always been on our horizon, it is hugely import-ant. We are on track to have between 18 and 24 athletes, which could be as much as 45% of Team GB. In terms of the demographic, we would be kicking above our weight if we only got 10%.”

The same applies to the visit to the Indian sub-continent in October,
in which some sports are absent (judo), some are entering “a rebuild phase” (swimming), and others riven with doubts about whether the team will even travel (cycling). “All we are highlighting is that there is an expectation that we might not do as well as Melbourne,” he says.

There is a persistent, consistent call for streamlining all three of Scottish football’s governing bodies so it is instructive to consider a body that has emerged out the other side of that process. The institute lost autonomy and board members such a Dougie Donnelly in the merger, but for Whittingham the most important thing is that the athletes have been unaffected. “This was a political decision and we had to go on and make it work,” he said. “We wanted to protect athletes and sport so during that period the delivery of services was completely unaffected.”

If he had a magic wand, the one thing Whittingham would change about Scotland is attitude. The “poor me” card, he says, is still played too often.

“The challenge Scotland has is ‘what happens if you are only used to climbing a summit, not a mountain’,” he said. “We can’t just show them a Munro or a summit. We need to show them a really big mountain, because that might be what it takes to win a medal.”