UK Sport Funding Explained: How Lottery Money Is Shared

No British Olympian is on the state's payroll. A rower at Caversham or a track cyclist at the velodrome in Manchester has no employer, no contract of employment and no medal bonus waiting from the Treasury. What they have is a place on a programme run by their governing body, paid for by UK Sport, and in most cases a personal grant that covers rent and food.

That is UK Sport funding in outline. UK Sport, the government's high-performance sports agency, invests National Lottery and Exchequer money in Olympic and Paralympic sports across the United Kingdom in four-year cycles that run from one Games to the next. Most of it goes to national governing bodies such as British Rowing, British Cycling and UK Athletics to run what is called a World Class Programme: coaches, sports science, medical cover, training camps and competition. A smaller share goes straight to athletes as an Athlete Performance Award, a means-tested contribution to living costs. Sports are funded according to their chances of winning medals, and a sport judged to have none can receive nothing at all.

Two streams of money: the programme and the athlete's own award

Ask a funded athlete what UK Sport gives them and the honest answer is that they see only the smaller half.

The larger stream never touches an athlete's bank account. It is the award made to the governing body for the cycle, and it buys the working environment. A head coach and the coaches under that coach. A performance director. Physiotherapists and doctors. Time in a wind tunnel or an altitude chamber. Boats, bikes, sleds and the mechanics who look after them. Flights to a World Cup regatta, a month at a warm-weather camp, entry fees. An athlete on a well-funded programme may have several times the value of their personal grant spent on them each year without handling a pound of it.

The second stream is the Athlete Performance Award, paid by UK Sport directly to the individual from National Lottery money. It exists so that an athlete can train full time instead of fitting sessions around a job.

What it pays for	Programme award to the governing body	Athlete Performance Award
Coaches and performance staff	Yes	No
Sports science and medicine	Yes	No
Training camps and competition travel	Yes	No
Equipment owned by the team	Yes	No
Rent, food and household bills	No	Yes
Travel to daily training	No	Yes
Personal kit and minor sporting costs	Sometimes	Yes

The imbalance between the two is deliberate. UK Sport's view since the late 1990s has been that medals come from systems, and that a brilliant athlete with a poor coach and no physiotherapist will lose to an ordinary one with both. Money handed to individuals can be spent well or badly. Money held by a programme can be directed at whatever the performance director thinks is costing tenths of a second.

It also gives the governing body control, and this is the part athletes sometimes resent. The programme decides who is on it, where they must live and train, which competitions they enter. An athlete who wants to train with a different coach in a different city may find the support does not follow. The grant is personal. Almost everything else is conditional on staying inside the system.

There are obligations in the other direction as well. An athlete joining a programme signs an agreement with the governing body covering training attendance, conduct, anti-doping whereabouts and availability for selection. Funded athletes are also asked to give a small number of days each year to appearances on behalf of the National Lottery, visiting schools and clubs or thanking players in the press after a medal. It is the nearest thing in the arrangement to a return on the ticket-buyer's pound, and it is why so many British medallists mention the Lottery by name in their first interview.

1. 1Ticket soldA fixed part of National Lottery sales goes to good causes, and sport receives a set share of that money.
2. 2UK Sport's shareUK Sport receives its portion of the sport allocation, alongside a grant from the government.
3. 3Investment decisionBefore each four-year cycle UK Sport decides which sports to fund and at what level.
4. 4Programme awardThe governing body receives money to run a World Class Programme with agreed targets.
5. 5Athlete nominatedThe governing body puts forward the athletes it wants on the programme and recommends a band for each.
6. 6Athlete Performance AwardUK Sport pays the grant to the athlete, subject to a means test and an annual review.

The route public money takes into Olympic and Paralympic sport. Exchequer funding joins at UK Sport and follows the same path from there.

How the Athlete Performance Award works

The award is a grant with three working parts: a band, a means test and a review.

The band reflects what the athlete has achieved. At the Podium level there have been three, usually labelled A, B and C. Band A is for athletes who have won medals at an Olympic Games or a senior world championship. Band B covers those finishing a little further down, in the top eight or thereabouts. Band C is for athletes who have earned a place on the programme without yet producing that kind of result, including members of relays and crews. Podium Potential athletes sit on lower bands again. The governing body proposes the band against criteria it has agreed with UK Sport, so the same finishing position can be worth a different band in different sports.

The amounts are set by UK Sport and are modest by the standards of professional sport, with each lower band stepping down from the top one. UK Sport revises the levels from time to time and publishes them in its own guidance. Athletes' representatives have complained more than once that the bands lagged behind the cost of living, particularly for those required to live near a training base in the south-east of England.

Then the means test. The award is reduced once an athlete's income from other sources, sponsorship and prize money included, passes a threshold that UK Sport sets and reviews. Above it the grant tapers away. So the very best-known British Olympians, those with major endorsement contracts, may take little or none of the award they are entitled to on results, and the money stays in the system for others.

Why the grant is not a wage

The award is described in UK Sport's paperwork as a contribution to living and sporting costs. The wording matters legally.

In 2019 an employment tribunal in Manchester considered whether Jess Varnish, a former sprint cyclist, had been an employee or a worker of British Cycling or UK Sport, a question on which rights such as protection from unfair dismissal depend. The tribunal found she was neither, and her appeal against that finding was later dismissed. Its reasoning was that the athlete agreement resembled a grant to support a person's own pursuit of excellence more than a contract to perform work for someone else. Athletes on the programme therefore have no employment rights against the bodies that fund them, although welfare provisions around pregnancy, injury and leaving the programme have been strengthened since.

No medal bonus

British athletes are not paid by the state for winning. A good many countries reward Olympic champions with cash or pensions. The United Kingdom does not, and neither does the British Olympic Association. The philosophy is that public money buys preparation. A medal's reward is indirect: a higher band at the next review, a stronger hand with sponsors, and in a few sports prize money from the international federation.

Podium and Podium Potential: the two levels of the UK Sport World Class Programme

A World Class Programme has two rungs, and the difference between them is measured in years.

Podium is for athletes with a realistic chance of a medal at the next Olympic or Paralympic Games. UK Sport's own shorthand is that they are no more than four years from the podium. These are the senior squad: full-time, centrally coached in most sports, on the higher award bands.

Podium Potential is for those whose results suggest they could win a medal at the Games after next, so up to eight years away. They are typically younger, often still in education, and their programme is closer to an apprenticeship. Below Podium Potential the responsibility passes out of UK Sport's hands to the talent pathways funded by Sport England and the other home-country sports councils.

Movement between the rungs is driven by the annual review. Once a year, usually after the season's main championship, each governing body assesses every athlete against performance criteria: results, progression against a trajectory the coaches have drawn, training data, conduct. The possible outcomes are these.

Outcome of annual review	What it means for the athlete
Retained on the same level	Support continues, with the band reviewed against the year's results
Promoted from Podium Potential to Podium	Higher band, fuller access to senior coaching and services
Moved down a level	Reduced award, usually with a set period to return to the required standard
Removed from the programme	Award ends after a notice period linked to time served, with transition support
Newly nominated	Athlete joins at whichever level the governing body recommends

Removal is the hard edge. An athlete dropped from a programme loses the grant, the coach, the physiotherapy and often the reason they moved to that city. Notice periods and transition support were lengthened after the welfare reviews described further down, and athletes can appeal a removal decision through the governing body's procedures. The appeal looks at whether the criteria were applied properly, and seldom at whether the coaches were right.

Places are finite, which sharpens every review. A governing body's award is sized for a set number of athletes at each level, so in a sport with a strong junior intake one athlete coming on usually means another going off. Coaches describe the annual meeting as the worst week of their year for that reason.

Injury, pregnancy and time away

The programme rules make allowances for the things that interrupt a career. An injured athlete normally keeps their award and their medical support through rehabilitation, with the position looked at again at the following review. Since 2021 UK Sport has published guidance on pregnancy, under which an athlete who becomes pregnant stays on the programme and continues to receive the award during the pregnancy and for a period after the birth, with a plan agreed for her return to training. Before that guidance existed the position varied from sport to sport, and an athlete had little in writing to rely on.

Selection for a Games is a separate decision made under a separate policy, though the same performance staff tend to make both. Being on the programme is neither necessary nor sufficient for an Olympic place, as our explainer on how the British Olympic team is chosen sets out.

How a sport's award is set

UK Sport publishes investment principles before each cycle, and the first of them has never changed in substance: money follows medal potential.

In the months after a Games every eligible sport submits a plan covering the next four years and looking ahead to the four after that. UK Sport's staff assess it against a set of questions. How many medals can this sport credibly win at the next Games, and how many at the one after? What did it deliver last time against the target it was given? Does it have the athletes in its pipeline, the coaches to develop them and the leadership to run the programme? What does success cost in this sport, given that a sailing campaign needs boats shipped round the world and a taekwondo campaign needs a mat? Is the governing body compliant with the Code for Sports Governance, which UK Sport and Sport England made a condition of public funding in 2017?

The answers produce an award and a target range of medals. Rowing, cycling, athletics, sailing and swimming have been the five largest recipients in most cycles, for the plain reason that they offer many medals and British athletes have won them.

Since the Paris cycle the full programme has had smaller tiers of investment beneath it.

• World Class Programme funding, the full version, for sports with medal potential at the next Games or the one after.
• Progression funding, a smaller award for sports judged to be further from the podium, on a longer horizon.
• Support for national squads, a modest sum to keep a national team functioning and competing where neither of the others applies.

The old arrangement had only the first tier and a cliff below it. A sport either had a credible medal case and received a programme, or did not and received nothing. The two smaller awards were added in direct response to a decade of criticism about that cliff.

One structural feature survives every redesign. Team sports are expensive per medal. A hockey squad of sixteen can win one medal between them, and a track cycling squad of similar size can contest a dozen events. Under a formula that counts medals, basketball and volleyball start a long way behind the velodrome, which is part of why British track cycling became what it is, a story told in our guide to Great Britain's track cycling programme.

Where the money comes from: Lottery tickets and the Exchequer

UK Sport has two sources of income and has depended on each at different times.

The first is the National Lottery. A fixed portion of the price of every ticket goes to good causes, and that pot is divided by government direction: a fifth to sport, a fifth to the arts, a fifth to heritage, and the remaining two fifths to community, health, education and environmental projects. Sport's fifth is then split between five distributors.

Sport England, UK Sport, sportscotland, Sport Wales and Sport Northern Ireland each receive a fixed percentage under the government's directions. UK Sport's slice is a minority of sport's share, and the bulk of Lottery sports money goes to Sport England for the grassroots. The elite system is the visible part of Lottery sport and not the largest.

The second source is grant-in-aid from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport: ordinary taxpayers' money voted by Parliament. In the first cycles it was the junior partner, paying mainly for UK Sport's running costs and its anti-doping work. That changed with London. In the 2006 Budget the Treasury committed £200 million of additional public money to preparing British athletes for a home Games, with a further £100 million to be raised from the private sector. The private target was never fully met. The public commitment was, and Exchequer funding has been a major part of the elite budget ever since.

The effect on totals was dramatic. On UK Sport's figures for Olympic sports, investment in the Sydney cycle was about £59 million. For Beijing it was roughly £235 million and for London about £264 million.

The mix between the two sources shifts from year to year, and it shifts for a reason that has nothing to do with sport: ticket sales. Lottery income is a share of what the public spends on draws and scratchcards, so when sales dip, as they did in the middle of the last decade, UK Sport's Lottery income falls with them. Awards to sports are promises made four years ahead, so a shortfall cannot simply be passed on, and the gap has had to be covered from reserves or Exchequer money. A cycle is also an accounting period, and it does not always behave. Awards are announced in the December after a Games and run for four financial years from the following April. When the Tokyo Olympics were postponed by twelve months in 2020 the cycle had to be stretched to cover a fifth year of preparation that nobody had budgeted for, and extra money had to be found. The Paris cycle that followed was a year shorter in practice, which is one reason its awards were made while Tokyo had still not taken place.

The licence to run the Lottery passed from Camelot to Allwyn in February 2024, and the terms of that licence, including how much reaches good causes, matter more to an Olympic cycle than most athletes realise.

UK Sport, Sport England and the home-country sports councils

Five public bodies fund sport in the United Kingdom, and confusing them is easy because their names differ by a word or two.

Body	Territory	Main job
UK Sport	Whole United Kingdom	Olympic and Paralympic high performance, major events, international influence
Sport England	England	Participation, facilities, clubs, talent pathways, non-Olympic England teams
sportscotland	Scotland	Participation and the Scottish performance system
Sport Wales	Wales	Participation and the Welsh performance system
Sport Northern Ireland	Northern Ireland	Participation and the Northern Irish performance system

The dividing line runs through the middle of an athlete's career. A promising English swimmer of fifteen is supported by a talent pathway that Sport England pays for through Swim England. If she reaches Podium Potential she crosses to a programme funded by UK Sport through the British governing body. In 2006 responsibility for the English end of the performance pathway moved from Sport England to UK Sport, which left a single body in charge from Podium Potential upwards.

The split explains some apparent oddities. Netball is among the most played women's team sports in England and is not on the Olympic programme, so the England team's support comes from Sport England and not UK Sport; our profile of the England Roses covers that pathway. Basketball has large participation among young people in English cities and has received Sport England money for it, yet lost its UK Sport programme because an Olympic medal looked remote. Skeleton is the reverse case. Almost nobody in Britain slides head-first down an ice track for recreation and there is no grassroots to fund, but British sliders won medals at five successive Winter Games from 2002, and the sport has been backed accordingly, as our record of British medals at the Winter Olympics shows.

UK Sport's remit is also wider than cheques to governing bodies. It runs the programme that helps British cities bid for and stage world and European championships, using Lottery money to underwrite events such as world championships in athletics, cycling and rowing held here. It supports British candidates for posts in international federations. Until 2009 it also ran the national anti-doping programme, which was then moved to a separate agency, UK Anti-Doping, on the reasoning that the body paying for medals should not be the one testing the medallists.

Sport England's Lottery income, by contrast, mostly never comes near an elite athlete. It goes on community facilities, on programmes to get inactive people moving, and on grants to governing bodies for clubs, coaches and volunteers. The slice that funds talent pathways and student-athlete scholarships is small beside those, and it is the only part that connects directly to the UK Sport system above it.

The home-country councils also fund their own nations' teams for the Commonwealth Games, where England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland compete separately. UK Sport has no part in that. How those Games are organised is set out in our guide to the Commonwealth Games format.

The services behind the cash: the UK Sports Institute

At Bisham Abbey, a medieval manor on the Thames in Berkshire that has been a national sports centre for decades, there is a unit where injured athletes live in for weeks of supervised rehabilitation. It is run by the UK Sports Institute, and it is a fair picture of what the institute is for: expertise that no single governing body could afford to keep.

The institute began in 2002 as the English Institute of Sport and took its present name in 2023. It is owned and funded by UK Sport. Its staff are practitioners, not coaches. Physiotherapists, sports doctors, strength and conditioning coaches, physiologists, nutritionists, psychologists, biomechanists and performance analysts are employed by the institute and deployed into sports, often embedded with one squad for years. There is also a performance lifestyle service, whose advisers help athletes with education, careers and the awkward business of what happens when they stop.

The arrangement is partly a purchasing system. Governing bodies use their programme awards to buy practitioner time from the institute, so a share of the money UK Sport gives a sport flows back to an organisation UK Sport owns. It sounds circular. The advantage is that a physiologist who has worked with rowers can move to canoeing and carry what was learned, and that small sports get access to people they could never hire outright.

The work happens at a network of high-performance centres. Bisham Abbey and Lilleshall in Shropshire are the old national sports centres. Loughborough University, the English Institute of Sport building in Sheffield, the Manchester complex around the velodrome and the University of Bath each house several sports. Some Olympic Park buildings from 2012 are used for elite training too, as described in our guide to what became of the London 2012 venues.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have counterparts. The sportscotland institute of sport is based at Stirling. Sport Wales runs its institute from the national centre at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff. The Sport Northern Ireland Sports Institute works from the Ulster University campus at Jordanstown. They support athletes on British programmes who live in those nations as well as their own national squads, and an athlete moving between a home-nation centre and a British programme base will usually find the same job titles on the doors.

What happens when a sport loses its funding

December 2012, four months after the most successful British Games in more than a century. UK Sport announced its awards for the Rio cycle with a record total, and several Olympic sports learned they would receive nothing, basketball and handball among them. Both had been funded for London because a host nation is given places in team sports it would not otherwise reach. None had a medal case for Rio.

The same thing happened after Rio. Archery, badminton, fencing, weightlifting and wheelchair rugby lost their programmes for the Tokyo cycle. Badminton's case caused the loudest argument, because its players had won a bronze medal in Rio, had met the target UK Sport set, and were cut anyway on the judgement that a medal in Tokyo was unlikely.

A governing body in that position has two formal steps. It can make representations to UK Sport's board, presenting new evidence or arguing the assessment was wrong. If that fails it can take a formal appeal to an independent arbitrator through Sport Resolutions, on the limited ground that UK Sport did not follow its own process or acted irrationally. Basketball won a reprieve by the first route early in 2013 and lost its funding again a year later at the annual review, alongside synchronised swimming and water polo. Every appeal after Rio failed.

An athlete in an unfunded sport pays their own way. In practice that has meant some mix of the following:

• part-time or full-time work fitted around training
• support from parents or partners
• crowdfunding and local sponsorship
• small grants from charities such as SportsAid, or a university scholarship through the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme
• whatever the governing body can spare from membership income and Sport England money

The all-or-nothing model has been softened in stages. In 2018 an Aspiration Fund was set up, a pot of a few million pounds from which unfunded Olympic and Paralympic sports could bid for help with qualifying for Tokyo. The progression and national squad tiers followed for the Paris cycle and brought in new Olympic sports such as sport climbing, in which Toby Roberts won a British gold medal in 2024.

The record of the sports that were cut is mixed enough to embarrass both sides. Wheelchair rugby, dropped in 2016, won Paralympic gold in Tokyo five years later. British basketball did not come close to an Olympic Games in the same period.

Before and after 1997: from one gold in Atlanta

Great Britain finished 36th in the medal table at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, behind Ireland, Algeria and Kazakhstan. The team won one gold medal, in the coxless pair rowed by Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent. Helsinki in 1952 had also produced a single gold, but 36th was the lowest table placing a British team had recorded, and it arrived at a useful moment.

• 1Golds at Atlanta 1996
• 36Table position in 1996
• 27Golds at Rio 2016
• 2Table position in 2016

Great Britain's gold medals and position in the Olympic medal table at the last Games before Lottery funding and at its highest placing since.

The National Lottery had been running since November 1994, and sport was among its good causes from the start. But the directions given to the sports councils allowed Lottery money to be spent only on capital projects: pavilions, pools, pitches. Paying an athlete to train was not permitted. After Atlanta the rules were changed to allow revenue funding of people and programmes. UK Sport was created by Royal Charter and began work in January 1997, and the World Class Performance Programme made its first awards that year.

The effect was visible at the first opportunity. In Sydney four years later Great Britain won eleven gold medals.

Games	Gold medals	Total medals	Table position
Atlanta 1996	1	15	36th
Sydney 2000	11	28	10th
Athens 2004	9	30	10th
Beijing 2008	19	47	4th
London 2012	29	65	3rd
Rio 2016	27	67	2nd
Tokyo 2020	22	65	4th
Paris 2024	14	65	7th

The figures are those at the close of each Games. Several totals have since moved in either direction as medals were reallocated after doping cases, Beijing's upwards and Tokyo's down by one.

Golds as counted at the close of each Games, before any later reallocation. Lottery-funded programmes began in 1997.

Show the numbers

British gold medals at each summer Olympics since 1996

Item	Gold medals
1996	1
2000	11
2004	9
2008	19
2012	29
2016	27
2020	22
2024	14

Two things stand out. Rio, not London, was the peak in the table: Great Britain finished above China and became the first nation to win more medals at the Games immediately after hosting than at its home Games. And the gold count has fallen at each Games since while the total has held around 65. A system built to convert finalists into champions is now producing a great many silver and bronze medals, and the reasons for that are argued over inside British sport without agreement.

The Paralympic record is, if anything, stronger. British teams have finished second in the Paralympic medal table at most Games of the Lottery era, with the same funding model applied through classification-specific programmes; the system those programmes work within is explained in our guide to Paralympic classification codes.

The criticisms UK Sport funding has had to answer

"No compromise" was UK Sport's own phrase, adopted in the mid-2000s and used with pride for a decade. It meant that investment would go where medals were most likely and nowhere else, with no allowance for a sport's popularity, its social reach or its history. As a method for climbing a medal table it worked. The objections to it came from three directions.

The first was concentration. A formula that counts medals rewards sports with many events and small international fields. Critics pointed out that Britain was spending heavily on sports in which relatively few countries compete seriously and almost nothing on basketball, played in nearly every country on earth and by large numbers of young people in British cities who rarely see a velodrome. UK Sport's reply was always that its remit was medals and that participation was Sport England's business. The reply was accurate and did not settle the argument.

The second was the cliff edge, already described: a sport that lost funding lost everything, and with it any realistic chance of ever earning it back.

The third, and the most damaging, was welfare. In 2016 and 2017 a succession of athletes in several funded sports made allegations of bullying and discrimination inside World Class Programmes. An independent review of the climate in British Cycling's programme reported in 2017. Baroness Grey-Thompson's Duty of Care in Sport review, commissioned by the government, was published the same year and recommended among other things an independent ombudsman. In 2022 the Whyte Review, commissioned by UK Sport and Sport England, described a culture in British gymnastics in which the welfare of young athletes had been put behind results over many years. The common thread was uncomfortable for the funder. A system that paid programmes by results, and gave those programmes power over an athlete's income, had created conditions in which athletes felt unable to complain.

How the stated priorities were rewritten

UK Sport's strategy for 2021 to 2031 dropped the old slogan. Its headline ambition is to keep winning and to win well, the second half meaning that how medals are won is now treated as part of the result. Funding agreements carry conditions on culture and athlete welfare. Programmes undergo regular culture reviews. An independent service for reporting concerns was piloted. The investment model gained its two lower tiers, and the list of funded sports grew longer than it had ever been.

Whether the change is deep is a fair question. Medal potential is still the first investment principle, the five biggest sports are still the five biggest, and a governing body that misses its targets still faces a smaller award. What has changed is that medals are no longer the only thing UK Sport says it is buying. A reasonable judgement is that the system proved public money can buy Olympic success with unusual efficiency, and then spent its third decade working out what that success was supposed to be for.

For news and features across the sports this money supports, see our cycling coverage or browse the full list of England sport guides.