Money is the root of all evil and the quickest route to the top. It is, as Woody Allen said, better than poverty if only for financial reasons. Whether it makes Olympic champions is another issue, but there are plenty of minority sports ready to put someone else's money where their mouths are.

Athletics has come in for plenty of flak this week. Niels de Vos, the UK Athletics chief executive, went on the radio and had to fend off questioning from Nicky Campbell about complacent athletes. It is a tired old argument that paints athletes as overpaid underperformers who have got their grants by luck. Dewy-eyed old pros have been griping for Britain, too.

The idea of complacent runners reclining on the chaise longue while some lottery lackey peels their grapes is misplaced. Six track and field athletes in Britain receive £25,383 a year. They won medals at the Beijing Olympics or the World Championships last year. It means a rising star such as Martyn Rooney, the fifth-best 400 metres runner in the world last year, gets a modest package equating to £19,000. Those deemed capable of improving sufficiently to threaten the medals at the World Championships in Berlin in 2009 get £12,600. It would take a different sort of drug to the performance-enhancing type to be complacent about earning in a year what John Terry can pick up in a morning.

There is the question, then, of whether money makes much of a difference at all. Christine Ohuruogu spent a year out of the system because of her three missed drugs tests. She was shorn of her lottery funding and had to take a part-time job at Newham Council to find £20,000 to pay her legal fees. It could be argued that a lack of money was the making of her.

It is the same with Dwain Chambers. Whatever you think about the former drug cheat, the bare fact is he is skint. He has earned £1,500 in the past six months and owes the IAAF, athletics' governing body, about £130,000. Nevertheless, he has been the best sprinter in Europe this year. Over in Jamaica, there have been manifold reasons peddled for the country's newfound status as sprint capital of the world. A desire to escape poverty seems as good as any.

Of course, to make life as hard as it has been for Ohuruogu and Chambers would be self-defeating. If you want to entice people into a sport, you have to back them. Money helps but the igneous mindset and masochistic streak that mark out champions come from somewhere else. In athletics, after medical support, athletes say that the best thing about funding is that it allows them more time to recover. In effect, we are funding people to sit on their backsides and Middle England miserablists cannot cope with that.

But we are rewarding mediocrity, people grouse. Well, if money truly works as an alchemic force, surely it should go to those sports struggling to flourish. Do the cycling and rowing teams need increased funds when they are already world leaders? Ben Folds, the American piano player who resembles Woody Allen on THG, addressed this issue in his song Free Coffee. He sang: “When I was broke I needed it more, but now I'm rich they give me coffee.” Maybe Britain needs to wake up and smell the free coffee, too.

This brings us back to athletics, which missed its Olympic medals target of four - by one. The total might have been five if Paula Radcliffe had been fit; Jessica Ennis, another athlete expected to do well by those who set the targets, did not even make the journey. Had Phillips Idowu jumped another five centimetres, it would have been two golds. It is a fine line between success and a budget cut.

This myopic thinking also governs the view that we must be represented at all sports in London in 2012. If the Olympics matter, does it matter where they are? Is beach volleyball's intrinsic worth heightened by being held in Horse Guard's Parade rather than a Beijing sandpit? And does it matter if we are fourth or fifth in the medals' table?

The obsession with the table is fine just as long as no one pretends that we want a post-London legacy in a plethora of minority sports.

But you cannot win with funding. The grass roots say these huge sums should be invested there. Basketball says that it is worth a 137 per cent rise. Spike Milligan said: “All I ask is for the chance to prove that money won't make me happy.” He spoke for handball players everywhere.