A deal generated by the powerful magnet of the 2012 London Olympic Games will be worth nearly £50 million to British athletics over the next six years and is similar to the sum received by Chelsea Football Club from their five-year shirt sponsorship by Samsung. The backing comes from Norwich Union, UKA’s main commercial sponsor since 1999.

David Moorcroft, the UKA chief executive, described the package as “enormous”, while Patrick Snowball, the executive chairman of Norwich Union, said that athletics remained attractive despite Britain’s declining performances in recent years, its paucity of world-class stars and the spectre of drug-taking, highlighted most recently by the two-year suspension of Dwain Chambers, the sprinter.

Although the deal will improve vastly the resources available to UKA in preparing a team capable of joining the front-runners in the 2012 medals table, Norwich Union emphasised that this was only part of its motive. “Elite performance is, to us, the icing on the cake,” Snowball said. “What we are trying to do is give opportunity to a huge pool of youth.”

Investment in grassroots athletics will almost treble as training for more than 100,000 teachers in some 5,000 secondary and 20,000 primary schools will be given through a project known as Elevating Athletics. “I am delighted with the scale and breadth of this,” Moorcroft said. “Driving up performance in every region, in every age group, has become our mantra.”

Central contracts are to be offered to about 500 athletes and the best of those who sign can expect to earn in the region of £200,000 a year in appearance fees, lottery funding and medical support. The second tier would likely benefit by £50,000 to £100,000. Those who decline will not be permitted to negotiate their appearances at televised domestic meetings, although they cannot be denied participation in national championships.

The meetings are promoted by Fast Track and Jon Ridgeon, its director of athletics, said: “We take our brief from UKA and, as one of the benefits of central contracts, you get to compete at the televised events. There is still a commercial negotiation to have about what price an athlete is worth to compete, but to have that negotiation, an athlete will need to sign a central contract.”

Adam Walker, Moorcroft’s No 2 and architect of the contracts, believes that most athletes would be better off signing than taking their chance independently on the grand-prix circuit. However, Kelly Sotherton, the Commonwealth heptathlon champion, said that she expected pockets of resistance.

“Not everybody is going to accept these contracts,” she said. “Some are going to think, ‘Big Brother wants to control us.’ ” She added, however, that she would sign. Dean Macey, the Commonwealth decathlon champion, gave his support, suggesting that, too often, athletes had put earning money from the grands prix before championship performance.

“Over the last few years, the emphasis on winning medals has been lost,” Macey said. “This is going to bring us back to where the major target for every athlete should be winning medals.”

Walker expects contracts to become “the cultural norm”. Roger Black, a highly successful 400 metres runner from the 1980s and 1990s, said of the new land of opportunity: “I do not think there has been a better time to be a British athlete.”

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Leading UK sports sponsorship deals outside football: