The fourth place in the medal table that Team GB has long been targeting for London 2012 can be radically scaled back if budget cuts of up to £79million are enforced on Olympic sports, Lord Moynihan, the chairman of the British Olympic Association, gave warning yesterday.

Lord Moynihan said that a realistic target would be eighth place if the Government fails to honour its funding pledge. “We will be deeply disappointed this week if the Government moves away from their commitment,” he said. “To give our Olympic and Paralympic athletes the best chance of success in 2012, the full investment programme agreed by Gordon Brown when he was Chancellor must be honoured in full.”

When London bid for 2012, the promise was that the Games would inspire a new generation to rise from their sofas and partake in sport. The Games were, in effect, the poster campaign for greater participation. Whether or not you believe that will work is another matter, but that was the theory.

In accordance with this, Gordon Brown's budget of March 2006 promised £600million to fund elite sport. The thinking was this: you not only need to host the Games, but to make the poster campaign work, you need host-team success. Tomorrow, however, the Government announcement that it has come up £79million short on its pledge will burn a hole in the theory because UK Sport now has to decide which sports will face the cuts.

Moynihan's fear that Britain will tumble down to eighth in the medal table appears something of an over-reaction. The policy of UK Sport has long been a “no compromise” attitude, where the sports that might deliver medals will not be affected.

The sports that will be the worst hit, therefore, will be those with a negligible chance of producing medals. However, any cuts along these lines can only undermine one of the very basic justifications of London bidding for the Games: the ideal that the Games will inspire greater participation.

The idea was that, through investment and hard work, Britain could produce a half-decent basketball team, for instance, that kids would watch and enjoy it at the London Games and that they would then vow to sign up to the local basketball team. But there may now no longer be a half-decent basketball team, or volleyball team or handball etc. And the list goes on.

As Huw Goodwin, a handball player who may well find himself an ex-handball player today, said: “Britain has one opportunity to sell as many sports as possible; I think that's very important.” Indeed, it was important, very much in the past tense.

Handball

OK, no one in their right minds genuinely thinks that handball stands the remotest chance of bringing medals for Britain in 2012. But the point about cutting the handball programme now is not that it is a waste of a medal hope in 2012 - it isn't - but that it is a waste of all the time and money already invested. In other words, £3million and two years of people's lives. In early 2007, Goodwin was pursuing a psychology career in an eating disorder clinic in Edinburgh. His career was derailed when he saw an advertisement: tall people wanted for 2012. He could not resist. So he sent off his application, went through various rounds of a Talent ID scheme and was rewarded with a national lottery grant and a ticket to join the rest of the Great Britain handball team at their training headquarters.

“It's been about two years [that] I have put towards handball and given up my career for,” Goodwin said. “A big part of our squad have stopped their lives and moved off to Denmark - but with the ambition of it lasting four years and beyond. But, through no fault of any individual, that might now be stopped.”

Volleyball

Volleyball in the UK was going nowhere, but the British volleyball programme won funding of £4.2million over four years and targeted a plan based on playing and training with the best opposition as much as possible. If the budget is cut, that opposition will be out of reach. In the past year, the men's team have been playing in the top league in Holland and the women have had camps and matches in Russia and Puerto Rico.

Britain's leading beach volleyball team have risen to No57 in the world and Kenny Barton, the performance programme manager, believes that a medal in men's beach volleyball is a possibility but he adds that a budget cut “would really hurt”. “To keep progressing at this pace, any cut in the funding programme or even level funding would have a negative effect,” he said. “The promise was there that the Government would fund performance sport so that the athletes could commit to the programme. It seems it is only the athletes [who] have fulfilled the commitment.”

Hockey

A sign of these hard times is that hockey is one of the sports at risk of funding cuts and yet a medal is within touching distance. A sign of how far we have lost sight of the bigger picture - to use the Games to encourage participation - is that hockey is ideally placed to deliver that participation boost. It is already an established sport with an established club structure. In 2004, the men were ninth and the women did not qualify. In Beijing, the men finished fifth and the women sixth. “A medal is certainly within reach providing we get sufficient funding,” Phil Kimberley, the chief executive of Great Britain Hockey, said.