Can athletics deliver in London? That is the $64,000 question as the 1,000 days milestone approaches this week, but the man at the top has the answers.

“I believe we can win more medals than any other sport,” Niels de Vos, the UK Athletics chief executive, said. “Nobody ever jumped higher by setting the bar low and this is about having the most successful Olympics of modern times.”

This is bold given that, for many years, British athletics appeared to be dying a death by a thousand cuts, with a form of civil war raging between the elite and the grass roots, and a timeline of old pros using 20/20 hindsight to champion their era and damn the class of 2012. Things are different now.

“There has been a major, major culture change,” De Vos said. “At the World Championships in Berlin we had a team of 60 and you could count on the fingers of one hand those who did not perform. That is very different from previous championships. For the first time since I’ve been involved they regarded themselves as a team, there was a sense of ‘we’re all in this together’. We dress the same. We come to dinner together. The coaches share information. That’s quite a threat to the coaches so it’s a struggle, but it’s happening.”

To win more medals than any other sport in London will probably require a double-figure haul, something Britain has not achieved at an Olympics since 1964, the two boycotted Games of the 1980s — the first in 1980 led by the US and then the Soviet-led boycott four years later — excluded. And since the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, the only individual British gold medal-winners have been Linford Christie, Sally Gunnell, Jonathan Edwards, Denise Lewis, Kelly Holmes and Christine Ohuruogu.

De Vos is nevertheless optimistic. Analysing the statistics from the past three Olympics and the subsequent World Championships suggests Britain is on the right track. In Athens in 2004 and Helsinki a year later, Britain had 12 top-eight finishes excluding the relay. In Beijing last year and Berlin in August it was 29.

“On those projections 25 or maybe even 30 top-eight finishes in London is realistic,” De Vos said. “I want us to be represented in every event at London, which we weren’t in Beijing, but I don’t want to open the door to people just because we’re the home nation. We want people to compete.”

The good news is that the next generation may be even better than the class of 2012. This year has seen Britain achieve its best ever results at the World Under-18 and European Under-23 Championships. De Vos knows the margins for error are narrow, which is why a Dutchman, a Canadian and an American is a blueprint for success rather than the preamble to a joke. Charles van Commenee, the Dutch head coach, leads an international team including Kevin Tyler, the head of coaching and development from Canada, and Dan Pfaff, director of the Lee Valley high performance centre, from the United States. What happens after 2012 in the wider context is another question and De Vos says that the latest Sport England figures show the number of people participating in the sport has increased by 100,000 in the past year. “When they had the world indoors at Birmingham [in 2003] there was a huge upsurge in kids turning up at Birchfield and the club just wasn’t ready,” he said. “They didn’t have the coaches to take them on and the opportunity was lost forever.” Networks of coaches are being put in place to deal with the demand.

Nevertheless, he has concerns for the next generation. “The danger of training too hard, too young is a huge problem, and history is littered with kids who burnt out,” he said. “We praise our young stars way too early in this country.”

Another legacy debate centres around the Olympic Stadium and De Vos wants to know as soon as possible whether it will be included in the FA’s World Cup bid. “If they’re going to keep [the capacity] at 80,000 for that bid, my attitude would be don’t mess around. We’d like to bid for the World Championships, but need to know what’s happening before we can. It would be a shame if it was kept as a larger stadium and we had no events to fill it. When it’s downsized to 28,000 we would want it five or six times a year, but we would not run it and the conversations about multiple use are ongoing.”

The sport itself is undergoing a facelift. The Diamond League starts next year, designed to throw up more head-to-head rivalries. De Vos says the decision to host the European Championships every two years from 2010 means Britain will send a development squad in 2012. The World Championships, he says, should be held every four years rather than two. At home De Vos believes the future is brighter. “There was a huge amount of angst and negativity when I came in [in January 2007],” he said. Now he says the relationship with England Athletics is better than ever.

“I’m a great believer in devolution,” he said. “We’re not the body that should be doing the doing. It’s down to the shires.” If Saturday’s 1,000-day marker is an arbitrary one for many, there is no doubt that the countdown is under way. “It’s just a number,” De Vos mused, “but every day matters.”