The 2008 Olympics was always going to be followed by a battle for the best coaches in Beijing, and the first such skirmish between Great Britain and Australia has been won by Team GB, who saw off Australian advances directed at Shane Sutton, the head coach of British Cycling.

Sutton is not only one of the key people in Britain’s world-leading cycling team but he is also an Australian. It was no surprise, then, that he would be a target for offers from his home-land and the failure to lure him back will be a severe blow.

However, Australia has been quick to react to the blow to national pride suffered by finishing below Britain in the medals table. Indeed, the Pommie insult is being used by John Coates, the president of the Australian Olympic Committee, in his efforts to persuade politicians to fund a war-chest to make Australia more competitive.

Australia won 58 medals in the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and had slipped to 46 in Beijing; Coates is targeting 55 at London 2012 and 60 in 2016. However, even the haul in Beijing was better than many had expected; some insiders thought a worse result would deliver a clearer message to politicians of the necessity for increased funding. Without it, Alan Thompson, the swimming coach, said, Australian sport was “on the verge of a crisis”.

In the five weeks since the Beijing Games ended, Australian sport has begun to cut its cloth accordingly. In China, the Australian athletics squad did not include a sprinter, male or female, and did not compete in the sprint relays.

The follow-up came two weeks ago in Canberra, where the Australian Institute of Sport announced that it was cutting its track and field sprint programme altogether.

A similar kind of review has taken place at one of the regional centres of excellence, the Western Australian Institute of Sport, where the entire staff has been made redundant and told to reapply for their jobs.

However, the Australian backlash has not been helped by the resignation of Mark Peters, the head of the Australian Sports Commission. While his replacement remains unappointed, Australian sport has a vacuum at the top at the time when it needs leadership and decision-making.

Peters’s parting shot was that a national lottery would help to solve funding issues. “It would be an ideal solution to at least know the bucket of money we’ve got available rather than fighting each year for every dollar,” he said.