Didn’t we do well, or did we?

Chris Tomlinson in the long jump and Dean Macey in the decathlon deserve favourable mentions in the dispatches that will thud onto the desk of Simon Clegg, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association, next month. Individual debriefing sessions will follow through next month, potentially serious torture for sports such as judo, hockey, swimming and athletics, which have failed to justify the money thrown liberally in their direction. In addition to the UK Sport funding, an extra £6.5m has been used to fund the next tier of athletes, only a handful of whom were selected for the Athens Olympic squad.

Today marks the end of an era as Max Jones, the national performance director, stands down, leaving an abyss where the next generation of talent should be and a system so in need of renovation that not even Holmes, the golden girl herself, can paper over the cracks. Athens has marked the final destruction of a heritage — in men’s middle-distance running, sprinting and triple jump — and little consolation can be gained from the similar fall of traditions in Germany, France and Italy.

Strange forces have been blowing through the Olympic stadium, bringing in Greek 400m hurdlers with the speed of sound and a strapping Chinese hurdler who annihilated a field that included a Latvian and a Brazilian. Nudges and winks at such prodigious feats in a Games of record positive drug tests only partially mask the poverty of our own efforts. Sweden have not forsaken their heritage quite so profligately. After the great Patrick Sjoberg came Stefan Holm to win the men’s high jump, and on the same night Christian Olsson usurped Jonathan Edwards’s triple jump title to complete a golden hour for the blue and yellow of Sweden — not known to be an athletics powerhouse.

Nothing exhibited lack of confidence in the British team more clearly than the last-minute inclusion of Malachi Davis, an American runner with a British passport. Davis finished fifth out of eight in his heat of the 400m with a time of 46.28sec that would not have been good enough to qualify from any one of the eight heats.

An instructive glimpse of the future could be found in the Olympic stadium late one night last week. On the long jump runway, Tomlinson, a flop-haired youth from Middlesbrough, was responding to the biggest competition of his life with the composure of a veteran. In contrast to Phillips Idowu, whose inability to land one legitimate triple jump earlier in the week must have driven Edwards to distraction, Tomlinson jumped faultlessly to finish fifth. He, at least, should be a genuine contender in Beijing.

At the same time on the track, Soos resembled a boy who had strayed into the fathers’ race. He was adrift of the pace after half a lap, fought back to stay with the main pack and showed admirable tenacity to lift himself to sixth in his semi-final of the 800m. Soos is just 21 and deserves further support, but his improvement needs to be spectacular for him to play any realistic part in the British team for Beijing in four years’ time.

Some hard decisions will have to be made by Jones’s successor — possibly Charles van Commenee, Denise Lewis’s coach — over the next few months. It might already be too late. Swimming has cut some fat from the bone and yet the squad still, under the formidable command of Bill Sweetenham, underperformed here. Athletics is several years behind swimming in the development of a coherent structure and a winning mentality. For once, it is nothing to do with money. Athletics is now well-funded.

“The whole culture has to change,” as one senior British sports official said. “The attitude is, ‘We’re track and field, we can do what we like.’ It’s getting harder and harder to make an impact, particularly on the track, so we have to get street-smart, fund a smaller, fitter team and make lottery funding less a divine right and more related to performance.”

The British are now competing with nations such as Japan, whose £130m-a-year investment in an institute of sport in Tokyo has prompted a startling increase in their medal tally. The new regime in athletics could do worse than analyse the success of three lower-profile sports at recent Games. Cycling, sailing and rowing have consistently provided the best return on investment when it matters. This is not down to luck but to intelligent recruitment programmes, judicious use of funding, good coaching, attention to detail and an understanding of the concept of elitism.

The 10-man support team for the track cyclists operated with the slickness of a Ferrari pit crew, anticipating on the opening night the effect of Chris Hoy’s gold celebrations on the other riders due to compete and buying special firemen’s chairs off the internet to cool down the riders in the cloying heat of the velodrome. No sooner had the last wheel turned in Athens than thoughts had already turned towards Beijing.

Long before their rivals, the British sailing team had set up base at the Olympic centre at Agios Kosmas, renting a house for two years before the Games and employing a chef to control diet and a meteorologist to monitor the fickle winds on the Mediterranean. It is no coincidence that, for the second Olympics in succession, cycling and sailing have won the most golds.

A final tally of two golds (Hoy in the 1km time trial and Bradley Wiggins in the individual pursuit), a silver (team pursuit) and a bronze (the madison) is ample evidence not just of the excellence of the original cycling world-class performance programme established by Peter Keen in the mid-1990s, but also of a talent for filling in forms, an art underestimated by too many British sports.

In rowing, the victory of the coxless four masked a subtle shift in the balance of power within the British squad. All three heavyweight women’s crews won medals: two silvers, for the women’s pair and the quadruple sculls, and bronze for the double scull. Six out of those eight medallists should be available for Beijing, but the development of a strong women’s squad for events with weaker fields is smart thinking, not least because the men’s squad may have to face a future without Matthew Pinsent, Ed Coode and James Cracknell.

“We’ve got the world championships coming to England next year and that will be a good platform for Beijing,” says Cracknell. “But we need to step up over the next four years. We can’t rely on Pinsent and (Steve) Redgrave for ever. When England won the rugby World Cup, guys of 6ft 4in headed for the rugby field, but the publicity we’ve generated might bring some of them to rowing.”

Steve Williams, the one member of the four who seems certain to carry on, Alex Partridge and Andy Hodge will be bequeathed one of Britain’s greatest sporting legacies over the next four years.

Britain’s insistence on competing across a wide range of sports is a great strength. It is also a supreme weakness. According to figures released by Sport England and UK Sport, the two big bodies that fund British sport, more than £150m was spent on developing and preparing this Olympic team. That is nearly £500,000 per athlete. These Games have produced fewer gold medals than Sydney, but the medal total has held up well overall. The full impact of the broad range of facilities offered to elite athletes by the English Institute for Sport will be felt in the next Olympic cycle, which can only be beneficial. But athletics is the Olympic front of house, and no amount of emotional investment in Kelly Holmes can disguise the need for change.