Handball? It’s a foul

With so much political capital invested in the 2012 London Olympics, there is already intense pressure for Britain’s sportsmen and women to give the nation something to cheer.

The 2012 target is to finish fourth in the medals table, which almost certainly means beating Australia's Athens tally of 17 gold, 16 silver and 16 bronze medals. Britain finished tenth in Athens, winning nine gold, nine silver and 12 bronze medals, so that target is highly ambitious.

With the UK slumping to 34th in world athletics and hurdler-turned-BBC pundit Colin Jackson convinced that any athletics medal in London would be "miraculous", the plan is to bridge the gap between the reality of Athens and the 2012 projections through hard cash and lateral thinking. The two approaches combine spectacularly in the controversial plan to target marginal sports where there is a perception that 'easy' medals are on offer.

Handball claims to be the world's second-biggest ball sport, but there are only around 30 clubs in Britain and no British team has ever qualified for any Olympics, including Beijing.

Yet trials were started last year in which nine men and three women from 2,500 applicants, all extremely tall but most with no experience of the sport, were chosen to spend five years playing as taxpayer-funded professionals in handball-obsessed Denmark. In January they will join the nine male and five female British handballers already at Aarhus Handball Academy, before all 26 join professional Danish clubs at a cost of £1.2m per year.

In the unlikely event that the UK handball team wins a medal, it will have cost £6.2m. If that's the going rate for a gong, that coveted fourth-place finish will cost over £300m. What price national pride?