Team GB's volleyball vice-captain Andrew Pink's memories of 2012 not viewed through rose-tinted glass Predictably, it has been unable to do so, with British Volleyball's men's and women's indoor teams having been all but disbanded, the organisation's offices closed and its staff laid off, its elite programme now limited exclusively to a women's beach volleyball pair. For a sport in which Britain had never previously competed as a single entity and certainly had no Olympic heritage, it might appear naïve for it to expect the cash to keep rolling in under a clear policy that sees public money distributed purely on medal potential at one of the subsequent two Games. But Pink says that any funding programme that leaves some of its sports "dead in the water" is simply not delivering on its legacy commitments. "They pretty much wiped away all the five years" hard work we did putting all the right processes in place, hiring professional coaches, having a centralised team, having a development team working so we had a pipeline of players," he said. We're almost back square one - or square zero. That's the part of legacy that's really not right. Pink claimed that even with £3,536,077 of UK Sport funding, getting Britain's volleyball teams in a position to compete at London inside five years was nigh-on impossible. Part of a men's indoor side that lost all of its matches, he said: "We would've liked to have done better but the funding wasn't there to do it. Every single time I played for the national team in the summers, I would be in debt, and that was the whole way through the Olympic cycle. So when the Government announced in the run-up to the Games that they were going to give the Opening Ceremony an extra £40 million, when our guys are struggling to eat properly, that sort of stuff is very annoying. Volleyball is far from alone, with handball also suffering and basketball initially seeing its funding cut to zero before getting it back. It is no coincidence all three are team sports, according to Pink, who insisted UK Sport's criteria for judging sports was deeply flawed when applied beyond individual disciplines. "As a country, if you look at what we're good at team-sport wise, those are sports that don't rely on the national funding set-ups," he said. Football, rugby, cricket, the clubs look after the young players. They do most of that stuff themselves. Which is why UK Sport is fantastic at developing individual athletes and individual sports, but team sports, they don't really have that institutional knowledge to do so. What's the incentive to develop those athletes there and develop the sport where your standard is competing for medals? There's a huge disconnect there that needs to be addressed. There has been talk among other sports of "a challenge" to UK Sport's 'No Compromise" approach and even suggestions some of the high-achieving sports would be prepared to sacrifice a proportion of their own funding increases to help those less well off. Pink has decided change is better effected from within, having become acting president of Volleyball England's performance commission as well as targeting a spot on UK Sport's international leadership programme. I'm motivated because after the five years we've put in, toiling, absolutely skint, not being able to see family and friends, nobody wants to see that washed down the plughole. So, there are a few of us who, off our own backs are saying, 'This isn't right. We're going to get motivated, we're going to get involved and we're going to get people in those meetings where decisions about funding and the like are made. Because that's the only way to ensure that your sport's interests are looked after. There is a hell of a lot of politics involved in sport and we, as a sport, didn't play those games very well. Insisting he was not "bitter" about the fate that had befallen British volleyball since the Olympics, Pink nevertheless said: "I'm looking forward to 10, 12, 16 years" time when we are back again and we are funded and we've got all our processes in place. We will have a great youth system developing players here and we are qualifying for the Olympics again, off our own back. Then we can rub it in their faces that they didn't support us when they should've done.