Verdict on team that went missing

Awarding eight points for a gold down to one point for eighth, Britain amassed 54 points, their worst at any World Championships and 41 points down on their tally in the Sydney Olympics. For almost two decades, using this barometer, we have been either the fourth or fifth best athletics country in the world. Here, we sank to ninth.

For years, Britain's athletes have spoiled us. Having covered every major championship for 15 years, I'd suggest this is the first time in that period where the team has actually under-performed.

Even in the Atlanta Olympics, when they were criticised for not bringing home gold, they won six medals and finished fifth in the placings table.

We have become so used to overachievement that failure here seemed particularly shocking. In previous championships, the elite have delivered, papering over the lack of strength in depth elsewhere.

Here, stricken by full blown post-Olympic blues, the team's soft underbelly was brutally revealed.

Suddenly, our team, supposed to be streamlined and ultra-competitive was exposed for carrying too much deadwood.

Why athletes like Mike Openshaw, who couldn't break 14 minutes in his 5,000m heat, Mark Proctor, a perennial championship underachiever in the shot, and Jamie Baulch, who produced a 400m heat time which Macey almost matched in the middle of a decathlon, were selected for individual events is a mystery.

The tally of athletes achieving personal bests, the test of whether they've peaked and achieved on the biggest stage, was only four - Christian Malcolm (100m/200m), Mark Lewis-Francis (100m), Dwain Chambers (100m) and Macey (decathlon) - out of a team of 62.

For the first time in living memory, there was no British men's finalist in any track event longer than 400m.

So was this performance, which doubtless will be filed in the summer catalogue of great British sporting failure, a first sign of alarming decline or just a one-off aberration?

Jones argues the latter, claiming the team was unlucky with injuries before and during the event.

Yet he conceded it "may have been an accident waiting to happen". he Has long warned about how the lack of world-class medical back-up for elite athletes and how the unrelenting demands on British athletes - next year, they will be expected to chase medals in both Commonwealth and European Championships - threaten the team's potential to win medals.

"This is a reality check. We've got to go back and examine what we're doing because we're not a two or three medal nation," said Jones.

There should be no panic, yet. A leading Australian sports doctor, Ken Fitch, will undertake a review of the GB medical set-up later this year and the benefits of some lottery-funded initiatives are yet to kick in.

Jones has high hopes for a new national high performance centre for endurance running at Twickenham and there is such talent emerging through the teenage ranks that Jones asserts that "between 2004 and 2008, we'll see more quality people in the team across the board".

We must hope so because the championships only get more mercilessly competitive.

Extraordinarily, 42 different nations won medals, including unlikely outposts like St Kitts and Nevis and Haiti, and 23 landed gold here.

Forget Michael Johnson's claim that it was a poor championship. It may have lacked his greatness and it did not produce a world record - which is as much to do with athletes being overworked as with the IAAF's more concerted out-of-competition drugs testing efforts - but it was a magnificent edition nonetheless.

We had two wonderful 100m finals, fantastic races in the women's 400m, 800m and 10,000m and men's 5,000m and 10,000m, perhaps the most amazing finish to any 200m race in history with six in a line battling for the men's silver, wonderful field event competitions like the women's vault and the men's javelin.

We saw unsurpassed champions like Marion Jones (200m), Maurice Greene ( 100m), Jan Zelezny (javelin), Allen Johnson (110m hurdles) and Hicham El Guerrouj (1500m) lifting third individual titles, long jumper Ivan Pedroso winning a fourth and discus thrower Lars Riedel, incredibly, a fifth.

Then there were the unbeatable Marion Jones and Haile Gebrselassie, being beaten and, depressingly, Olga Yegorova, who failed a drugs test for EPO a month ago, winning the 5,000m.

Much was made of Edmonton being the wrong host. How could there be any surprise that in a country without a real feel for the sport, this was the worst-supported of any championships?

Yet the stuff about 'Deadmonton' was probably neither here nor there because, ultimately, the only measure of the city had to be how it coped with the logistical nightmare of staging the world's third biggest sporting event.

It was hard not to come away with the uncomfortable feeling that Edmonton, north London, where we haven't even built a stadium yet, would be hard pressed to do as impressive a job.

But should it end up on our doorstep in 2005, maybe our athletics team will be fit and raring to turn up to their own party. Because, sadly, most went missing here.