I CAN still remember speaking to Mica McNeill on the day she discovered her funding from the British Bobsleigh and Skeleton Association (BBSA) had been withdrawn.

I was expecting tears, or at the very least a quiver in the voice that reflected the gravity of having almost a decade of work, commitment and sacrifice ripped up in the seconds that it took a malfunctioning governing body to decide that women’s bobsleigh wasn’t as worthy of support as the men’s equivalent, even though McNeill and her partner, Mica Moore, were regularly outperforming their male team-mates on the World Cup circuit.

Instead, what I got was unshakeable conviction. “This won’t be the end,” said McNeill, with a steeliness that was perhaps only fitting given her Consett roots. “This isn’t going to beat us. People are saying that’s it, we can’t get to the Olympics. But we know we can. We haven’t come this far to give up now.”

What followed next was one of the most uplifting sporting stories in many a year. Fuelled by a burning sense of injustice, McNeill poured her heart and soul into promoting a crowd-funding initiative that surpassed its £30,000 target in less than a fortnight.

To date, more than £40,000 has been raised, and that money paid for McNeill to complete the World Cup season, enabling her to realise her dream of competing at the Winter Olympics.

On Wednesday, in partnership with her Welsh team-mate Moore, she made history as she became the first British female to finish in the top eight of a Winter Olympic bobsleigh competition. Given that she is only 24, there is every chance she will be even better when Beijing host the next Games in 2022. In four years’ time, a first-ever British female bobsleigh medal should be a thoroughly realistic proposition.

McNeill’s story could hardly be more inspiring, yet before she can turn her thoughts towards the next four years, she needs some clarity about the way in which her sport will be funded. And therein lies the issue. “We don’t want to be powered by the people anymore,” she said, in the aftermath of her fourth and final run in Pyeongchang. Better that, though, than suffer a repeat of the farce that unfolded four months ago.

The Winter Olympics have sparked an impassioned debate about the way in which British sport is funded, but in a number of instances, the discussions that have played out in the last few days have been muddled.

There are different methods for funding grassroots sport and competitors at the elite level, so while MP David Lammy was right to point out that the GB basketball team does not receive a penny from UK Sport, potentially jeopardising the ability to field home nations teams at April’s Commonwealth Games, the sport receives £4.7m from Sport England for investment at grassroots level. Perhaps that is insufficient, but that is a different debate.

Bobsleigh gets nothing for grassroots investment, but there is a UK Sport funding formula that is supposed to guarantee adequate support for the elite competitors that have a realistic chance of competing for Team GB at the next Winter Games.

Given that McNeill has just finished in the top eight at her first Winter Games, and that there is every chance that she will be even better in four years’ time, she deserves to be adequately funded. While UK Sport is yet to announce its funding plans for winter sports over the next four years, there will almost certainly be money available for bobsleigh. But how on earth can McNeill be confident about receiving it if there are not wholesale changes to the administrative structure that oversaw such a catastrophic overspend in the last Olympic cycle?

There have been changes in personnel at the top of the BBSA in recent months, but too many winter sports authorities have got themselves into a similar mess in the last few years to have any confidence that meaningful change will be enacted. To avoid a repeat of what McNeill has had to go through in the last few months, it is imperative that UK Sport begin to take direct control of how their money is spent.

It is simply not good enough to throw more good money after bad, and hope things will turn out better this time around. The BBSA let McNeill down dreadfully in October, and before UK Sport send more funds in their direction, they should demand a seat on the organisation’s board.

There should be complete transparency in how the BBSA spends its public money, with monthly reports revealing what is going where. If there had been similar openness in the past, perhaps the black hole that emerged in the autumn would not have become so crippling.

There also needs to be a wider review into how elite British sport is run, though. Too many bodies are stuck in the past, clinging to the same structures and policies that were created up to a century ago. They might have been relevant then; they certainly aren’t now.

The organisations that run elite sport in this country are too white, too male, too middle-aged and too middle-class. They no longer represent the sportspeople they are supposed to be supporting and nurturing, if indeed they ever did.

That is why the Football Association was able to get itself into such a shambolic mess over the dismissal of Mark Sampson from his position as manager of the England women’s team, and helps explain why a host of sports, including bobsleigh, have been accused of allowing bullying and abuse to become endemic within their elite programmes.

Too often, sports administrators are more interested in protecting the status quo than enacting positive change. That cannot be allowed to continue, otherwise more athletes will find themselves having to plead for public handouts in order to compete at the highest level.

To her credit, McNeill turned her own personal trauma to her advantage, using it as a powerful motivating force in the final gruelling months before the Games.

She was adamant the mistakes of others would not undo everything she had worked towards since she first took up bobsleigh as a teenager. Her refusal to back down clearly struck a nerve, hence the remarkable public support for her appeal.

It remains a disgrace she was put in that position, yet it will be an even bigger one if anything similar occurs in four years’ time.