WINTER sports in this country have changed. Once something of a laughing stock when it came to anything to do with snow or ice, British athletes now find themselves competing at the highest level in a range of winter disciplines.

From slalom to snowboard, skeleton to slopestyle, the British team at next year’s Winter Olympics will feature a host of realistic medal prospects. As Durham ski cross star Emily Sarsfield put it so neatly when we spoke earlier this month, “it’s not Eddie the Eagle anymore.”

Except it is. Not when it comes to the athletes, who are every bit as committed, professional and talented as their equivalents on Team GB’s summer Olympics squads, but when it comes to the way in which winter sports are run in this country, it is hard to overstate just how shambolic things are.

Sarsfield knows all about that, with a ridiculous administrative wrangle having cost her a place at the last Winter Olympics in Sochi. British Ski and Snowboard refused to ratify her selection for the British team even though she had met the selection criteria for a place at the Games. After a lengthy series of appeals and inquiries, the British Olympic Association agreed to modify its selection process for future Games.

That was a mess, but it looks positively slick compared to the complete meltdown that has engulfed the British Bobsleigh and Skeleton Association (BBSA) in the last few weeks. If it wasn’t for the fact that people’s lives are being turned upside down by their mismanagement, there would be a degree of irony in the organisation going downhill much faster than the athletes they are supposed to be supporting.

Mica McNeill is Britain’s number one female bobsleigh driver. Born and raised in Consett, she has uprooted to a new home close to the University of Bath in order to pursue her dream of competing at the Winter Olympics.

She is supremely talented, having won a gold medal at the Junior World Championships in January. She is fiercely committed, training for up to six hours a day, six days a week, and travelling all over the world in order to gain as much experience as possible against rivals who receive much more funding and support than she has ever been granted.

She accepts there are limits to the financial backing available in a sport like bobsleigh, so at the end of last year, with her career beginning to really take off, she begged and borrowed from a variety of family members and scraped together around €50,000 in order to buy her own bobsleigh. There have been plenty of other sacrifices along the way.

What did she expect in return? The support of a professionally-run organisation charged with the task of getting her to the Winter Olympics. It should not have been too much to ask. The BBSA is the best-funded governing body in British winter sport and was awarded £10m of funding from UK Sport to cover the cycle leading up to next February’s Games in Pyeongchang.

That money is public money, with the vast majority having been raised via the National Lottery. The BBSA’s sole remit was to spend it properly. Clearly, it has done anything but.

This has not been a good year for the BBSA, a crisis-riddled organisation that is no longer fit for purpose. First, after a group of elite athletes complained of a “toxic atmosphere” in the sport of bobsleigh, an independent review was launched into allegations of bullying, racism and sexism.

Then, in response to the escalating crisis, UK Sport cut its financial support by £50,000. Shortly after, performance director Gary Anderson and head coach Dominik Scherrer both stepped down. Then, last week, senior BBSA officials called McNeill and her female team-mates into a meeting to tell them that an “overspend” meant they were no longer able to fund a women’s team.

It would have been a disgraceful revelation at any time, but just five months before the Winter Olympics are due to begin, it is utterly indefensible. Why has the shortfall only come to light now? What steps were taken to try to rectify the situation? And why is the BBSA continuing to fund three men’s teams at the same time as it pulling the plug on the entire female operation?

McNeill’s two-woman bob is ranked 13th in the world. The British men’s two-man bob is ranked 19th, with the four-man standing 12th. Why has the BBSA decided it is more important to have two men’s teams competing in Pyeongchang rather than one men’s and one women’s? As the reigning World Junior champion, McNeill has way more development potential than anyone in the men’s set-up.

The whole thing is a disgrace, and McNeill now finds herself trying to raise the £30,000 required to compete in this winter’s World Cup series, with a top-30 ranking on that stage a pre-requisite of Olympic selection.

As of this lunchtime, her funding page (www.gofundme.com/teammcneill) stood at more than £19,000, almost two-thirds of the target. If you can spare a pound or two, please log on.

McNeill’s refusal to give up on her dream is admirable, but she should never have been put in this position. The BBSA has failed miserably, and as a recipient of a huge amount of public money, the organisation should be disbanded and reconstituted with a brand new set of executives.

UK Sport’s funding policies give it a degree of oversight with regard to the bodies it supports, although its focus on medal potential means it is not a neutral arbiter of the organisations it works with.

As the ongoing crisis engulfing the Football Association with regard to former England Women’s boss Mark Sampson proves, sporting bodies are often incapable of policing themselves.

These are multi-million pound organisations, yet all too often, they are run like local Parish Councils. That has to change. It is time for the Government to step in to create a new code of practice that sporting bodies receiving public funding have to sign up to. That code must guarantee an acceptable level of transparency and oversight. Had that been in place at the BBSA, the problems that led to this week’s decision would surely have been spotted and addressed much earlier.

It is too late for such a change to help McNeill, and having charted her progress from her earliest days, I fervently hope she makes it to Pyeongchang. As Sarsfield can attest though, the authorities running British winter sport have an uncomfortable history of letting down those in their care.