UK ATHLETICS chief executive Niels de Vos insists he is happy with the funding given to the sport ahead of the London Olympics and has backed Britain’s athletes to ‘‘surprise people’’ in 2012.

Athletics was yesterday awarded £25.1m by UK Sport, down from the £26.5m allocated before the Beijing Games last summer.

Britain’s athletes won four medals in Beijing, failing to meet their target of five, and De Vos admitted the cut could have been more severe had he not implemented a recent restructuring of UK Athletics.

One high-profile change saw the appointment of Dutchman Charles van Commenee as head coach after performance director Dave Collins’ contract was terminated after Beijing.

De Vos said: ‘‘It’s absolutely as expected, there’s no surprises for me there. We’ve already made a lot of the changes to our programme, both in terms of tightening up the management of it and the numbers of athletes that we fund.

‘‘We dropped that by some 20 per cent a couple of weeks back, so no surprises. The bottom line is I’m grateful to UK Sport for supporting us because there were changes that needed to be made.

‘‘I’ve been discussing those with them since pre-Beijing.

I made the changes and they’ve backed me and given me the money I need to make it happen, so overall, I’m pretty pleased.

‘‘Had we not made the changes, or had they not backed my plans, I guess it (the cut) could have been a bit more severe.

‘‘I don’t think there are going to be many things I can’t buy that I would have been able to, it’s just a funding package in a different landscape.

‘‘Athletics will be the showcase sport of 2012. I think the key thing is Britain’s performance within that showcase and all the changes I’ve made have been geared towards 2012.’’ De Vos added that the appointment of Van Commenee would be key to raising the profile of British athletics after the relative disappointment of Beijing.

‘‘Charles is a 2012 appointment and he and I are working closely with UK Sport to make sure we get as many Brits into finals as possible and as many medals as possible,’’ he said.

‘‘Some of that is funded by UK Sport, but not all of it.

There will be sports (within athletics) where we still think we can find finalists and maybe some medals.”