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U.K. – 8 sports K.O

After the crisis hit, though, a £50 million shortfall forced U.K. Sport to cut back, employing what it calls its “no-compromise” principle: Only those sports viewed most likely to yield medals would get full funding. The policy means that while the overall budget for London 2012 is slightly larger than for Beijing 2008, eight sports — fencing, handball, shooting, table tennis, volleyball, water polo, weightlifting and wrestling — are having to make do with budgets as small as one-quarter of what they had for the last Olympics. “We have to prioritize,” says John Steele, chief executive of U.K. Sport. “If you try to please everybody, you’ll fail on all fronts.”