• UK Sport performance director to stand down
• Keen will take on new advisory role in May
The man who masterminded Britain's best Olympic medal haul for over a century is to step down from his role three months before the London Games. Peter Keen, the performance director at UK Sport for the past eight years, who is widely credited with building the system that led to unprecedented success in Beijing and raised expectations for London, will take on a new part-time advisory role in May.
UK Sport, which will invest £143m of lottery and exchequer money in Olympic sport this year, said the changes would not impact on preparations for the London Games. Its chief executive, Liz Nicholl, said the search for Keen's successor would begin in June in the hope of appointing someone to the key role by January next year.
"At what point do you recognise that you've done your bit and your legs are getting tired? And what excites you?" said Keen. "You've got to be wanting to do it with a certain passion that's verging on the irrational at times. As most of the bits that were motivating me got done I started to think about what I did next. It's a bit more about getting back to where I came from, a bit more active duty."
In his new role as special adviser for performance, Keen will work more closely with individual sports and performance directors and is also expected to operate outside UK Sport as a consultant working with other sports and businesses. "My bit of the work feels pretty complete. In terms of what I can personally change about the London outcome, that ended quite a while ago," he said.
"In terms of the planning for Rio, that was mostly in the bank in December when the board signed off some pretty fundamental stuff about the rules of the game going forward. At a strategic level like this, decisions shouldn't be about personalities. They should be about the wisdom of collective expertise and a damn good, robust process."
Keen, a former cycling competitor and coach who was performance director at British Cycling between 1998 and 2003 and helped lay the foundations for that sport's recent success, compared his decision to step down from the role to the team time trial. "If you stay on the front too long, you start to hear people freewheeling behind you because they're chomping at the bit to come through. If you swing off too late, you can be so shot that you come off the back. I'm not going to do that," he said.
"My legs are getting a bit tired, there's some very fresh legs behind me. I'm going to nip in the back of the string and I'm going to be there supporting them."
The sports minister Hugh Robertson said: "In high performance sport, you're judged by the medal table. Peter Keen's legacy is the 47 medals we won in Beijing and the system he has developed that will take us to London and through to Rio. He is the cog in the middle of the wheel that has driven that high performance system."
Unveiling the latest results of UK Sport's Mission 2012 tracking system, Nicholl said that Team GB remained on track to finish fourth in the medal table for the Olympics and second for the Paralympics, delivering more medals across more sports than ever before. At the next Mission 2012 briefing in June, the final one before the Games, UK Sport is expected to unveil individual medal targets for each sport.