Last week, UK Sport announced it was withdrawing all funding from four Olympic sports. One of those sports is water polo. South Shields’ Angie Winstanley- Smith, a member of the team that played at the 2012 Olympics, explains why the decision is so badly misguided

OUR journey began on the day London was awarded the 2012 Olympics – July 6, 2005. I was with fellow water polo players Chloe Wilcox and Rosie Morris.

Chloe ran into my room in the student accommodation we rented screaming: “Angie – we’re going to the Olympics.”

Back then, the GB women’s water polo team had finished 16th in the World Championships, a competition that saw us pay to go to the tournament ourselves, staying in small selfcatering apartments in the centre of Barcelona.

I was the only British player to be playing abroad (I played in France from 2004-2009) and the water polo high-performance centre had just been created. I am sure the likes of Chloe and Rosie can tell some funny stories about living off £5 a week.

The high-performance centre was created before we knew about the London Games. We had already sacrificed many things to be the best we could. The Olympic bid just made it easier because, for the first time, British water polo had money to invest to compete with the best nations in the world.

The training schedule was tough, with a professional coach demanding professional training from girls who received very little financial support. Many girls balanced full-time jobs with full-time training – 5am starts, 9pm finishes.

But the results started to come and we finished second in the European B Championships in 2007, giving us a European ranking of tenth.

During the next five years, our programme evolved dramatically. With increased funding, many of the girls were able to work fewer hours and train more, and we started to make progress.

However, in January 2009, our budget was cut by 75 per cent. Back in England, I went back to university and supported myself through regular student loans.

A squad of 20 players started the final journey towards the Olympics, even though we were far from sure we would be given a spot as the British Olympic Association didn’t want to send any sport which wasn’t up to the standards they had set.

With results continuing to improve, UK Sport increased our funding in January 2010, enabling us to enter the World League. We beat a strong Italian team and rose to seventh in Europe.

Continued support enabled us to compete in the Hungarian national league.

We beat a Greek team that went on to be world champions and qualified for the European Championships for the first time in 15 years, securing our place at the Olympics.

Our Olympic results speak for themselves – we lost our quarterfinal against a Spanish team who went on to win the silver medal. We were as good as them – we were just very new to the world of top-level water polo.

THE Olympics changed my life. I have trained ten times a week since the age of 12 – that’s 15 years of freezing cold swimming pools before the sun has come up.

I lived my dreams, and I will never forget the moment I stepped out to play Russia in my first game and saw my family crying because they were so proud of me. That is what the Games meant to me.

The year after the Olympics was always going to be tricky, and the funding issue was always around the corner. In December 2012, UK Sport announced an incredible amount of funding was to be attributed to British water polo, commencing in May last year. This was exactly what we needed to be able to create a strong water polo legacy from the grassroots up.

We appointed a new full-time coach, Kostas Vamvakaris, and 13 girls signed contracts with clubs around Europe. Last month, we qualified for the European Championships for the second time in a row. That proved we belong at the top level.

This brings me to the present.

As it stands, British water polo doesn’t even have enough money to send its already qualified team to the Europeans.

Where does that leave the players? Devastated.

We are all spread across Europe, many relying on funding from UK Sport to live.

We made the decision to go abroad to help move British water polo forward. Our leagues run until June. Our money stops in April. We cannot leave because we have committed to a team for the season, but we can’t start to plan our life after polo either. And that is just the senior squad.

What about legacy? Our junior girls, born in 1993, finished eighth at the Junior World Championships in September, the best-ever result by a British team on the world stage. They will be 23 in Rio, and 27 in Tokyo, the perfect age for a team-sport player.

Should we really say to these girls that their dreams of being an Olympian are over? Our London legacy has effectively been thrown on the scrapheap.

How can UK Sport have believed in us last May, then barely eight months later, when we have all committed to the cause, decide we deserve no funding whatsoever?

We have a responsibility as women in sport to help young girls get involved.

And what about the spirit of the Games? The message that was sent out to everyone around London 2012 was to get involved, a message that now sounds redundant.

Instead, I fear for the future of our sport.