A decade of under-performance at the Olympic Games has forced British judo to take a gamble.

The British squad returned from the Beijing Games in 2008 without a medal, one of the few major disappointments of an otherwise successful outing for Team GB, to face radical alterations to the way their sport worked.

In came a new head coach and sweeping changes to their preparation ahead of London 2012, drastically limiting the number of competitions in which they fought in favour of more time spent training.

Some of the team are delighted with the post-Beijing arrangements, but fewer tournaments has meant fewer ranking points for many up-and-coming British stars, who now face a tough time against the top seeds whenever they do turn up.

One member of the team, Sarah Clark, told me late last year that Britons were "getting hammered in the rankings" which in turn made it difficult for them to prove themselves.

Results at this week's World Championships, in Tokyo, will be an early indicator of how successful judo's reinvention has been - and other sports will be looking on.

"We're making all the improvements we want to see," Margaret Hicks, British Judo's performance director, told me as the team gathered ahead of the trip to Japan.

"We've tried to avoid putting players in for lots of competitions early on in the Olympic cycle. Now we need to start getting strategic and, after the World Championships, we have to start getting some players to pick up ranking points."

The plan, introduced alongside Frenchman Patrick Roux's appointment as head coach a month after Beijing, is fairly simple: hold back Britain's judo players from a large number of tournaments in which they would otherwise have fought, in order to maximise training time and development while minimising the risk of injury and burn-out.

With that, you also minimise the chance of earning precious ranking points, but that loss is catered for on two counts.

Firstly, Britain has received a generous allocation of 14 places at the 2012 Olympics as the host nation - one for each event, the maximum GB could have earned anyway. So ranking points, used to determine everyone else's eligibility for the London Games, won't help any more Britons get there.

Secondly, though ranking points determine the initial seeding at competitions (hence Britain's players, sometimes bereft of points, are currently susceptible to facing their toughest rivals in the opening rounds), the ranking list used for London only takes into account the past two years of events up to May 2012.

Hence Hicks wants to ramp things up now that ranking points earned will go directly towards the 2012 event. But how easy is that on the athletes? Can you flick competitive edge on and off like a light switch? Can Britain's judo players, some starting from scratch in the rankings, go out and claw their way up the ladder in the next two years?

"It has had a big effect," said Karina Bryant, who competes in the women's +78kg category.

Bryant, 31, goes to Tokyo as a defending world silver medallist and, with Euan Burton, leads the British team in terms of experience and achievements. She is ranked 16th in her category, with 342 ranking points, of which 150 came from that last silver medal - a hefty chunk. (By comparison, the +78kg world number one Lucija Polavder, of Slovenia, has 1,130 points. The PDF file listing all the world rankings, published regularly by the International Judo Federation, is well worth a read. I've picked out the British ones at the bottom of this blog.)

"Probably the majority of the team going into the World Championships are going without a ranking. But it's not London - we're trying to prepare with the bigger picture in sight," Bryant added.

"It's not going to be the best, going into the competition without a ranking, but if you want to win you have to beat whoever you're going to have to fight anyway. If you have a hard first fight then your second or third maybe won't be so hard: you've got to get on with it.

"For me, it's perfect. I've got a lot of experience behind me so at the Europeans and Worlds I want to be performing, and hitting them as targets on the way. It is hard for me because it's something new to see the bigger picture instead of always trying to perform every year.

"But I'm getting a lot of confidence from it, even though I'm possibly not getting the results I want or fighting as much as I want - I can still see the progression and that's what I need."

Others, like Clark, are less convinced. And, at British Judo's high performance centre in Dartford, Clark's team-mate Faith Pitman admitted she hasn't been a huge fan of this approach.

"I find the more competitions I do, the better I get and the more attuned to competitions I get," the Todmorden 25-year-old told me. She is ranked 43rd in the women's -63kg category, and her 118 ranking points would have to be almost quadrupled to break into the world's top 10.

"Having said that, with the new rule changes and stuff, it's been quite interesting for me to have more of an overview of my training and adapt my judo.

"There are good and bad points. I think it's working for me now - but we'll see, won't we? Hopefully, over the next six months things will really come into place."

This is by no means the first time in recent years that judo has confronted upheaval head-on. Internationally, the IJF changed a number of rules at the start of 2010 (and this Worlds marks the first such tournament to allow two competitors per country in each event, doubling the field). Domestically, this is one of several initiatives the British are trying in a quest for Olympic success.

Two years ago, my colleague Matt Slater found a similar split in the camp over plans to relocate the entire elite team, including Scottish duo Clark and Burton, to Dartford. It was notable that, while I met up with the majority of the team in Dartford ahead of their flight to Tokyo, both Clark and Burton had remained in Edinburgh.

But a willingness to openly raise big issues around where and how to train, or where and when to compete, and make critical changes accordingly is one sometimes sadly lacking in Olympic sports.

In taking such bold steps to address a lack of performance, judo follows in the footsteps of the likes of British Cycling, who adopt a similar approach to competitions - using them as tools for Olympic success only where necessary.

Other sports like handball or volleyball cannot afford to take that risk and throw themselves into all the events they can get, each of which presents invaluable exposure to a higher level of competition. Certainly, when I met them earlier this summer, the GB men's handball team could only talk of their desire for more time on court.

Judo's gear change may yet help elevate them to the ranks of failing sports which turned themselves into Olympic success stories. Only time, and results from Tokyo onwards, will tell.

So you know what to look out for over the next week, Hicks expects her team to produce four to six top-eight finishes at the World Championships, and that would meet the targets set by funding body UK Sport. Bryant and Pitman agree that two to three medals is a realistic ambition for the British.

"Maybe it's good for the youngsters to get used to this approach early on," Bryant concluded

"I don't think they've got anything to fret about, they're in good hands and they have to have confidence in the people they're working with.

"I think it's working well and if they see the likes of me being confident with the programme, maybe the players who don't have as much confidence will settle down a bit, get some hard work done and reap the rewards next year and in 2012."

Most British judo players are beginning to pick up ranking points now that we are into the two-year period which counts towards London 2012, so the situation is not as dire as it may once have looked.

However, the effect of the British approach to competitive judo in this period is noticeable in most instances.

Current world rankings from the International Judo Federation
(Available in full as a PDF file, correct as of 6 September 2010

WOMEN

** The data for Gibbons and Woolcock applies to the-70kg category, in which they usually fight, but they have been moved to the -78kg category for the World Championships. Britain has a surfeit of talent at -70kg so the coaching staff have made the decision to give four athletes an outing rather than two.

I've been in Basildon working on a row which is at the heart of 2012's Olympic promise - how do you encourage young people to take up sport?

The council in the town, east of London, is building a £38 million "Sporting Village" which includes an Olympic-size swimming pool and sports hall.

It is hoped that some international teams will want to use the facilities as a training camp in the run-up to 2012.

There's no doubt that people in Basildon are going to benefit from the top-class facilities in the long term.

But there's a big problem...

More than a third of the funding is coming from Olympic grants but the council wants to raise another £12 million by selling off public space for housing.

That may mean taking away green space where many children play for the first time.

Three of the six sites facing development are controversial with online protests and petitions against the plans.

I met a group of residents who are very angry that a rare patch of green space where children play could be taken away from them. One told me that people couldn't afford to go to the new Sporting Village while their green space was free.

It's an interesting question. And I reckon the Basildon scenario is probably being repeated in other places up and down the country.

Of course, it's crucial to build facilities where children can try out all sorts of sports, especially when it's raining and snowing outside.

But at the same time, children need a place near where they live where it's safe to go and kick a football about or play cricket or rounders.

Are we getting this right in this country? Do we have enough facilities in place so that we can take advantage of the buzz of the Games to encourage kids to take up sport?

I feel the answer to this depends on where you live.

Mexican wave at Twickenham. Getty Images

Olympic organisers have a big lesson to learn from some some chaotic crowd scenes which I experienced at Twickenham at the opening of the new domestic rugby season at the weekend.

Having stopped people from taking drink cans into the stadium, presumably because they could be used as missiles, the bars still sold plastic bottles of coke and cider to spectators.

Sounds harmless? Well, far from it when the bottles are flying into your face and landing on your children from a great height.

In the second half of the Wasps-Harlequins game, the crowd got carried away with a Mexican wave and starting throwing anything they could find into the air; bottles, cups and cardboard beer glass holders.

My friends and I were forced to get our children (all junior rugby players) out of the stadium in the middle of the half because the rubbish being thrown down on us was dangerous. One cider bottle hit me in the face. Stewards and police were powerless to stop it.

It was hardly a great advert for Aviva's new sponsorship of Premiership rugby and I won't be heading back to Twickenham in a hurry.

In fact, I plan to return the tickets I have for the forthcoming autumn internationals to my rugby club because I can't risk taking my son to the game and getting injured. I also prefer to watch matches until the end, rather than having to leave early because it is too dangerous to stay.

The 2012 Olympics have to learn from this. Given that Coca-Cola is an Olympic sponsor and its products will be sold in the Olympic Park, it is crucial that bottles are not sold at all to spectators. Just pour the drinks into a plastic cup. It's hardly rocket science.

There is nothing wrong with a Mexican wave (even though I hate them) and spectators can, of course, get excited if they want, as we all hope they will during the Games. But stadium organisers have to think seriously about what they sell to spectators because a bit of fun can soon turn nasty.

There's been a flurry again recently about how the Internet is changing the way we think - and whether it's making us better informed or actually more stupid. Whatever your conclusion on that debate, there's zero doubt about one thing: the way we consume media is changing. The old certainties have gone.

I know myself that being able to watch the BBC iPlayer on my main television at home has meant I now watch a lot more TV on-demand than I do live; and it's a trend that's growing fast. We can also see the massive growth in video consumption on this website: from being text-based a decade ago, people now expect to be able to consume audio-video action, interviews and reporting. And it's because of the changing behaviour of our audiences in the UK that we set out our ambitions for London 2012 - that you'll be able to watch and listen whenever and wherever you want to.

Now, none of this is saying that traditional programmes don't matter anymore. They clearly do - hence the success this summer of Sherlock and Rev, or the weekly journalism in Panorama; and special sports shows like the Alex Higgins programme this week which was watched by almost three million people. Those formats are still highly valued.

So what I'm setting out here is not either/or but it's certainly both/and: we need the classic crafted longer-duration programmes but we also have to deliver content in ways that suit the technology and audience needs of the 21st century. That's why we created World Olympic Dreams not in the first instance as a programme but as something that could play across all our platforms as shorter films and reports. It has still proved puzzling to one or two people that it's not a "programme" slotted in to BBC One - and yet we're now getting the evidence that this approach is working even better than we anticipated.

You may have caught the extraordinary World Olympic Dreams film in which Luol Deng, one of the world's highest paid sports stars, returned to his native Sudan. If not, you can watch it here (see what I mean about whenever and wherever...) And here is how it was played across our established broadcasting services in just one day:

0500 - BBC World News tv
0600 - BBC World News tv
0740 - Radio 5 Live UK
0800 - BBC World News tv
1000 - BBC World News tv
1100 - BBC World News tv
1100 - BBC World Service radio
1200 - BBC World News tv including a live correspondent report
1200 - BBC World Service radio
1300 - BBC World News tv
1400 - BBC World News tv
1500 - BBC World Service radio
1600 - BBC World Service radio
1700 - BBC News Channel UK
1700 - BBC World News tv
1800 - The Six O'Clock News on BBC One
1930 - BBC News Channel
2100 - BBC World Service Newshour
2100 - BBC World News tv
2200 - The Ten O'Clock News on BBC One
2200 - The World Tonight, Radio 4
2230 - Newsnight, BBC Two
2300 - BBC World News tv
2400 - World News America

And it was also a special 30 minute programme for Crossing Continents on Radio 4 and for BBC World Service - as well as being online as text. The overall result: tens of millions of people at home and abroad have seen or heard a story about a basketball player who's hoping to be part of London 2012 - and his is just one of the couple of dozen stories that we'll return to in the next two years. This "News-based approach", as one gently critical person called it, gets far more consumption than any long-form programme ever would.

What this also does is give more audience access than ever before to a wider range of events. The recent World Paralympic Swimming Championships are a good example, with another long list of BBC reporting courtesy of our Disability Sport Executive Tony Garrett:

• Seven daily online video packages - apart from the obvious top stories from the day there was a daily editorial angle (which included some pre-filming items) to talk about the personalities and stories of the sport.
• Footage on Breakfast Sport and the BBC News channel Sport 24
• Exclusive interview about Natalie Du Toit's decision to retire from Olympic/Paralympic competition after 2012 which ran on BBC World News, the News Channel in the UK and 5 Live
• Three 5 Live Sports Extra programmes totalling seven hours of output
• Daily sports news for the 5 Live sports desks
• Daily TV/Radio items fed to BBC Nations and Regions
• Daily written online reports
• Items for Radio 4
• Additional stories covering the new swimming star American Mallory Weggeman (eight gold medals), interviews with six top international swimmers to watch out for as we move forward towards 2012 for the Website and World Service and ones with swimmers on Two Years to the Paralympics

So we believe we can show massive benefits already from changing the way we deliver content - and it reflects our commitments to London 2012 being the biggest-ever digital experience for the UK and, within the limits of our rights agreements, the wider world. Just to reiterate: programmes matter too, and we have some fascinating ones in production - not least the Twenty Twelve sitcom. However, we'd be limiting our ambitions if we stuck to older formats alone; and this way we're confident we can involve and enthuse millions more people.

Here's a sentence you could well hear in the run-up to London 2012:

"Smith is certain to medal after he top-scored in the first round."

But it's the kind of use of language that prompted a letter this week from a former BBC News reporter Michael Cole, whose plea is a simple one. Sport, he writes, shouldn't give anyone "a licence to inflict cruelty upon the English language"; and if we maintain standards then "the enjoyment of the Olympics will be enhanced for millions of people."

Michael cites a couple of examples of what he dislikes:

"Is Radcliffe going to medal?" is, in his view, "not only tortuous but it sounds as if it might be rude".

And the use of "lap" inappropriately in swimming amounts to "slavish copying of ignorant American terminology. Swimmers swim lengths, not laps. Anyone speaking of 'laps' in the swimming pool should have his or her microphone confiscated."

'To medal' or not 'to medal'?

My personal view is, whatever you think about the individual examples, I'm with Michael in spirit. I realise I'm running the risk of sounding like a candidate for Grumpy Old Men. But good use of language should be the hallmark of sports journalism and commentary just as it is for all broadcasting.

The sentence I quoted near the top is much easier on the ear if you say "Smith is certain to win a medal after he was top scorer in the first round". According to the online Oxford English Dictionary "medal" can be a verb - but it's one of those Americanisms that's crept across the Atlantic.

Even that, though, is some miles better than a horror I heard in a programme last weekend. It was an interview asking who was going "to podium" in a sport event - which I take it to mean who was going to finish in the top three. The OED doesn't accept "podium" as a verb so it's certainly not established use; and it seems ugly and unnecessary.

Now, in a phone chat with Michael Cole we agreed that English is a language that always changes and its beauty is in the fact it's never static. But Michael's closing paragraph in his letter is a powerful one: "As Stratford is the only Olympic venue mentioned in Chaucer, I think you must respect our beloved language. Please, tell your people to speak effectively - not for effect."

So what do you think? Is it only old fogeys who wince at "to podium" and "to medal", and does it matter if we adopt more American sporting language like "two-time winner"? If you have pet hates, let us know; and we'll try to make sure the offenders don't podium in 2012.