By Ian Gordon, PA Sport, Paris

Athletics chief David Moorcroft has given national performance director Max Jones his full backing despite arguably Britain's worst-ever World Championship performance.

The team ended their campaign in Paris yesterday with four medals, doubling their tally on the final day, but none of them were gold and it left Britain back in 26th place in the table.

It was only the second time in nine editions of the worlds that a British team had failed to win a single gold, repeating the drought of Athens in 1997 when six medals were won including five silver.

The final medal tally at the Stade de France was two more than in Edmonton two years ago but then Jonathan Edwards, who announced his retirement before the latest championships got underway, struck triple jump gold.

"Max will be performance director until Athens," said UK Athletics chief executive Moorcroft, resisting any idea of change before next year's Olympics in Greece.

Jones, who oversaw a successful European Championships campaign in Munich last summer, said: "We don't go from heroes to zeroes in the space of a year.

"I am relieved because I set a target of four medals and we got them, although they might not have been the colours we would have liked.

"But I know the British public and what matters to them are gold medals. The athletes who under-performed here know who they are, they will be hurting and they won't need us to tell them.

"We have got to make sure that we get all our top athletes fit and on the line for Athens because then I believe we will deliver medals.

"I am still performance director and I am going off to Cyprus this week to look at a training camp for Athens."

The likes of Belarus, Lithuania, Mozambique and the Dominican Republic all finished ahead of Britain in the medal table although one gold would have been enough to lift the team to equal 10th spot with Greece.

Britain's medal hopes did take a battering even before the championships got underway with distance runner Paula Radcliffe, decathlete Dean Macey and triple jumper Ashia Hansen all not making the trip.

And they were further hit when the likes of sprinter Dwain Chambers, shot putter Carl Myerscough and 400m hurdler Natasha Danvers failed to live up to expectations.

Chambers was unable to take advantage of a lead and anchor the 4x100m relay team to victory over the United States last night when he was overtaken by a 200m specialist.

Darren Campbell, third in the 100m; Kelly Holmes, silver medallist in the 800m after making a late decision to switch events, and Hayley Tullett, with her unexpected 1500m bronze yesterday were the only other athletes to trouble the medals.