By Mark Staniforth, PA Sport, Calgary

Sports Minister Richard Caborn did his bit to boost the morale of Britain's Winter Olympic team at their holding camp in Calgary on Tuesday.

Caborn joined with his colleagues and members of the press in a curling challenge match of such dazzling ineptitude it put the talents of British captain Hammy McMillan and Co. into sharp perspective.

Afterwards, with stones scattered all over the ice apart from anywhere in the vicinity of the target circle, Caborn admitted: "I don't think the government versus the press has done the image of curling very good at all. It was perhaps the first scoreless draw in the sport's history."

Caborn was rather steadier on his feet as he toured the stunning facilities maintained by the Canadian Olympic Development Agency, the legacy organisation from the 1988 Calgary Winter Games.

And he acknowledged that the venues and the myriad of programmes which attract youngsters into them brought home the reality of what needs to be done to produce a comparable level of success in Britain.

"I thought our own universities such as Loughborough and Bristol were good in terms of developing sport but clearly it is considerably better here," Caborn told PA Sport.

"When you look at how they have integrated the whole of sport, academia, health and development issues then you realise that they are well ahead of where we are.

"We've got to get our act together back in the UK. Even though we're investing the money we are not investing it into a kind of structure which is going to get the good results which they get here in Canada."

To that end Caborn has invited Roger Jackson, Calgary University's professor credited with starting and developing the legacy programme, to Britain later this year to discuss, along with bodies ranging from the government to the British Olympic Association and the health service, laying the foundations for a similar scheme.

"The experience Calgary has had from 1988 onwards proves you can actually achieve much better integration and therefore get much better returns on an investment than we are at the moment.

"We clearly need a more strategic think and closer working partnerships. In Canada they are investing probably not as much money as we are investing, but they are gaining much bigger rewards."

Nevertheless, when Caborn spoke to British team members at the official hotel he will have noted some of the success which lottery funding has had in improving the chances of the Winter Olympians.

He hardly needs reminding that the last time Britain was represented on top of the medal podium was by Torvill and Dean in Sarajevo in 1984, and that the last Winter Games in Nagano yielded a solitary bronze for the men's four-man bobsleigh crew.

Britain goes to Salt Lake City with perhaps the highest number of medal hopes for quite some time, with the men's and women's curling teams and snowboarder Lesley McKenna possessing genuine chances of creeping into the top three and skeleton star Alex Coomber the red-hot favourite to clinch gold.

Caborn added: "This is the first time the Winter Olympic team have been able to come to a camp of this nature.

"Two thirds of them haven't been to an Olympics before and being here in Calgary with some of the more experienced team members allows them to feel more confident and to prepare far better than had they been at home.

"Still, despite investing quite heavily, what I think is worrying is that we have not got the numbers of athletes at the very top level that we perhaps ought to, and there has been a steady decline over the last 20 or 30 years.

"We have got to look at the depth and developing the base if we are to going to continue to perform in a consistent way."