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A chorus of sporting voices has swung behind the drive to improve sport in schools and communities following Britain’s success at the London Olympics.
Top athletes and politicians said Team GB’s performance must be seized on, and warned against allowing the legacy of the Games to be lost.
Teachers should bring back competition in every school and more people should volunteer at local sports clubs, they said.
Jessica Ennis, the gold medal-winning heptathlete, said children needed to learn that competition was positive.
David Cameron claimed that teachers “don’t want to join in” and ministers suggested that the medal success was unlikely to be repeated without a significant change.
Roger Black, the former Olympic athlete, argued that sport was not currently valued in schools, while champions including Sir Matthew Pinsent and Laura Trott spoke of the importance of funding for sports.
Tessa Jowell, the shadow Olympics minister, said all political parties should commit to a 10-year plan for sport to build on public enthusiasm for London 2012.
Young people face an obesity epidemic, with many offered few opportunities for the sort of competitive sports that used to be the norm. Only about four in 10 children regularly take part in such sports.
Many clubs are seeing a surge of interest from the young but do not have the resources to offer them the opportunities that could help produce future medal winners.
The Daily Telegraph today launches the Keep the Flame Alive campaign to increase volunteering and return competitive sport to all schools.
“I started doing athletics when I was nine years old,” Ennis said. “I had loads of support from my school and PE teachers.
“I think it’s really important to have great sport in schools and teach it well and obviously create great role models. That will make a huge, huge difference.” She said it was important to “teach kids that it is not a bad thing to be competitive” and that she hoped some of the thousands of volunteers and visitors to the Olympics would be inspired to help run local clubs.
The Prime Minister welcomed the campaign as attention would shortly turn to the legacy of the London Olympics, whose motto is “inspire a generation”. “For the moment everyone is revelling in a golden summer of British sport, with Britain showing the world what we can deliver in all sorts of ways,” said Mr Cameron. “But in a few days it will be time to focus on the legacy and I welcome the intervention and ideas of the Telegraph and its readers.”
Jeremy Hunt, the Culture, Media and Sport Secretary, said that action in schools and local communities was essential to the legacy of the Games.
“The Olympics have highlighted what a fantastic sporting nation Britain is and we want to harness that inspiration to ensure that more children take part in competitive sport,” he said.
“The past few weeks have shown the importance of competitive sport and we want to ensure it is at the heart of the legacy left behind after the Olympics.”
Labour added its support to the drive to protect the Olympic legacy, with Dame Tessa Jowell calling for a cross-party consensus on school sports and a ten-year plan to build on the public enthusiasm for the Games.
The Shadow Minister for the Olympics said it was time to put arguments about what happened in the past behind us and focus on the future.
The important question was “how do we get every child having sport as part of their lives and how do we get children competing for the sake not only of children developing their sporting potential but also for the read-across to other parts of children’s lives?” she told the BBC, adding: “Schools that major on sports often show better academic results.”
Ms Jowell said: "This has got to go all the way from the child coming into reception class in primary school, taking part in PE, right through to our extraordinary medallists.
"Chris Hoy is absolutely right, it has been the investment in elite training which has created stability for high performance training for those athletes. We have got to make sure that money continues."
Olympic athletes lined up to back the call for a change in culture. Michael Jamieson, silver medallist in the 200 metre breaststroke, said: “I started at a small community run club, Scotia, in Bishopbriggs, Glasgow, and all the coaches were volunteers. Without them I wouldn’t be here.”
Nick Dempsey, 31, who won a silver in windsurfing, added: “At the end of the day, sport is about competition and it’s about learning to deal with the emotions involved.”
However, there are concerns that schools will struggle to cope with the expected rise in interest in sport. Fatima Whitbread, the former world champion javelin thrower, said: “What concerns me is a sudden influx of young people coming into sports clubs and the schools are going to struggle.”
There were also suggestions that schools did not place enough emphasis on sport, which was often eclipsed by a focus on academic performance.
Black, who won a silver medal in the 400m in 1996, told ITV’s Daybreak programme: “We have to recognise the importance of sport to schools.
“The problem is sport is just way down the agenda when it comes to the time children spend at school. It’s just not taken seriously enough.”
The Government has already faced accusations that it was undermining sport with the potential removal of funding.
The Prime Minister insisted that simply spending more was not the solution. “The problem has been too many schools not wanting to have competitive sport, some teachers not wanting to join in and play their part,” Mr Cameron said.
“So if we want to have a great sporting legacy for our children — and I do — we have got to have an answer that brings the whole of society together to crack this, more competition, more competitiveness, more getting rid of the idea you can’t have competitive sports days. We need a big cultural change — a cultural change in favour of competitive sports.”
But for many athletes, funding has also been essential to their success.
Trott, the double gold cycling medallist, told The Independent: “Funding is very important – it is the key to our sport, really. We would be lost without it.”
And Sir Matthew, the Olympic rowing gold medallist, warned that funding cuts could hit swimming, gymnastics, equestrianism and triathlon, arguing that “the only solution is to give sport a higher priority.”
Writing in The Times, he said: “Perennially it is dismissed as a side issue in Whitehall, a little add-on in the Department of Culture and Media.”
But identifying talent “needs money and commitments from politicians who, far too often are used to making decisions that pay off while they are still in office,” he said.
Critics say that sport in state schools began to suffer in the 1980s, when councils started selling playing fields and industrial action by teachers’ unions resulted in staff refusing to run sports during lunch breaks or after hours.
Teachers said that the claim that they did not want to take part in school sports was “extremely rude” and that the biggest threat to physical education was cuts in funding. The National Union of Teachers called the Prime Minister’s comments “foolhardy”.
Alan Watkinson, the former PE teacher of Mo Farah, the 10,000m champion, said: “We need to look much broader than teachers.
“Successive governments have asked teachers to do more and more.
“Teachers work extremely hard. We need to look outside of that, we need to look at teaching assistants, people in administration roles, community and parents.”
Labour said the Government had removed a target for each child to do at least two hours’ sport a week. Ministers claimed it was an “unenforceable aspiration” that led to unnecessary red tape.
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