Sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe today warned Britain's athletes that they must win a record haul of medals at the Beijing Olympics or risk having their funding cut in the build-up to the 2012 Games in London.

The stark message came on the day that Sutcliffe's boss - Culture Secretary Andy Burnham - confidently predicted that the nation could overtake the Australians in the final medal table.

UK Sport, the government agency in charge of elite sport, has set a target of between 35 and 41 medals and Sutcliffe is adamant that serious questions would be asked if unprecedented levels of funding granted by the body did not see Team GB return victorious.

He said: "If you look at it from public finance, we've put £500million into elite sports and what we've got to try to do is make sure there's a recovery of that in terms of the outcomes.

"It wasn't a target that we put to UK Sport, UK Sport themselves decided that's what we should expect from the amount of investment that's gone in to this Olympics.

"Every Games is a Games in its own right and you want to see success.

"I think that we would hope to see that expectation met."

The 41-medal target would be Britain's best return from a non-boycotted Games since the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp and anything less than that haul would be investigated further.

Sutcliffe added: "We will have a review immediately after Beijing on the investment that we put in with UK Sport and looking at those sports that have been successful and those that haven't."

Burnham believes that target is realistic, though, and that the best prepared team to leave these shores will make the nation proud.

He said: "Australia are saying Britain are the ones to watch.

"Other countries now look to us as a country that got serious about sport and are now saying they are in danger of falling behind Team GB in the medal table."

But Colin Moynihan, chairman of the British Olympic Association, urged caution.

He said: "We want to go forward from Athens but it would be unwise to speculate how much further forward.

"What we can say is that compared to previous Games we have a team that is better prepared, better resourced and better financed than before."