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UK Sport will double the funding given to 11 of the 12 marginal Olympic sports in the run up to the 2012 London Games as part of a wider £13m investment.

Sports such as handball, volleyball, fencing and shooting will benefit from a financial boost “based on clear evidence that they are performing well on their existing level of investment and deserve the opportunity to continue with more certainty”.

The only ‘basic-funded’ sport not to be granted an increase is table tennis, which has had its award deferred until next year while UK Sport works with officials to implement the performance changes needed to ensure success in 2012 and beyond.

The funding increase is made up of £6.5m from the Team 2012 programme, which is backed by Visa, and £6.5m of additional funds generated by UK Sport itself.

John Steele, chief executive of UK Sport, said: “These decisions are vital to our overall mission through to London, and represent what we believe to be the best use of the resources available from a performance perspective. While future funding can never be guaranteed, especially in such a difficult economic climate, they help to draw a ‘line in the sand’ around issues of funding and give sports a clear line of sight through to 2012.

“As always there can be arguments about how the cake is cut, but I am very confident we have done the best by British sport at this time.”

The announcement was welcomed by the governing bodies of the various marginal sports, some of which had taken a gamble by “front-loading” most of their existing funding in a bid to achieve the performance improvements that would entitle them to greater financial support.

Richard Callicott, president of British Volleyball, said: “This is fantastic news for British Volleyball. For the past year we have been working extremely hard to focus our efforts to ensure we had the ability to see all our athletes compete on home soil – but we took a big risk doing so.

“UK Sport has shown today that it has recognised the tremendous progress we have made and that our gamble was worth it, and we do now have much more certainty and ability to plan than yesterday.”