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As prime minister, Brown has promoted England's World Cup bid while Cameron is a keen jogger and cyclist

Don't expect Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg to be fielding many sporty questions in the Prime Ministerial TV debates, though.

, the and the continuing controversy surrounding football governance in England have all put sport on the political map. But, besides Brown's use of terrace chants and other strained footballing analogies to attack Cameron, it remains some way down the agenda.

Quite right, . How can anyone seriously sustain a case to keep sport at its current funding levels when hospitals, schools and the armed forces are potentially facing severe cuts?

But the great fear among the people who run sport is that even before the Olympic flame has been lit in London, their budgets will have been slashed and burnt.

The Treasury has already ordered the - the Government department which allocates money from taxpayers and the lottery to sporting bodies - to find £60m in savings by 2012/2013.

Sport is a devolved issue, which allows Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland greater say in how they spend their money for sport, but UK Sport is funded directly from Whitehall.

So although the Government promised to ring fence the and the £800m for Sport England to boost participation up until 2012, sport has a major problem looming with the next Government spending review in 2011.

The commitments may have been well intentioned, but they could quite feasibly turn out to be meaningless.

Any drop in funding is only going to make it harder to deliver on the Olympic legacy promises made by Lord Sebastian Coe. Nevertheless, all three of the main UK political parties have included sporting pledges in their manifestos, launched this week.

Labour says it will create a "" off the back of the Olympics. There are also pledges to maintain sporting integrity and the well trailed commitment to help football fans buy stakes in their clubs. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, there is no mention of the possible fall in funding. Yet, the sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe told me last week: "No one can say that there won't be cuts."

The Conservatives do partially address the issue by promising - reducing the number of funds it runs from five to four, meaning a 4% increase in the money sport receives.

, meanwhile, give sport only a passing mention, although the party's sports spokesman, Don Foster, said they would raid money lying in dormant betting accounts and make tax changes to help boost any shortfall.

Sport England hopes lottery money will plug any gap caused by a drop in direct funding by the Treasury. But over at UK Sport, the threat is considered so serious it is already drawing up a document called "Life after London", which will set out the arguments for maintaining the current levels of funding.

When it comes down to it, the money sport receives remains relatively insignificant when compared with the . And having invested so heavily in sport over the last 10 years, it would seem counter-productive to start making cutbacks just as the Olympic party starts.

But while they all talk a good game on sport, we will only see how valuable it is to our politicians once the election is won and the new Government works out where the axe will fall.