Home advantage in the London 2012 Olympics is a precious benefit. Yet Andy Hunt, the chief executive of the British Olympic Association (BOA), has witnessed the levels to which medal hunger has driven the Canadian hosts of the Winter Olympics in February and he insists that Britain will welcome the world with a more traditional version of fair play.

Canada has staged two Olympics — the summer Games in Montreal in 1976 and the winter version in Calgary in 1988 — and never won a home-turf gold and, in the build-up to Vancouver 2010, the hosts are courting increasing unpopularity in their efforts to put that right.

Hunt and the BOA have been fighting a series of battles with the Canadians. They have discovered that they have been banned from using some of the facilities that they had booked for their pre-Games preparation.

The British are not alone in their dissatisfaction. A number of Americans have voiced their concern. “They’re playing nasty,” was how one speed-skater described the hosts. Last week, Katie Uhlaender, the American skeleton racer, spoke for the athletics community when she said, “The world is pretty disappointed.”

When London is the focus in 2012, one of the aspects on which the host nation will be judged is the manner in which home advantage is used. Do Team GB go for broke in an all-out pursuit of medals? Would the Games even be perceived as a success if Britain courted an image similar to that of the Canadians? Where does popularity end and the cold-blooded quest for victory take over? Hunt said, “There is nothing we would do that would not be seen as within the spirit of the Olympics.” But his attitude has clearly been coloured by the Vancouver experience.

Some of Britain’s best medal hopes in February lie in the skeleton. The ice track is in Whistler and is the fastest and most technical in the world, so practising on it brings a distinct advantage. However, by the start of the Games, the British skeleton athletes will have had 10 per cent of the training time of their Canadian opposition. And that is not for lack of requesting more. Pretty much the rest of the world has had it the same.

For its pre-Games preparation camp, the BOA has booked its team into Calgary, which possesses the only other ice track in Canada. The team leaders went out on a reconnaissance mission to Calgary in September, but only two weeks before that, Hunt received an e-mail saying that the skeleton track would be closed to them.

“They were very clear that they would only allow Russians on it,” Hunt said. He was then told that there was an economic rationale for this decision and he pointed out in reply that restraining trade was actually uneconomical. Hunt said: “That’s when they conceded and said: ‘What’s wrong with home advantage anyway?’ ”

There is, of course, nothing wrong with home advantage. Russia will have home advantage at the subsequent Winter Games, in Sochi in 2014, and no one will be surprised if privileges are reciprocated for Canada there.

“It’s one thing to have more access, but another to prevent other nations using facilities that aren’t even Olympic venues,” Hunt said. Some hasty manoeuvring may have minimised the damage done to the British skeleton sliders as they will now train in Lake Placid, New York, and Salt Lake City. But the BOA has come up against Canadian resistance elsewhere.

Another key British medal chance is in the curling and one of the most important aspects of it is game and ice analysis. Yet when the Britain team requested certain standard camera positions, they were refused. The cold shoulder went as far as the petty limitations the BOA found were being placed on venue car-park permits.

The BOA decided to fight its ground on both these issues, took its case to the IOC and last week discovered it had been successful.This week, the British sliders are using their allocated training slots on the Whistler track, yet Hunt does not expect to have any success with requests that they receive any more than the bare minimum that they have been given.

“We all understand the home team will always get more access to home facilities,” he said. “That’s natural. But things like this are concerning.” The Canadian push for medal success comes under a C$110 million (about £62 million) programme called Own The Podium, which sets out Canada’s ambition to top the medal table by winning at least 35 medals. An example of the extent to which home venues have been protected is the downhill skiing course, which was built over the past two springs and has not only limited access to foreign athletes, but has also had fencing built around it at a cost of reportedly more than C$100,000.

The Canadian organisers have been invited to justify their policy on venue access for training and they insist that they have merely followed rules as laid down by the governing bodies of each of the Winter Olympics sports.

It will be fascinating to see how London follows the Vancouver example. The BOA has already detailed a programme, codenamed Project Leap and overseen by Sir Clive Woodward, which is studying exactly how to wring every possible gain from being hosts. As hosts, for instance, the competition schedule can be arranged to provide domestic benefit. It is recognised that teams get a mental lift when they win gold early in the Games and thus it seems likely that some of Team GB’s gold medal hopes will take the field in the first two days.

There is a difference, though, between improving home chances and limiting those of London’s guests. Hunt said: “I’m not of the view that we should be blocking access in the way we have experienced. I am sure that every medal we win will be won by the merits and efforts of our athletes.”