They were off to get involved in a sport of some sort together. For one of them, it was going to be her first time playing. During the journey, the other woman had set about explaining all of the sport’s key rules, and she was doing a good job of answering all of the novice’s questions. However, I never actually heard them say which sport it was. This gave me the stimulating challenge of trying to figure out what it was from what they were saying.
As I was only catching titbits of their discussion, it wasn’t easy trying to narrow down every single different sport so that it would fit in with what little I could make out. When I heard the phrase “line out” a couple of times, I became quite confused. Rugby didn’t seem to correspond with everything else that they were saying.
Finally, though, I was able to put my finger on it. The key for me was when I heard the experienced lady tell her friend that during play, there was to be no speaking. I had at last grasped that they were, of course, speaking of goalball.
Goalball is a sport for blind and visually impaired athletes, and it’s contested in the Paralympic Games.
A year earlier, and I had been fortunate enough to get a ticket for goalball at London 2012. Going into it, I didn’t really know what to expect. I have to say, though, that it ended up being rather fun. The silence in the arena as it was played made it seem all the more gripping and intense. It’s hard to find excitement quite like that elsewhere in the world of sport.
On the day that I went, I was able to witness Great Britain’s women overcome Brazil, and it was wonderful to see the sheer delight on their faces after the match as they savoured the once-in-a-lifetime feeling of being at a home Games.
Goalball at London 2012
To learn that the sport was picking up new participants a year on, albeit by simply overhearing a conversation on a train, made me rather pleased. Goalball is a sport which gets just about as little exposure as a sport can get, so it was great to find out that there was a level of awareness out there.
As I got off the train that day, I was thinking that if the conversation which I had just heard was indicative of people being willing to give new sports a try, even if they didn’t know any of the rules, then such sports would always be able to attract and retain new players. I went on to think that this would enable these sports to survive, and forever be able to continue to offer participation opportunities.
For some reason, those thoughts gave me a sense of pride.
Of the many benefits of sport, pride is the one which knits nations of strangers together to cheer on their elite athletes and will them to victory. Pride makes the people of a country simply feel good.
This, then, brings the question of how pride is best achieved.
The agency which distributes government and lottery players’ money towards the United Kingdom’s elite athletes, UK Sport, has for a long time thought that it has known the answer to this question: medals.
UK Sport has a longstanding ‘no compromise’ funding policy, which is all about gaining as many Olympic and Paralympic medals as possible for Team GB and ParalympicsGB. The way that this approach works effectively means that sports which bring home medals, or those that seem to have the potential to do so, are given extra funding. Sports which don’t meet performance targets, or where the signs of progress are too slow, have their funding reduced. In some cases, it is cut off completely.
More medals means more funding. Less medals means less funding.
When I first heard about this policy, many years ago, I was rather shocked. It seemed to me, back then, that they had gotten it the wrong way around. I would have been sure that people would have deemed that the sports which were not providing the best results would be the ones that should be getting more help so that they could improve. However, as I grew up, I learnt that UK Sport was getting it right. The policy works.
UK Sport was established in 1997, off the back of an Olympic Games in which Team GB won one solitary gold medal. Fast-forward to 2012, and that number had increased to an incredible twenty-nine. By focusing resources on the sports which were likely to provide medals, UK Sport had found a winning strategy.
Everything that I say in this blog, then, must be read in that context. All I can do is ‘nit-pick’.
The concerns that I have could possibly be imagined as some kind of weird double ended spiral, with one end going upwards, and the other end going downwards. To quote myself, “more medals means more funding” and “less medals means less funding”, and that’s what I’m getting at. I can foresee a partial danger where the sports that are successful suck up more and more funds, while the sports which are lagging behind receive less and less, until they have practically no realistic prospect of ever being able to see their athletes compete against what the rest of the world has to offer.
The level of funding that each sport gets from UK Sport really can be ‘make or break’.
So I’ll begin my critique, if I may, with cycling. I’ll admit that saying that does sound a bit curious given that the British Olympic cycling team is undoubtedly one of the country’s biggest sporting success stories in recent years. Indeed, they beat the entirety of Team GB to win the BBC Sports Personality Team of the Year Award in 2008.
Amazingly, in 2012, Team GB’s cyclists would match their 2008 tally of eight gold medals. Seven came from events on the track, and one from the road in each of these Games.
At the end of 2012, when UK Sport announced its funding strategy going forward to 2016, it was revealed that cycling was to see its funding rise from £26m to £30.6m.
In truth, this rise may not have raised too many eyebrows at the time, particularly as people may have just been digesting the news that the same strategy saw several other sports have their funding cut to zero. However, when I observed it, I couldn’t help but wonder what more cycling was going to be able to achieve with the extra money.
It was an astounding achievement to win seven out of ten gold medals on the track at each of the last Games. Of course, it would be nice to attain perfection by winning every gold medal on offer. After all, if the Chinese can do it in table tennis, then there should be no reason for the British to shy away from trying to do the same in track cycling. Maybe that is an aspiration to be worked on over time, but I also think that there does need to be a certain amount of realism. While seven out of ten is a fantastic result, the reality is that it is going to be extremely difficult to do much better than that in the future, regardless of how much money is set aside for it.
I could say what I am saying now, and easily go on to offer the solution of capping the maximum amount of funding that each sport can get so as to avoid successful sports vacuuming up millions of pounds every four years which might not make too much difference to them. However, I believe that there would be too many problems to be seen by having an outright cap.
For a start, the introduction of a cap would probably only end up affecting one or two sports, which would make it seem unimportant on the whole. Secondly, any sport which was going to be affected could end up arguing over the level of the cap, and perhaps claim to be a ‘victim of its own success’. Thirdly, I think that it needs to be recognised that elite sport training can be very dynamic. It is entirely possible for a new invention to surface that can significantly improve athletes’ training in some way, and it should be perfectly reasonable for sports to follow this up and buy into it, if they can afford it. I think that it would be wrong to deny them this because of a cap.
Instead, my solution for what I see as the potential for overfunding within UK Sport’s strategy would be fairly simple. I can see this issue resolved by having a more rigorous assessment of the level at which a sport has been performing in relation to how much there is left to be achieved.
With this, I have addressed the ‘upward spiral’ that I see within the ‘no compromise’ policy. This leaves me with the ‘downward spiral’ to look at, and therefore brings forward the question of those sports which receive little or no funding from UK Sport.
Back when I first looked at the numbers showing how UK Sport would fund each sport going forward to 2016, yes, I noticed cycling, but for me the most exciting figure was actually the one for water polo.
Australia's women getting the better of Russia in water polo at London 2012
The sport’s funding had been raised from £2.9m to £4.5m, with all the money to go to the women’s team. I was disappointed for the men, of course, but I was already used to seeing the fate of team sports being somewhat sacrificed in favour of individual sports. That’s why I was so excited to read about the women.
This was the chance, I thought, for Britain to build itself, consolidate itself, and have a sustained presence in an Olympic team sport other than hockey. People like me were doubtlessly looking forward to the prospect of finding out all about the British team, getting to know who the best players were, and being able to follow their fortunes for generations to come.
I had seen women’s water polo at London 2012, but not the British team. I did catch them at the temporary Water Polo Arena a few months earlier, though, as they hosted the official test event. On the final day of the competition, I saw them lose to Hungary.
Action from the VISA Water Polo International
The day before saw the tournament's best result for the home team, as they lost by only a single goal to the Americans, who would go on to claim Olympic gold. At the Games themselves, the British team lost their quarterfinal by just two goals against Spain, who took the silver.
Of course, going by wins and losses, then the team was doing poorly. In amongst it all, though, there were narrow defeats with some very encouraging performances. This is why, when I saw the funding details, I knew that this was an opportunity.
Unfortunately for people with this perspective, UK Sport decided to withdraw all of water polo’s funding earlier this year.
The team had just qualified well for the European Championships, but UK Sport clearly could not see a medal coming by 2020, and thus deemed it to be “high risk” to continue with the funding strategy laid out at the end of 2012.
Two months after this decision, the British women did manage to earn a memorable victory over Spain. Though this came too late, I’m not sure whether it would actually have made a difference to the funding situation.
When UK Sport announced the cut in funding, water polo was not the only sport to fall out of favour. Basketball, synchronised swimming and weightlifting also had their funds cut completely, as well as three Paralympic sports, including goalball.
The biggest outcry came from basketball, with British Basketball claiming that UK Sport’s funding system appeared “to show bias against team and emerging sport”.
I knew that the decision would be hard to take for basketball, but I really felt that it would be harder still for some of the other sports.
Basketball, after all, is the second largest team sport played by fourteen to sixteen year olds in this country, so I guess that I kind of always figured that it would be able to keep going. Not having a British team for such a popular sport would be inconceivable, I thought. Sure enough, earlier this month it was announced that Sport England would provide £1.18m to fund the British team. It was the first time that Sport England, usually only responsible for funding grassroots sport, had funded elite sport.
With regards to the livelihoods for the other sports that had their funding cut this year, I did manage to take what comfort I could from that conversation on the train to hope that the goalball teams could be kept going by enthusiastic amateurs. For the rest, though, it did look a little bleak.
A slew of appeals were made by the sports looking to have their funding restored. Only weightlifting was successful. Funds would be made available to female lifters after they were put at the focus of a comprehensive new strategy.
However, the decision to reprieve weightlifting, but not the others, only seemed to reinforce the notion that team sports were being hard done by. British Swimming, the country’s governing body for aquatic sports, released a statement warning that several sports now faced “dying out”, and claimed that UK Sport had particularly little understanding of team sports. It was adamant that both synchronised swimming and water polo were making progress.
Whatever that progress was, though, it was not enough for UK Sport. The ‘no compromise’ policy means that a medal has to look like a possibility within eight years.
After its appeal failed, British Swimming declared that it was going to take legal action. This would be one last attempt to wrest back some funds, but this time, it would only be for synchronised swimming. Although David Sparkes, British Swimming’s chief executive, did indicate that he would push for UK Sport to review its strategy for “all team sports”, it must have by now become quite clear to the water polo girls that it was all over.
The synchronised swimmers had, for a long time, been meeting their performance targets, so I can fully comprehend why British Swimming would want to focus all of its efforts on them.
The most widely known British synchronised swimmer, Jenna Randall, was among a number of retirements from the team last year. The fact that a young and inexperienced team was left behind could well have been a factor in UK Sport’s decision.
When she announced her retirement, Randall, who has since gone on to try her hand at Cirque du Soleil, said she hoped that the “next generation” of synchronised swimmers would “carry on the legacy” of the sport.
It’s understandable why Randall might have thought that she would be leaving the team in a fairly healthy position. Going into London 2012, I’d be sure that a big part of her focus must have been on meeting UK Sport’s performance targets: a top ten position in the duet event, and a top eight position in the team event. When both of these objectives were achieved, and funding was raised from £3.4m to £4.3m, the squad may well have thought that they had just secured the sport’s future. With that overarching goal in mind during years of training and sacrifices, their minds could finally be put at ease.
Exactly two years on from British synchronised swimmers being in the Aquatics Centre’s pool to compete at the Games, and it was announced that British Swimming’s legal challenge to restore their funding had failed. The team now looked ‘dead in the water’.
All this has shown is that UK Sport is pragmatic. All-out efforts to meet performance targets are all well and good, but throughout everything, the idea remains to be that a medal should be delivered within eight years. This means that backwards steps can always be terminal, regardless of other steps forward.
And those steps forward might not just be in performance terms.
In recent years, handball is just one example of a sport to take what I can only imagine to be a fairly drastic measure. The English and Scottish national teams merged so that they would be permanently competing as Great Britain, even outside of an Olympic Games.
The idea at the time was to give the sport the best possible chance to develop in the future so as to gain success. However, now that neither the men’s team nor the women’s team receives a penny in funding, I do rather feel that decisions such as this one were all for nothing. Costs of simply staging matches have impacted on the teams’ liberty to play.
I do worry about this sense of ‘false hope’ that seems to come with the system. Whether it is handball seeing a brighter future with unified teams, synchronised swimmers going out of their way to meet performance targets, or water polo fans rejoicing at an injection of cash, it does look as if people are being given the chance to dream, only for their dreams to be taken away from them at some point further down the road.
Maybe, then, the answer to all this is to have a more compassionate approach from UK Sport.
However, such a suggestion is completely and utterly at odds with what ‘no compromise’ is all about. Don’t forget that I’m not disputing that the policy works.
And yet I am not the one to give the hints that there may be compassion to come. No, that was done by UK Sport itself.
Last month, UK Sport announced that it would be open to a rethink, and launched a consultation, available to both its partners and the public, asking a series of questions which, on the face of it, seem to indicate a slightly more sympathetic rational. Perhaps Sparkes was able to exert some influence after all.
This could pave the way for all sports to grow at elite level in this country.
When talking about the consultation, UK Sport’s chief executive Liz Nicholl particularly highlighted the issue of team sports. Hopefully that’s something which can be picked up on by reading this blog, as well.
There have been numerous examples of team sports asserting that there is a bias against them.
“The funding system is weighted against team sports” according to handball player Mark Hawkins. “You need more time for a team sport to develop than an individual in an individual sport.”
Nicholl has explained that UK Sport would probably be ready to start funding sports based on the potential for medals within twelve years instead of eight, noting that this would cost more money. This would be of particular benefit to team sports.
I’m not convinced about how this would work in practice, though. I could easily be prepared to believe that any sport could be twelve years away from a medal if they had the right investment.
This, then, is the point where I reach my own conclusion as to how to deal with the possibility of sports being ‘wiped out’ in elite terms.
I think that every sport should get some funding. I’d propose a model of ‘baseline’ funding. This is to say that there should be an amount, say £500,000 per Olympic or Paralympic cycle, which will always be the minimum which each sport will get.
Everyone would be able to freely admit that sports on the baseline would not really be thinking about medals. Crucially, however, they would be kept alive and be ready to take in any talented youngsters that suddenly emerge onto the scene. In particular, it is imperative that team sports have squads in place; otherwise there will be nowhere to go for those youngsters, no matter how good they are.
Also, using the baseline method would mean that there would not be so many time-consuming appeals. Sleepless nights for those who have had to grapple with constructing a decent presentation to deliver to UK Sport, saying why their sport deserved funding, would be a thing of the past.
I think that everyone can understand why some sports are funded more than others. I’ve always thought that it has been a bit extreme, though, to give those sports at the very bottom absolutely nothing. That is the essence of my argument.
We’ll have to wait and see if UK Sport will go for a new approach. One possibility is that funding could be linked to participation rates. When reporting that Sport England was going to fund elite basketball, BBC sports editor Dan Roan suggested that other sports with zero funding could be hopeful. The fact that basketball is fairly popular at grassroots level may have influenced Sport England, and so other sports may see an opportunity for this effect to be replicated. Indeed, before the decision to fund basketball, there was some talk last month that UK Sport and Sport England could spread some funds over all the sports which were missing out.
That is all speculation for the future, though. For now, the consultation is still ongoing.
There are plenty of other questions that UK Sport wants to see answered in this consultation, as well. Basically, UK Sport wants to know what its remit should be.
Nicholl raised the issue of medals, and whether they should still be the primary focus. She also discussed the “impact” that can be achieved through sporting success, evoking memories of London 2012’s motto: Inspire a generation.
A crowd barrier in Greenwich Park bearing London 2012's famous motto
One other area that Nicholl brought to the fore was whether or not UK Sport should be funding sports which are included at neither the Olympic Games nor the Paralympic Games. This suggests that UK Sport might be thinking that success at the Commonwealth Games, too, is worthy of investment. Although this could be complicated by the fact that the home nations would be competing separately, while UK Sport is supposed to work for all of them, people involved in sports such as squash might have their fingers crossed, as they could be in for a bit of a boost.
At this point, I can mention the one further thing that I think might be wise for UK Sport to consider. After Rio 2016 there will be a review of the entire programme of Olympic sports, with changes coming into effect at Tokyo 2020. With this, the sports themselves won’t change, but it’s likely that the medal events will be different for a number of sports. For instance, FIBA, the international federation for basketball, is understood to be very keen about including the half court version of the sport, known as 3×3, in future Games. I’d suggest that UK Sport could think about beginning the funding of British 3×3 right now.
If UK Sport could accurately predict the events makeup of forthcoming Games, then it could start funding for events such as 3×3 before their Games presence was even confirmed, and so this country would have a head start over some of its rivals. Of course, though, this tactic is risky by its nature. There may not be any guarantees that all predictions can be accurate.
Even if UK Sport is not willing to commit funds to events before they are included at the Games, it may yet be a good idea to seriously think about what any potential new Olympic sport could be.
This week it emerged that the International Olympic Committee has put forward a recommendation that sees the cap of twenty-eight sports per Games being lifted. This concept is still at an early stage in being contemplated, along with various other recommendations. I can’t be sure, therefore, of what will come of it. All the advice that I can offer UK Sport in this regard, then, is to stay attentive.
As it happens, I do actually think about what advice I could give to UK Sport whenever I see an article concerning the issue of funding in elite sport.
Right now, however, there is a key difference: I’m prepared to be listened to.
Since UK Sport’s consultation opened, I have been reading any articles related to funding that I come across even more avidly than usual.
Earlier this month, I read about Piers Gilliver, a British wheelchair fencer. The funding for his sport was jettisoned earlier this year at the same time as it was for goalball. Since that decision, Gilliver has been competing, and winning, with the help of funds raised by his family and friends. However, there is only enough money to last until the end of this year, and it is unknown whether Rio 2016 will be an ongoing possibility for him.
As I thought about this, I couldn’t help but picture how wonderful it would be to see a Brit competing at the top of every single different sport. This line of thinking has actually already crossed the mind of Craig Heap, a personality from gymnastics, itself a sport which receives relatively high funds these days.
In my last blog I wrote about Gibraltar’s road to international football. That was an important issue to me because there has been a growing belief inside me that says that every person in the world should have a right to play international football. This belief also says, though, that a country which is developed to the extent of the United Kingdom should be able to go further, and offer every one of its citizens the chance to reach international level in any sport.
Maybe that is why I felt the pride as I got off my train at Leicester. Maybe my mind had started to envisage amateurs getting involved in new sports all over the country, and making a progression to elite level.
This, then, brings me to an answer. UK Sport wants to know what its remit should be. I think that the sole focus should not be medals, but pride.
Pride emanates from medals. That is true.
I would add to that, though, and say that pride can also come from seeing the athletes of a nation competing in the widest range of sports possible.
If you’ve got an interest in funding for elite British sport, with any views whatsoever, then I’d urge you to get involved with UK Sport’s consultation. It is open until 10th December 2014, and can be found by clicking here.
