Why Britain is on track for Games humiliation in 2012
By Matthew Syed
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7713-2293662,00.html
Our correspondent says that after repeated failures, the spin cycle employed by the sport’s governing body just won’t wash
THE surest sign that an institution is heading towards the knacker’s yard is when it becomes paranoid about negative publicity. The Home Office, for example, is reported to have trebled its number of press officers since 1997 in the comical belief that it can spin its way out trouble.
UK Athletics (UKA) is treading the same deluded path. It is spending more than £500,000 a year on PR and communications and has slapped gagging orders on its athletes in the form of contracts, in the desperate hope that it might serve to conceal the wretched state of a once thriving sport.
But the truth will out — especially when the facts are so damning. At the last big competition, the World Championships in Helsinki last year, fewer Great Britain athletes made finals than ever before. As in Athens at the Olympic Games in 2004, only one British male reached a track final. England’s gold-medal count at the Commonwealth Games in March was the lowest since 1970.
Rob Whittingham, UKA’s own statistician, said: “Elite performance in Britain is the worst it has been in global terms in history,” a verdict confirmed by the dire results at the Norwich Union London Grand Prix at Crystal Palace on Friday. As the Britain team prepare to fly to the European Championships in Gothenburg, which start next Monday, many are predicting the lightest medal haul since 1966.
But the malaise goes far deeper. At the last World Junior Championships in 2004, Britain failed to win a medal for the first time since 1972. The grass roots are little better. The Sussex Championships last month — a meeting that in the glory days would have been staged over five evenings, with finals at the weekend — was contested over two afternoons, with many events going straight to a final.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the cash earmarked by UKA for the purposes of spin would be better spent on severance payments for those presiding over this debacle. If you think this harsh, let me remind you that if things do not improve soon, we will face the humiliation of a succession of finals at the 2012 Olympic Games in London in which Britain not only fail to win medals but will not even have any home participation. This is about more than athletics; it is about national self-esteem.
The track record of those running athletics is more woeful when you consider the amount of public money that they have had at their disposal. Since 1997, UKA has spent more than £25 million of Lottery money on what it rather optimistically calls its World Class Podium Programme.
The man presiding over these failures is David Moorcroft, a former distance runner who has been chief executive of UKA since 1997. He believes that he is doing a good job. So good, in fact, that a group of 137 clubs formed a breakaway movement last year to press for change because they have lost confidence in the governing body.
Moorcroft is responsible for many of the problems afflicting British athletics. He has assembled a vast staff (UKA employs about 115 people at an annual cost of £3.6 million, according to Moorcroft’s own figures) while presiding over declining standards in both performance and participation. He has failed to deliver properly targeted funding to the grass roots. He has allowed the elite- performance budget to be mismanaged. And he has failed to get to grips with the chronic shortage of high-quality coaches.
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Last year’s report by Sir Andrew Foster, commissioned by UK Sport and Sport England, forced UKA into some policy changes, but why should anyone trust Moorcroft to deliver them after nine years of failure?
Many will say that Moorcroft is a decent chap, and they are right, but this is precisely what is wrong with British sport. There is too much camaraderie and not enough accountability. Governing bodies, like the old nationalised industries, are not subject to market disciplines, which is why those who fail are able to cling on to their jobs indefinitely.
Moorcroft vigorously defended his track record, pointing to a number of recent initiatives, some decent youth performances in recent months and a new multimillion-pound sponsorship deal with Norwich Union. He also argued that UKA has invested record amounts of money, not seeming to realise that this is precisely why people are so concerned at the lack of delivery.
But who to take over? The dream appointment would be Lord Coe, someone with an unprecedented record of success both as an athlete and as the chairman of the London 2012 bid team.
Coe offers the only real prospect of the systematic shake-up that is required if British athletics is to escape from the black hole into which it has fallen. With 2012 looming, this is an issue that cannot be ducked any longer.