Moorcroft faces fight for job
By Simon Hart
(Filed: 13/08/2006)
European Championships, day six
The position of UK Athletics’ long-serving chief executive David Moorcroft is looking increasingly precarious as Britain face the prospect of returning from Gothenburg with their lowest medal tally at a European Championship since 1966.
Despite a few encouraging individual performances in Sweden, the team’s overall performance has been nothing short of dismal and it follows similarly abject displays at this year’s Commonwealth Games in Melbourne and last summer’s World Championships in Helsinki.
With Britain facing the prospect of being humiliated in the flagship sport at the 2012 London Olympics, the knives appear to be out for the former 5,000 metres world record-holder, who has been at the helm of British athletics for the past nine years.
While Moorcroft has enjoyed considerable success in ensuring the governing body is on a sound financial footing - clinching an impressive £50 million sponsorship deal with Norwich Union four months ago - the failures of Britain’s elite performers have placed him under increasing pressure.
Earlier this year his counterpart at the Lawn Tennis Association, John Crowther, was sacked for his inability to produce top-class players, having also had nine years to turn things round.
The whispers on the athletics circuit suggest Moorcroft may soon suffer the same fate, particularly if Britain’s youngsters fare poorly at the World Junior Championships, which begin in Beijing on Tuesday.
One highly-placed athletics source said there was increasing boardroom frustration about Britain’s failures, both within UK Athletics and at UK Sport, and he doubted whether Moorcroft would survive.
“I think it is very likely that he will be asked to resign,” said the source. “Athletics is desperately in need of an overhaul.”
A similar view was expressed earlier this year by Lord Colin Moynihan, the chairman of the British Olympic Association, after the English athletics team slumped to their worst Commonwealth Games performance in 40 years.
In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Lord Moynihan called on Lord Sebastian Coe to take over the leadership of British athletics to ensure that talented youngsters were not lost in a mediocre system.
“Athletics has to be the jewel in the crown of Team 2012,” said Lord Moynihan. “Action needs to be taken now and Seb Coe is the man for the job. His record in athletics is second to none and his organisational and managerial skills were self-evident in London 2012’s gold-medal bid.”
Coe’s commitments as chairman of the London Olympic Organising Committee would prevent him from taking a hands-on role, though it is clear that the sport needs a fillip if it is to make the most of the funding riches that are now on offer in the run-up to 2012.
Dave Collins, the UK Athletics’ performance director, has also come in for stinging criticism for his failure to recruit top overseas coaching talent, and he has exposed himself to ridicule in Gothenburg by awarding each of his athletes marks out of 10 for their performances accompanied by a schoolteacher-style comment.
Collins is likely to remain in his post, if only because he has been in the job for only 18 months and has had insufficient time to make significant changes. Ominously, however, he is already talking down Britain’s prospects of winning an individual gold medal at the Beijing Olympics in two years’ time.
“Beijing is going to be a hell of a hard place to win medals for anybody barring, of course, the host nation,” he said. “Would it worry me to go to Beijing and not get a gold medal? I wouldn’t necessarily be throwing myself out of the window.”
It may be an honest assessment, but such defeatist talk is not what the country wants to hear so soon before it hosts the world’s greatest sports event.