by There was a surprise guest at the Sports Journalists Association’s annual awards gala on Thursday. Linford Christie made a rare public appearance to honor Zharnel Hughes for breaking his 30-year-old British 100m record and, whatever past controversies, the long queue of selfies that soon formed was a reminder of an indisputable fact.
Athletics was once on a par with football in the nation’s consciousness and serial winners like Christie were among the most famous people in the country.
A day earlier, UK Athletics had announced annual losses of £3.7 million and its chairman, Ian Beattie, had to explain how the sport is currently operating without a title sponsor and even had to partially subsidize the BBC’s coverage of its main Diamond League meeting this summer. Cuts worth £1.8m have already been made since last year and, with just seven months to go before the Olympics, “a much more agile organisation” is ominously predicted.
“It’s clearly been a difficult time,” Beattie said.
A current athletics international expresses it more directly.
“Everyone I’ve spoken to says it’s a complete disaster,” said the British athlete. Telegraphic sport.
One administrator describes a sport historically fraught with traditionalists who resist change, which has long oscillated between lucrative structures such as football, golf or Formula One and those Olympic disciplines that, realistically, only A quadrennial day in the sun can await you.
“Athletics in the UK risks becoming a once-in-four-years event that people remember they enjoyed but then forget about,” the administrator said.
And yet, how many traditional Olympic sports could attract 50,000 local spectators for a single-day event, as athletics did at London Stadium for the Diamond League in July? Or achieve a TV audience of three million the following month that would surpass even Eastenders when Katarina Johnson-Thompson regained the world heptathlon title?
It remains the jewel in the Olympics’ crown, genuinely global in nature, and a sport with the potential in Paris next summer to launch the likes of Johnson-Thompson, Keely Hodgkinson, Zharnel Hughes and a new golden generation of middleweight runners. distance to another stratosphere. .
Despite the support of local fans, the London Diamond League this year recorded losses close to £500,000. The same meeting the previous year finished £800,000 in the red, while the World Tour indoor event in Birmingham (removed from next year’s calendar) lost £500,000. The biggest stars command five- and sometimes even six-figure appearance fees, as well as expenses and prize money, leaving no prospect of breaking even without major business and broadcast partners.
So why can’t athletics in this country sell itself?
Conversations with numerous people within the sport invariably lead to two things. The first is the loss in 2020 of a £3m annual contract with the BBC to screen major national events.
The other is poor management and distracting infighting, summed up in an independent review three years ago by Dame Sue Street that reported “a general culture of mistrust” and insiders’ view that it “couldn’t get any worse.”
Ed Warner, president until 2017, also wrote a scathing assessment earlier this year in which he described the situation as “scandalous” and criticized “unnecessary politicking, the pursuit of vanity projects, timidity and simple carelessness.” He cleared Beattie and chief executive Jack Buckner of blame after serving only in 2021 and 2022 respectively, but specifically pointed out how the deal with the BBC was canceled rather than renegotiated well before it expired.
“Now the BBC thinks: ‘Do we need to renew? Where else is UK athletics going?’” another industry expert said. “Sky can spend money but, when you sit down with a big potential sponsor like Aviva, Sainsbury’s or Muller, they want a couple of million eyes on it. It’s a virtuous circle. If you don’t have the showcase you can’t bring the sponsor.”
After Niels de Vos and Warner stepped down from their respective roles as CEO and Chairman of UKA in 2018 and 2017, each after more than a decade, there have been nine different incumbents in their roles.
The longest chief executive tenure between De Vos and Buckner was that of Jo Coates, who arrived just days before the Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020 before resigning in October the following year after a major disagreement over policy. safeguard. Coates says the BBC’s decision to withdraw was known two years earlier and points out that the organization was almost breaking even in the 2020-21 accounts.
“Unfortunately, there was a group of people in athletics who actively worked against me,” he says. His biggest regret was reviewing whether distances in men’s and women’s cross-country should be equalized, admitting it created an unnecessary storm within the sport.
This has also caused great instability among coaches. Neil Black was the long-serving performance director but resigned shortly before his death in 2020 after coming under fire for his support of Sir Mo Farah’s now-disgraced former coach Alberto Salazar. Sara Symington and Christian Malcolm came and went before Stephen Maguire’s surprise departure as technical director last month, just weeks after leading Great Britain to 10 medals at this year’s World Championships.
Selecting only possible finalists among the top eight classified as “shameful”
Sources say it was due to disagreements over where the cuts were being made. Paula Dunn has just been appointed interim head coach and will be keenly aware of athlete disquiet, particularly on the fringes of UK Sport-funded programs for potential Olympic medallists.
sport telegraph We have been told of a “them and us” atmosphere in which even free access to training facilities in Birmingham and Loughborough is the exclusive domain of the athletes chosen to receive funding, while others balance their training – and all associated costs – with multiple jobs.
There is also deep controversy over a policy that only selects athletes who are considered potential top-eight finalists for a World Championships or Olympic Games. This means that athletes who qualified through their world rankings were not in Budapest during the summer, even at some events where Great Britain was not represented. This week, one athlete called the policy “disgraceful” and said some athletes have lost thousands of pounds in sponsor bonuses for appearing at a major championship as a result.
“Not only is the British athlete losing experience, as well as potential gains, but then moving on to a lower-ranked athlete from another country,” the athlete said.
UK Athletics will maintain its main focus on those athletes qualified as capable of reaching the finals ahead of the Olympic Games, as well as a relay program that won four medals at the World Championships despite major tensions behind the scenes.
“There is a positive momentum created around success in this environment,” argues Buckner, who says the Olympics and World Championships do not necessarily provide the best development for athletes below the high qualification standards required by the UKA.
There is confidence in the Olympic Games and, backed by a still strong club scene, the European Cross-Country Championships held on Sunday in Brussels demonstrated its great potential. Innes Fitzgerald, Megan Keith and Will Barnicoat were among the individual gold medalists at Under-20 and Under-23 levels as part of a record-breaking run that brought team golds in four of the seven events.
A new partnership with the London Marathon and Great Run is being discussed that could bundle athletic events, including those organized by UKA, into one streaming deal.
Buckner, who has also presented a documentary-style Olympic series for the BBC, “says there is no magic pot of gold” but that they will continue to do the “hard work” to develop and present their product to broadcasters and sponsors. His tenure will be judged largely by the deals that ultimately come about, and a renegotiated deal with Nike has at least helped stave off bankruptcy.
It means UKA had £6.5m cash in the bank as at March 31, 2023, which was not on the bottom line profit and loss, and the organization projects to break even from 2025.
Frank Dick, who was director of training when British athletics was at its peak between 1979 and 1994, now stresses the need for stability and long-term planning. After all the acrimony, there is also a passionate plea.
“We have fantastic athletes, great coaches and good administrators. For God’s sake, understand that you are in the same game, the same team, we wear the same colors, the same insignia,” he says. “We are interdependent. If we do not move forward together, we will die separately.
“This sport is fantastic, it changes people’s lives for the better and we have to extol its virtues.
“I have 100 percent faith in Jack: he did an incredible job in the triathlon, he did an incredible job in the swim. He will do an incredible job in athletics. The problem is that he has a boat with a hole in the side.
“The skills of being a captain are being compromised. He can’t do it alone. And I just hope that all his energies are not used frantically to get the water out.”
