The Electronic Telegraph Tuesday 9 October 2001 Sue Mott
BRITISH sport is not being run properly. It is not even being walked. It is limping along, dragging a ball and chain of bungling and betrayal which has left this country wretchedly humiliated in the eyes of the wider world. We are the Railtrack of world sports organisations, except the Government are not willing to take up the responsibility for the farcical failures. Apart from the England football team qualifying for the World Cup (and that was a struggle) the events of the weekend were frightening. To be stripped of the 2005 World Athletics Championships in London because we have no prospect of building a stadium in time was bad enough. But to go on proposing Sheffield as the alternative site when the president of the International Association of Athletics Federations, Lamine Diack, had expressly rejected the idea was worse. It was tantamount to a public con. Yet there was the Sports Minister, Richard Caborn, on Sunday morning, still insisting that Sheffield was a viable possibility. It isn't. He was contradicted seconds later by Diack himself. It was kindergarten politics. Any old sop to fool the public because the truth - that we cannot organise a knees-up in a brewery let alone an Olympiad - reflects badly on a Government that promised (in their manifesto) to host a battery of major sporting events for the greater kudos of PM and country. So they spent £10 million chasing the World Cup and it went to Germany. Picketts Lock has cost up to £3 million and now it is consigned to the bin. Our potential Olympic bids have been torpedoed by our perceived expertise in organisational paralysis. Where does the embarrassment end? The Sheffield option was a non-starter. When Diack had met with the then Sports Minister, Kate Hoey, and a small British delegation last year to discuss the siting of the World Championships, he sat on a House of Commons balcony overlooking the Thames and expressed great satisfaction at the view. The nuances were clear. Great sports events deserve great cities. Hoey was left in no doubt that London was the one and only contender. Yet, with scant regard for the IAAF's explicit preference, let alone common courtesy, the Government moved the goalposts a couple of hundred miles north. Set alongside Caborn's suggestion of shopping trips round Harrods for the wives of IAAF councillors, it was an act of gross naivety. The Sydney Olympics were not suddenly uprooted to Wagga Wagga. The episode smacks of monstrous ignorance and arrogance combined. You can certainly support the `ignorance' argument. Following the news last Friday that the Picketts Lock project would be scrapped, a Government minister, Ben Bradshaw, was asked for his opinion during a Radio 5 Live discussion programme on the situation in Afghanistan. He was non-plussed. He had never heard of Picketts Lock. Public debate has been raging for three years, public money has been flowing into feasibility studies and he had no inkling of its existence. For all the spouting of ministerial words and espousing of sporting photo opportunities, there really does seem to be minimal interest in British sport at Government level. This was powerfully illustrated yesterday when a spokesman for the Departure of Culture, Media and Sport suggested that the legacy to athletics of the Picketts Lock fiasco would be £7 million to UK Athletics' elite fund and a further £40 million for other projects. "Then hopefully they can train some people to win some medals in someone else's stadium," he said with breath-taking disregard for this nation's ambitions to host an illustrious event. Caborn himself did not take kindly to criticism of the Government's role in Picketts Lock. "Can I say to you, it's about time you and a lot more people stopped trying to run British athletics on just events," he told Garry Richardson on Radio 5 Live on Sunday morning. "Let's have some strategy. We're not going into knee-jerk reactions." This was pretty shameless propaganda. If ever there was a knee-jerk reaction it was trying to put Sheffield in the frame for the World Athletics Championships. Furthermore, it was the Government who sought "events" in the first place, failing to appreciate that glossy brochures are one thing, fully-fledged, operational stadiums another. Our sports decision-making processes are less streamlined than silted up, with more tributaries than the Nile. Take rowing. Our most successful Olympic sport at Sydney 2000, the proud bearer of Sir Steven Redgrave and his famous cohorts, the gold-bedecked jewel of our watersports crown. And they haven't got a single dedicated training course to call their own and use for international regattas. For years and years and years (actually 15 years) the Amateur Rowing Association have been pursuing the development of a gravel pit site at Caversham, near Reading, and in the next two weeks Sport England will pronounce on the success, or otherwise, of their dream. It was not an outlandish dream, to establish one fully-buoyed, 2,000-metre course dedicated to rowing, as opposed to sharing the Thames with leisure craft (summer) or white-water floods (winter) or decamping to Nottingham where the course is disrupted by wind, canoeists, wind surfers and sailors. As a result, rowing holds its national championships in Belgium. We are constantly sliding into farce. Here was Britain, boasting the greatest living Olympian (not to mention Matt Pinsent) and forcing him to commute to Brussels for a home competition. Sir Steven is utterly and totally committed to seeing the building of the course at Caversham, but note, he was retired long before its arrival. Various matters have slowed up the process. The approximate £10 million cost, three different local councils from whom planning permission needed to be sought and the conservation of local water voles. Heels dragged. Time lagged. Meanwhile, Eton School built their own rowing course, but international rowers cannot use it except after school hours. "We would have liked things to have moved a bit quicker," said David Tanner, performance director of the ARA, in devastating understatement. He is hopeful that the sport which dealt us 12 gold medals in Sydney will finally get a lake to call its own. It is certainly unlikely that the world governing body would ever sanction a World Championship at Nottingham again after their experience in 1986 and the national championships (before Belgium) have also suffered disruption from the weather. "We were frequently blown off," said Tanner. "We have had to squeeze whole racing programmes into very small windows of good weather foretold by a very good Met man in Birmingham." Obviously, this prescient Met man in Birmingham would have about as much chance of running British sport as the present governmental incumbents. At administrative level we are presented daily with examples of inaction in action. British tennis has just postponed its revolution. At Wimbledon this year, the Lawn Tennis Association chief executive, John Crowther, came out bravely and announced that he and his board would no longer tolerate the years of withered hopes and half-baked performance that typified British entries in the draw at the four major events. (In the unlikely event that any, apart from Tim Henman and Greg Rusedski, reached the main draw.) A sedate civil war followed with the forces of brisk change on one side and those favouring a slower revolutionary rate on the other. Two weeks ago the LTA Council members cast their definitive vote - and elected to do nothing quite yet. "The council voted unanimously that change is necessary, but more time is required for the details to be agreed," was Crowther's official comment. Privately, he might be hair-rippingly frustrated that the powers of swift decision making are still being hampered by committees trailing paper chains of minutes and points of order. The LTA board had been planning to define targets for their staff and hold employees accountable for failure. They wanted to see an increase in the number of dedicated players (which has dropped alarmingly in a short space of time), the number of junior competitors, mini-tennis players, active coaches and players in the top 100 of the men's and women's game. As it is, such noble aspirations have been pushed aside by the political engagements. The next meeting is scheduled for Nov 7 and there are no guarantees the full council, comprising 109 voting members, will be prepared to take the necessary self- expunging steps then either. If the Olympics featured a committee meeting endurance event, Britain would be unassailable, though training would be hampered by not being able to agree on the number of paper clips in attendance and whether the tea should be Earl Grey. It would be the cause of hilarity were it not cementing our reputation abroad as a set of painful bunglers. And we still don't know where Wembley is going. If it transpires that more public money is to be siphoned into the maw of that on-going disaster area (and demolition site), we, the tax-payer, ought to send the bailiffs into the Football Association headquarters at Soho Square and claim every last carpet tile for ourselves. The FA owe us Wembley. We're not paying for it. The amount paid to architects, surveyors, printers, advisers, consultants, caterers, chauffeurs, civil servants, gofers and ministers on grandiose plans that have no chance of commission is bordering on the scandalous. Picketts Lock, even on the drawing board, cost money. Residents in the Lea Valley could justly complain that no one spends £405,000 unblocking the drains but it is deemed worthwhile on the preliminaries of a doomed sports bid. In the end the project had ballooned to nearly £120 million for a stadium the Department of Culture, Media and Sport have now taken to describing as "a white elephant no one would use again". In which case, why spend more than £2 million on the process of finding out? The ramifications will be felt for years. The London Olympics in 2012 are looking fantastically remote (but why should any government minister care on the reasonable calculation they will be out of office then) and there are rumours that the Scots are getting twitchy about their chances of hosting football's 2008 European Championship, tarnished by this glut of Sassenach humiliations. "Happily, we are an entirely separate nation," said Andy Mitchell, head of communication at the Scottish FA, urgently drawing UEFA's attention to Hadrian's Wall. "We're hosting the Champions League final in Glasgow next year and we're sure that UEFA will be focusing on Scotland's abilities to run a tournament efficiently." It may help the Scottish cause that those vying with them for the championship include Russia and a joint Turkey-Greece arrangement which may not be exemplary in its co-operative bonhomie. Although neither was Ken Bates, to be honest. There are both too many people running British sport and not enough. The whole structure resembles a poorly organised children's game of pass-the-parcel. One individual makes half a decision, then passes it on to another, strewing forest-loads of paper in the process. On and on it goes, getting battered, losing shape, until one hapless soul is left holding the tattered remains when the music stops. Richard Caborn looked like that unlucky loser this week. But the real victim is the international reputation of British sport. Eamonn Condon www.RunnersGoal.com
