|
1,331 Days to the start of the London Olympics |
|
You need only look at the core objectives of England Athletics to confirm what everyone knows. Sport England are pulling the strings. The laughable core objective "to improve the quality of experience of every participant" is a Sport England key performance indicator (KPI). Sport England have a habit of using subjective Key Performance Indicators.
Athletics has now spent its £20 million pounds legacy funding, and what have we got to show for it? The discredited Foster Review has effectively closed down the voluntary administrative structure headed by the AAA's. The sustainable funding promised in return has never materialised. Sport England, UK Sport, UK Athletics and England Athletics are unreliable partners, and need to be ignored.
Are the 15/20 England Athletics personnel who are to lose their jobs in the regions worthy of more sympathy than an athlete who has been dumped from lottery funding? It is the remaining personnel at England Athletics and UK Athletics, with no job security that we should be feeling for.
Lets not be bashful about saying I told you so. The Foster Review consultation meetings were crammed with people saying the new system was financially unsustainable.
Clubs voted at two EGM's in October and December 2005 to preserve the AAA of England. Despite this, chairman George Bunner disgracefully sent the staff to work for England Athletics. An unspoken objective behind these changes was the theft of the commercial value of the sport. The National Championships in Olympic year are worth millions of pounds. £6 million was paid by the BBC in 2004 for the TV rights. The England Athletics statement of 22nd October 2008 clings desperately to the stolen National Championships. "We believe that athletics competition, other than at national championship level can be best delivered by established competition providers" wrote John Graves and Mike Summers. When the North, the South and the Midlands are reunited as the AAA's with a democratic mandate from the clubs, they will be more than a match for UK Athletics and England Athletics.
Cy Knibb, Chairman of the England Athletics Voluntary Regional Council, is currently undertaking a consultation of some kind. This is the same Cy Knibb who wrote in the Athletics Weekly on the 5th July 2007 a critique of Charles Gains comment that England Athletics were doing the bidding of Sport England. Cy Knibb called Charles Gains, who had just resigned as a Regional Chairman, a "propagandist" and said he had been "economical with the truth".
It is possible to lay the same accusation at the door of Cy Knibb, but I would prefer to believe he is extremely naive.
Let me give advance notice of what Cy Knibb's consultation will conclude:
This predictable outcome of Cy Knibb's consultation has been lifted straight out of the Sport England Strategy Document for the period 2008 to 2011. What Cy Knibb publishes might look like direct investment in Clubs and Counties, but in reality it will be the same trojan horse tactic that Sport England have employed since they first created UK Athletics. Sport England's priority is to use sport to promote the Government's social agenda. The new funding will pay professionals to work within the willing clubs, but these employed people will have the usual conflict of interests. They will embrace the enormous bureaucracy demanded by central regulation. They will call it "good practise" and "clubmark", the result will be lots of volunteers doing work that does not relate to sport. Athletics cannot be run from the top down because volunteers might respect rules and regulations which govern competition, but outside of competition they work to their own rules. Its called imagination and initiative. Hopefully by now, clubs and counties will have learned the lesson that their is no such thing as free lunch. England Athletics and UK Athletics mothered by Sport England and UK Sport cannot be trusted. In 2013 the remaining professionals will be sacked by an ungrateful employer who will never understand why most volunteers wanted nothing to do with these enthusiastic, well meaning and decent people. Making the world a better place is a by-product of athletics and that is a wonderful thing, however when making the world a better place becomes the core objective, then most athletics people would rather put some money in the tin, then go off and enjoy sport somewhere else.
Zac |