J'Accuse

Sixteen years ago I was sitting in a cafe by a marina close to the Gradski stadium in Split talking to German sports journalist, Hans-Joachim Waldbrol. He was in the Croatian port for his newspaper the Frankfurter Allgemeine; I was handling the media for the British team.

The occasion was the XVth European Championships and Britain had won an unprecedented eighteen medals, including nine gold. Waldbrol had asked, as so many had that week, about the secrets of Britain’s success. In Gothenburg the opposite question was being constantly put: what was the reason for Britain’s failures? It is the decline and fall of a European athletics superpower that is, just five seasons away from the London 2012 Olympics, deeply worrying for those who love athletics in this country.

Despite the gutsy efforts of its athletes on the final day the British team won the lowest number of overall medals since 1982 and finished lower down the medal table than we have ever done.

This follows on from the Commonwealth Games in March, in Melbourne, where the four home countries collectively put up their worst performance since 1950.

In both 1982 and in particular 1950 there were far fewer events being contested than in 2006. And by general consensus the overall standard in this year’s competitions was low.

The sharp decline in Britain’s international athletics status may have serious future consequences. If it is not reversed then as contracts come to be renewed with television and sponsors second thoughts may come to the fore. In both areas nothing is for ever. Seb Coe is right to be concerned about the prospects for his sport in London 2012.

The question is not just what has gone wrong this year but who must take responsibility for almost a decade of decline not only in Britain’s international status but in a drastic domestic deterioration in standards, participation levels and the status of coaches. Not only that but there has been an unprecedented alienation of the voluntary sector, who are so crucial to the survival of any sport. Put more succinctly who has got us into the mess that we are in today?

The responsibility for this state of affairs lies with UK Athletics and its senior management since 1997. First and foremost it must lie with the Chief Executive, David Moorcroft with whom the buck must ultimately stop. It lies with him because of a lack of leadership qualities, of management skills and of being so compliant with the sport’s paymasters, Sport England and UK Sport, that they publicly praised him for it. Those two over-bureaucratic bodies, with their propensity for ticking boxes and ignoring reality, must also take part responsibility for the sad state of British athletics.

Deputy Chief Executive, Adam Walker must accept responsibility for the shambolical state of coaching in this country. When he was in charge of development he allowed it to degenerate into the state that it is in today. During his development tenure schemes were launched more to satisfy sponsors than to advance the sport in any way. His attitude towards criticism and to the voluntary sector has contributed much to the alienation that exists.

The now retired Performance Director, Max Jones, is accountable for our international decline. In the World Championships of 1993 Britain won ten medals, three of them gold; in the three World’s during his tenure Britain won eleven medals, two of them gold.

He also oversaw, for seven years a frittering away of millions of pounds of support money for supposed world class performers, whom he and his team selected, who proved to be anything but.


Following the calamitous and acrimonious financial collapse of the British Athletic Federation (BAF) Sport England determined that the voluntary sector, which had run the sport for over a hundred years, was no longer fit for purpose. It set up an overblown, totally professional organisation under Moorcroft that immediately made two major errors. The first was to separate elite performance from the rest of the sport. Jones and the clique of coaches with whom he surrounded himself adamantly refused to have anything to do with coaching per se; it was not part of his brief. Secondly, coaching, now erroneously under development, virtually became coach education and the total emphasis was academically driven so that qualifying rather than coaching became the raison d’etre. It seemed possible to reach the highest levels without actually coaching anybody of note.

Thus a half century of dedicated individual coaching by men who were respected around the world and which had made Britain a global, as well as a European, super-power, was also deemed unfit for purpose. Coaching for nine years has lacked any leadership, has been a rudderless, disillusioned ship.

The introduction of a dreaded squad system that continues today fails to recognise that 99% of success is gained by a bonding of coach and athlete working together, in all weathers, six days a week. The appointment of professional event coaches that were of low calibre and who proceeded to try and teach their grandfathers to suck eggs also increased alienation. These men suddenly became world-wide experts overnight. Coaches with vast experience who had consistently produced international athletes of high calibre were ignored and discarded.

Moorcroft’s final blow to coaching came with his appointment of Dave Collins, a sports psychologist, as Performance Director. This came about, it is said, following a conversation with Clive Woodward, the rugby guru. What the CEO failed to recognise was that along with his motivational qualities Woodward was also a highly qualified rugby coach. The jury, increasingly sceptical, is still out on Collins and his motivational skills.

But it is not just in coaching that UK Athletics has failed the sport. Only now, after almost ten years, is it attempting to address the increasingly Byzantine nature of the competitive structure in Britain. Clubs and athletes, of all ages, collectively spend hundreds of thousands of hours and pounds travelling to league and other competitions. In an increasingly intense battle with other major sports for recruitment this travel mania, despite the protests of obsessed team managers, is one of the key reasons why British athletics is not only failing to recruit youngsters but is haemorrhaging talent as never before. UK Athletics should have confronted this issue at the beginning of its tenure instead of appeasing those jealously guarding their fiefdoms.

The Picketts Lock fiasco, when the voice of the sport remained mute; the hundreds of thousands of pounds lost in the abortive Shine Awards scheme; the increasing alienation of clubs and voluntary officials that saw the formation of the militant Association of British Athletics Clubs (ABCA), together with a massive communication failure with the sport must be added to the litany of failure by UK Athletics. The irony is that when athletics finally came to be investigated by Sir Andrew Foster it was the dormant AAA of England that was the target not UK Athletics.

UKA and, in particular, Moorcroft seem in denial about all of this. If things go wrong it is, apparently, an act of God. Recently an article by Matthew Syned, which angered Moorcroft, appeared in The Times. In his riposte Moorcroft made a telling remark. “I was just very disappointed,” he said, “that the article did not take into account any of the good things that UKA has done.”

Moorcroft et al have always confused their work ethic (and no one can accuse the staff of lacking effort) with achievement. The organisation never seems to assess what it is doing or to even know what the final outcome should be. The boxes are ticked without any evaluation.

Norwich Union, Britain’s major sponsor, are reported to have expressed disappointment that Startrack and Sports Hall were not credited in Syned’s piece. But both of these activities are an end in themselves; they have made, through no fault of their own, little or no contribution to what should have been their aim, the recruitment and retention of young sportsmen and women into the sport.

“Whatever the sport was 20 years ago,” Moorcroft said in another interview, “it isn’t the same now.” That’s true. What British athletics was 20 years ago was successful. In the 1986 European championships Britain won 15 medals, 8 of them gold. Not only that but comparing the championship performances of the British athletes in Stuttgart and Gothenburg, in the 40 events where comparisons can be made, the class of ‘86 performed better in 25 of them. And this in an era where the overall standard of the championship was much higher.

Not only that but it was at a time when the sport was only just becoming professional so that only a few were earning. There was no lottery funding, no medical backup, no director of performance, no insistence on squad training; it was just highly successful coaches nurturing, as they mostly had done for half a century, great talent. There certainly wasn’t a hundred strong federation beavering away in seclusion like Trappist monks about their prayers.

David Moorcroft holds a high place in the pantheon of great British athletes but his tenure as Chief Executive of UK Athletics has been disastrous. In any other professional business he and his senior management would have been considering their positions some years ago.