Hard Truths

It is a truth universally acknowledged (except, apparently, at the British federation) that the more Olympic finalists that a country has the more medals it is likely to win.

Shortly after he took over as Performance Director of British athletics Dave Collins, a former marine and a sports psychologist with a robust personality, said that by the 2012 Olympics in London he wanted 50% of the team to reach finals. More mature heads nodded and smiled; Britain had never achieved such a feat at world level before but giving the newcomer the benefit of the doubt they thought that his ambitions were in the right direction.

The facts and figures since that pronouncement, however, indicate that the trend is almost the opposite. At the Athens Olympics in 2004 (Max Jones’ swansong) Britain had fourteen finalists (25% of the team) from fourteen of the forty-six events, winning four medals. In Helsinki in 2005 (Collins’ debut) Britain had seven finalists in seven of forty-seven events, winning three medals. Just 15% of the team reached finals.

What is worrying for the future of the sport in Britain is that the country had no competitors in almost 30% of the events in Helsinki, accelerating a trend that has been taking place over the last decade or more. But, as he has clearly stated Collins (as did Jones before him) has no concerns for the future of athletics in Britain; his concern is to satisfy what might be called the podium-fetishers in government and sports councils. This mesmeric allure can clearly be seen by the change in title of the top support programme from World Class Performance to World Class Podium.

Of the 41 athletes currently listed in the World Class Podium programme 66% are runners (of which 44% are sprinters and hurdlers). In the World Class Development programme 89 athletes are listed of whom 30% come under ‘sprints’. Only eight throwers are listed in both programmes (two in Podium and six in Development) just 6.1%.

And development in the jumps is limited. The only events in which Britain can be expected to produce finalists in the near future are the men’s long and triple jumps and the women’s long jump (anticipating Ashia Hansen’s retirement).

So as the options for finalists narrows Collins has to rely almost entirely on sprinters competing in only 22% of the 47 events to produce podium appearances. But even here the chances of individual success at present seem slim.

Critics of this somewhat Cassandra-like viewpoint may well point to the huge successes of the Kenyans and Ethiopians over a limited range of events for the past couple of decades. But whilst their success seems never-ending, that of our often over-hyped sprinters over the past decade has been spasmodic to the say the least. Britain’s men have won three individual sprint medals in seven global meetings (our women, one) and six relay medals (our women, one). Our last men’s individual sprint medal was won in the World Championships in Paris in 2003 by Darren Campbell. Katherine Merry was our last individual woman sprint medallist in 2000 but the last 200m winner of a medal came 23 years ago in the inaugural World Championships in Helsinki in the person of Kathy Cook.

It is Catch 22 isn’t it? Our government and sports councils demand podium places as an indication of a sport’s success but the system they put in place militates against gaining the requisite number of finalists to make that possible.

Not only that it also detrimental to the development of the sport as a whole.

All these statistics should concern those behind the drawbridge at Athletics House in Solihull but there are, in some ways, even worse figures for which the Performance Director, as a sports psychologist, should be held accountable (but won’t be). Leaving aside the crass awarding of points-out-of-ten to athletes for their performances in Gothenburg and the even crasser act of revealing them to the media there is the little matter of the work of a Finnish statistician, Mirko Jalava.

Jalava had a look at the way athletes from 32 of the competing countries at the European Championships performed in what was their major meeting of the year (and for some the major meeting of their lives). Only 9 British athletes out of a team of 75 achieved a season’s best in the Swedish port placing the country 30th out of the 32 listed with only Austria and Hungary in a worse position.

By my calculation, the year before in Helsinki, only eight athletes achieved a season’s best.

Most commentators put this down to poor technical preparation and coaching but, as far as preparing and peaking for a major championship are concerned, the mental approach of an athlete is of equal if not greater importance. This is Collins’ territory, this is where his expertise supposedly lies but from the above statistics he singularly failed to inspire anyone in Gothenburg or Helsinki. Indeed, in some cases, he seems to have achieved the opposite, as highlighted by the case of hammer thrower Shirley Webb in Sweden.

If he had done his homework properly or knew the sport at all Collins would have known about the generally poor performances down the years of our field event athletes (and throwers in particular) in major championships and surely planned accordingly. British shining stars like Steve Backley have been a rarity in the throwing firmament; mostly our throwers have been shooting stars, falling away almost upon arrival at a major championship.

This is a known fact and the reasons are mainly twofold. Firstly our throwers lack the necessary regular quality international competition for them to acclimatise to facing world-class throwers and secondly, as most coaches eschew mental preparation as being irrelevant, they are psychologically ill prepared.

Webb arrived in Gothenburg with two poor major international performances behind her this season, 18th in the Commonwealth Games in Montreal in March with 59.31m and a 60.70m in May at the renowned international throws meeting in Halle, Germany. However that she was physically ready for the European was evidenced by a 66.42m in Grangemouth, Scotland some two weeks before her qualifying competition. These are facts that the Performance Director should have surely noted. In the end Webb finished 18th in her qualifying pool with 60.30m – her poorest three throws of the year thus coming in her three major competitions.

To compound her disappointment and frustration Collins awarded her his equal lowest mark 2 out of 10 (the other 2 was awarded to Hammer thrower, Zoë Derham) and commented: “Poor. Way off the pace and below her PB.”

Carl Myerscough is no different from his British shot-putting peers in mostly not qualifying (except that he doesn’t kick chairs in frustration). He failed to qualify in Gothenburg and Collins awarded him 4 marks with the comment: “Poor. Needs to focus on performance under pressure.” Just like that?

What steps have UKA been taking to ensure that our top throwers get frequent opportunities to compete against the best and what steps has Collins in particular taken to ensure good one-to-one mental preparation sessions for the throwing and jumping fraternity?

Dave Collins seems to have attended the same charm school as the Australian swimming coach Bill Sweetenham. His tenure in office has been punctuated by threats to withdraw funding from those who are, in his eyes, not showing the right attitude and the enforcement of a contract on the top athletes (which Paula Radcliffe has not signed). Indeed enforcement appears to be the raison d’être of this branch of UKA. What he should know, as a psychologist, is that every individual is different and accordingly needs treating differently.

By next year’s World championships in Osaka Collins will have been in position long enough to take responsibility for what occurs there. The auguries are not good; his base is indeed narrow. Only two individual men make the world’s top ten in their event in 2006 – Phillips Idowu and Nathan Douglas in the triple jump. Only two women, Jo Pavey in the 5000m and Kelly Sotherton in the Heptathlon do likewise. As the song says, there may be trouble ahead.

Monaco We Have a Problem

The World Athletics Final rose from its mausoleum in Monaco to a surprising new lease of life in Stuttgart. Great weather, good presentation and magnificent crowds spurred tired athletes, led by the amazing Tyson Gay, to fine performances. It was, like the Gothenburg European Championships that preceded it, the epitome of international track and field: exciting, colourful, glamorous, televisual. The problem is that in providing such magnificent entertainment the IAAF and its promoters are sucking the rest of the sport dry.

The advantage that team sports, like football, rugby and cricket (that curious legacy of Anglo-empire) have over athletics is that their stars regularly appear in front of their fans. A keen Barcelona fan knows that, injuries permitting, he (or even she) is able, for nine months of the year, to marvel at Camp Nou at the magic of Ronaldhino and Valdes; at Old Trafford thousands, every fortnight, can relish the skills of Rooney and Ronaldo.

In athletics it is a different story and a Swedish or Portuguese fan will be very lucky indeed to catch a glimpse of Christian Olsson or Francis Obikwelu in the few weeks that comprise the international season. In 2004, the year before his horrendous injury, Olsson appeared just twice in his home country and Obikwelu, from this year’s rankings, left Portugal out of his schedule. No wonder then that Fast Track, the British promoter, invites fans to travel to its five televised meetings to see the stars ‘live’.

Championships apart, international athletics is fast becoming a sport for television, often moulded to the medium’s demands but, as we shall see, even that cosy premise might be in jeopardy. Is this to be short term financial expediency with longer term dire consequences?

He who pays the piper calls the tune. With its enormous financial clout the IAAF are the paymasters of the professional athletes. In order to maintain their lifestyle they have to run, jump or (less likely) throw where the money is. In Britain our declining numbers of stars very rarely appear in meetings below national championship level and I suspect it is the same across Europe. And the message from that continent is that the sport is very much on the decline.

The IAAF says that it needs its promotional activities (and top athletes) in order to fund its essential development programme, currently running at 5 million dollars per annum. Between 1991 and 2004 the federation spent 94 million dollars on development, including the Regional Development Centres. Without its promotions, the federation says, which bring in television and sponsors, none of this activity could take place.

But Europe is the only continent that does not require a RDC and the critics of the whole development system, including the World Athletics Plan, say that the expenditure far outweighs the benefit.

Because Europe is where the soul of the sport is 95% of the IAAF programme takes place there. The great one-day meetings at Zurich, Berlin, Brussels and London attract, along with enthusiastic crowds, the world’s best. But the irony is that the only continent that can provide the wherewithal to stage such meetings with the crucial television coverage is the one continent not to benefit.

The question is would European athletics benefit more if the EAA and individual European nations were free to mould their own competition structures using their star athletes?

Hansjörg Wirz, European (EAA) President and his colleagues are recognising this irony and are calling for “a meeting [with the IAAF] to review the division of responsibilities for the competition structure within Europe.”; it’s finally dawning on everyone that the EAA competitions programme is very much second tier.

Current trends in television coverage should also be of great concern. Only a few years ago you could watch the big Grand Prix meetings, the Weltklasse from Zurich, the Ivo Van Damme from Brussels, the DN Galan from Stockholm etc., on terrestrial television. When the programme planners decided that such events were losing their appeal, Sky took up the Golden League series and Eurosport covered other meetings across Europe. Now the Golden League coverage is confined to a pay-per-view channel, Setanta, with a consequent lessening of exposure for the sport.

Athletics is like a big city, glitzy and vibrant at the centre but run down and depressing in the shanty towns around the outskirts. Below international level, athletics in Europe is similarly run down. In Britain competition is an amorphous mess of mostly self-indulgent meetings and leagues bearing no obvious relation to each other and involving vast amounts of travel for athletes of all ages. Promoters have such little faith in their product that few charge for admission, perhaps realising that the general public wouldn’t understand what was going on in the up to six hours or more of indeterminate activity. Is it little wonder then that federations are reporting a sharp decline in participation levels, overall standards and public interest?

Eighteen months ago the IAAF staged a workshop in Monaco on the future of competition. It was very much the brainchild of the sadly missed István Gyulai. With his background in television he realised that radical changes would have to be made to the IAAF programme of events that was becoming more and more Byzantine. Speaker after speaker (of which I was fortunate to be one) urged a streamlining of the programme, a whittling down of the number of events, of making the whole system simpler to understand. This was especially urged by the television representatives present, including the BBC’s David Gordon. Unfortunately since István’s untimely death the proposals made are still hanging on the vine (though there is to be an appointment of a Competitions Director); indeed the confusion at the end of this season with the Golden League final, the World Athletics Final and the World Cup must surely be bewildering to those who are not aficionados of the sport.

What is urgently needed in Europe is some thinking outside the box. We need meaningful competition for both athletes and spectators; we need to create competition that taps, like the famous Finnkampen international, into our tribal natures (why not have a continent-wide inter-city cup with big prize money?); we need to urge federations to get a grip on their competition structures at a lower level to lure the public back. All the indications are that athletics is still overwhelmingly popular with the public but is a sport that is badly failing their expectations.

In recent days Luciano Barra, an Honorary Member of the EAA and a close associate of the former IAAF President, the late Primo Nebiolo, issued an Open Letter to the present president, Lamine Diack in which he was highly critical of the way the IAAF was leading the sport. He urged the President to consider his position and reminded Diack of the coup d’état that occurred in 1981 when the then President, Dutchman Adrian Paulen, was strongly persuaded to give way to Nebiolo and a whole new era of athletics began.

Whether we are at such a stage in the sport at this time will be a matter for rigorous debate as we head for Osaka and the all important Congress but it is now obvious to more and more people that radical action is needed if athletics, the major Olympic sport, does not decline into the status of so many others and become a minor player on the world scene, emerging once every four years into the public’s consciousness.

(Agree? Disagree? Have your say by clocking Comment)

Drug Abuse: Fresh Thinking Required

It was in 1967 that the British cyclist Tommy Simpson died in the Tour de France, on the barren slopes of Mont Ventoux in Provence. A combination of heat exhaustion and amphetamines killed him, thus exposing to the world the extent of drug misuse in sport.

Why has it taken almost forty years for those charged with fighting the use of banned substances in sport to reach the conclusion, long since arrived at by those dealing with drug abuse in society, that it is those who supply and encourage their use who are the most culpable?

Recently continental police forces have been active in investigating the supply of illegal substances to cyclists and their teams competing in the major European races. In Germany those involved with the GDR doping programmes have been pursued and punished. But in athletics it is only very recently that the curtain has been slightly lifted on the shadowy world of the provision of illegal substances. One result has been the exposure and prosecution of Victor Conte, owner of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO), the ex-Ukrainian coach, Remi Korchemny and others.

And, this year, with the sudden rush of exposures including Justin Gatlin and Marion Jones, the spotlight has fallen on their coach, Trevor Graham, thirteen of whose athletes have been banned for drug misuse. This month Graham has been banned by the US Olympic Committee from using its facilities and his lucrative Nike contract has been ended. He is also reported to be under investigation by the FBI. Graham, a man described in USA Today as having “the ability to be caught in the spotlight yet remain in the shadows,” denies any wrongdoing. But with his athletes testing positive over a number of years, why has Graham not been investigated before by US Track and Field and USADA, the US anti-doping agency?

For years the drug testers have been mopping the floor without turning off the tap. And, with the advent of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and its 20 million dollar budget, it’s become a very expensive mop indeed.

In setting out to counter the drug problem in sport the International Olympic Committee and the international federations set up a very crude form of justice. They decreed that athletes were entirely responsible for what they ingested. If a test proved positive then the athlete had to prove his innocence, the exact opposite of the centuries old legal tenet that a person is innocent till proved guilty. Simplistic and puts the onus entirely on the athlete.. As for the illegal drug traffickers, well, that was a complicated problem to be avoided at all costs.

The greatest drug scandal to hit sport was the positive test of Ben Johnson at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. He had won gold in a sensational 100 metres only to be stripped of it two days later. But Johnson, who was hounded out of the South Korean capital in a media frenzy, was something of an innocent abroad, taken under the wing of coach Charlie Francis and persuaded that, as all world class sprinters were on drugs, he should join them. Johnson and Francis were both banned by the Canadian federation.

In the very expensive Dubin enquiry that followed, Francis was found to have a whole squad of drug assisted sprinters. However he is still operating, seemingly with impunity, a lucrative athletics business. Indeed three years ago Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery travelled to Canada to consult with him, ostensibly on starting techniques.

But why has sport been so assiduous in chasing the drug cheats and been exactly the opposite in dealing with the dealers? Why have we taken the easy route? It’s mainly because sport has become over obsessed with the English Victorian concept of fair play. Anyone (i.e. a cheat) abusing such a concept must become a pariah for whom redemption is not an option. In exclusively pursuing such a policy in sport doping, it has missed seeing the wood for the trees.

In Britain we have a media frenzy every time an athlete tests positive, a frenzy that goes well beyond the sports pages. This is best illustrated by the case of Diane Modahl. In 1994 Modahl tested positive for a steroid, was withdrawn from the Commonwealth Games and sent home in disgrace. I was spokesman for British Athletics at the time and the day after the announcement my family and I had planned to travel to Cornwall for a long weekend. The phone rang; it was the BBC wanting an interview. I told them I was off to Cornwall and nothing was going to stop my trip. They assured me they’d be with me within the hour.

Sure enough within the time span a BBC van pulled into our cul de sac, some forty miles west of London. From it a mast made its way, literally, into the sky, well above the roofs of the houses. A satellite dish was manoeuvred towards the BBC Television Centre in West London and out went a live interview to the one o’ clock news. It was the lead item.

I did get my weekend in Cornwall but after ten minutes driving had to hand over to my wife because of the incessant ringing of my mobile. On the way down we had to deviate to Plymouth for Independent Television News. And finally in a tiny village in Cornwall I had to conduct an interview in a phone box. The good news? My mobile didn’t work in Port Isaac, our destination.

The Modahl case went on for years. She finally cleared her name at the cost of hundreds of thousands of pounds and went on to try, unsuccessfully, to gain compensation. It became a cause célèbre. Whenever something occurred in the case it was featured on mainstream news, often as a lead item.

If the Modahl case had been investigated thoroughly from the beginning, instead of being rubber-stamped guilty by a prejudicial committee, it would have been thrown out early on thus saving the then British federation and later Modahl from bankruptcy.

And some journalists take on an evangelical role, always taking care to remind us of an athlete’s drug record. One English reporter in particular always mentions Linford Christie’s nandrolone positive in writing of the great sprinter. Do fashion journalists refer to Kate Moss as an ex-junkie? I think not. No, for some redemption will never be an option for those who have so sinned.

If our sport is to effectively fight drug abuse it needs to move away from the present quasi-legal adversarial system against athletes. It needs to set up a full investigative process once a test proves positive. This process would include everyone involved with the athlete – coach, agent, doctor, physiotherapist. The testing process should be reviewed by an independent body. Experts in the field would be called in, not to represent one side or the other but to give a professional opinion. The sport and the public would draw its own conclusions concerning anyone who would refuse to co-operate.

The athlete, if found guilty from such an investigation, should be given the chance to plea bargain (which looks likely to happen in the Gatlin case). There should be a reduction in sentence if the athlete reveals the source of the drugs he or she has ingested and the people involved. Only by delving deeper into the murky world of drug abuse in sport will solutions be found.

In the thousands of tests carried out each year around the world the number of positive cases remains static at around one percent. This figure is either an accurate reflection of drug abuse in sport or it is not; we just do not know. What we do know is that the present test system is clearly not acting as a deterrent to those who are determined to win by whatever means it takes. Let us have fresh thinking on this always contentious issue.

Fool’s Gold

The obsession of politicians and sports councils with gold will prove to be the downfall of British athletics. Ever since government started pouring lottery money into the sport but insisting on it being spent only on top performers, in ways decreed by sports councils, athletics in this country has sharply declined.

And it has been done seemingly without a whimper of protest from an acquiescent UK Athletics whose top management have had a vested interest in keeping the severely flawed system going. They are like the courtiers in Grimm’s fairy tale of the king’s new suit of clothes.

Dave Collins in his presentation on the UKA website says that he doesn’t “cater for the improvement of standards in British athletics.” But he also says: “I direct the programme which enables UK athletes to win medals at World and Olympic level.” It is his (and before him Max Jones’) failure to see that the two are irrevocably linked, that the latter must depend on the former that is accelerating the decline of the sport in Britain.

The father of British coaching, Geoff Dyson recognised this from the very beginning. “The star performer,” he used to say, “stands at the top of a pyramid and the higher he stands the greater the base of that pyramid must be.”

What government and its quango, Sport England, have provided, in financial and logistical terms, is an inverted pyramid that must inevitably collapse.

And we’re all being mesmerised by the medal tables. Although Britain finished tenth in the medal table in Gothenburg we actually finished fourth in the ‘placings’ table that collates the eight finalists, six points behind Spain in third. However before there is dancing in the streets of Solihull it should be noted that the team amassed the lowest points total at a European Championships since 1982.

And midst all the brouhaha about the World Junior Championships we should note that all the medal success came in the sprints and relays. And before we go all wild about Harry (Aikines-Aryeetey) we should also note that no World Junior 100m champion has ever gone on to win an Olympic or World title. Collins is right to comment that in looking for future international medallists performance isn’t everything.

If we study the decade before lottery funding became available with the first decade of its implementation we can see that in the seven Olympic and World championships between 1987 and 1996 we won a total of 49 medals; in the seven between 1997 and 2006 we won 32. Not only that but the spread of events was greater between 1987 and 1996. In the first decade we won medals in around half of the events on the programme, in the second we won medals in around a third.

This trend is reflected in the athletes listed in World Class Podium Programme.
44.2% are sprinters and hurdlers; 21.4% are endurance (making 65.6% of the list runners). Only two throwers make the grade.

In World Class Development 77.0% are runners. This means that of the 134 athletes just 13% are jumpers, 6% are throwers and 4% are multi-eventers.

So as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer so Collins’ pyramid base becomes ever smaller. How can any Performance Director worth his salt be seemingly oblivious to such erosion and not want to do something about it?

Those sporting bureaucracies Sport England and UK Sport, who have also had their own administrative upheavals during UK Athletics’ ten year existence, have colluded and are colluding with UKA to keep this expensive white elephant on the road (because of course it is in all three organisations’ financial interest to do so). If, as has been reported, £25 million of lottery funding has been spent on the world class programmes over the past decade that totals almost £800,000 per medal; or if we’re just talking gold, £3,125,000 each. By no stretch of the imagination could this be construed as value for money. In fact it is a financial scandal of quite astronomical proportions because the effect of all this expenditure has had a negative effect on the rest of the sport.

And it is a succession of chairpersons and chief executives of those two equally expensive quangoes who must bear a considerable amount of responsibility. In not advising government that its lust for gold was inappropriate to the welfare of British athletics (a unique sport thanks to its diversity) and in supporting the latter’s mismanagement in the name of receiving compliancy it has done it a grave disservice.


Farewell from him

In commenting on David Moorcroft’s resignation as Chief Executive UKA’s President, Lynn Davies, is reported to have said: “Dave isn’t responsible for performance. Don’t hold him accountable for our national team at major championships.”

As I recall it both Max Jones reported and now Dave Collins reports to Moorcroft and suggesting that the CEO has no responsibility for their performance is a bit like suggesting that Ken Lay had no responsibility for the downfall of Enron. The remark highlights the refusal of anybody at UKA to be accountable for their actions.

I wish Dave well with a sigh of relief. The facts, as displayed in last week’s and this week’s blog, are that he was taking the sport on an accelerating downward spiral. The list of his organisation’s failures has been too widely catalogued to require repetition here. Perhaps his biggest failure was not to recognise that a majority of his workforce lacked knowledge and experience of athletics and needed guidance. His refusal to tap into the vast experience available to him from within the sport has led to a huge expenditure of energy for little or no success either domestically or internationally. The sport as a whole resented the millions spent on what proved to be ineffective professional administration.

Let us paraphrase (again) Lady Bracknell. “To appoint one inappropriate chief executive,” she might have said, “might be regarded as a misfortune; to appoint four looks like carelessness.” Well a little more than that. The last four appointees have all, in their own way, been a disaster. All charming fellows, all not up to the task. Already speculation is rife about Moorcroft’s successor and doubtless, in this day and age, bookmakers will be taking bets.

But before that hour approaches and to appease the Gods that have led us to this parlous state perhaps a few more sacrifices are still required.

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.