Christmas Greetings from UK Sport

It’s Christmas – the season of goodwill to all men, and indeed women, as long as the man or woman doesn’t play Basketball, Handball, or Table Tennis and isn’t a wrestler. If you’re any of them, the season of goodwill is going to pass you by courtesy of UK Sports ‘no compromise’ approach to the distribution of public money for the next Olympics.

‘No compromise’ actually means zero tolerance. Zero tolerance of failure to win medals, because all of these sports, together with indoor volleyball and men’s beach volleyball have seen their funding cut to zero as a result of their failure to contribute to our medals total and general feelgood bonhomie this summer. In contrast the sports that put a smile on our patriotic medal winning faces are getting big increases from a budget that is itself increasing by 11%.

Compared to the fate that might have awaited underperforming athletes in the Soviet era, UK sports zero tolerance response is small beer. You don’t succeed, you lose your funding, but nothing else. But it is still fairly draconian, and at odds with a mantra that it’s the taking part and not the winning that counts. Clearly winning, or at least beating the odds and exceeding expectations, is everything where funding is concerned.  

The justification for the zero budgets, given by Liz Nicholl, UK Sports chief executive, is that ‘they are not likely to medal in Rio or the Olympics beyond that. They probably won’t qualify to even be in Rio’. Well if they weren’t likely to qualify before the funding cuts, they definitely won’t do now. Cutting finding effectively turns a prediction into a self fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t have the money to prepare for the Olympics how are you going to get to Olympic standard?

An argument could be made that these sports should be given more money, not less, as they are clearly the ones in need of more development? Perhaps before simply taking away all funding there should be some detailed analysis of why their Olympic targets were missed. Was the failure to win medals down to under-performing athletes and sports people? Was it because national teams had coaching staff that failed to bring out the true potential in them? Was their failure because of their tactics and management style, or because they had to deal with sporting facilities that were always going to mean they’d face an uphill struggle? And were the medal targets they were set unrealistic from the outset? Was some other measurement of improvement between 2008 and 2012 necessary to make an adequate assessment of their success?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but the sports that have had their funding cut are putting forward convincing arguments to say you have to look beyond the medal count. But the targets doesn’t allow for that. The focus is only on the winning, and winning is, for the most part, defined in the narrowest sense of coming first. It may be that this is outside of UK Sports control. If the external measurement of their success is based on delivery of medals it is easy to see why they have effectively written off some sports and reduced funding of others. It’s a pragmatic way to achieve a target that is reflected simply in number of medals, not overall levels of sporting achievement and participation across a range of sports.

In defending the cuts, they have argued that the excluded sports still have grassroots funding and need to rebuild themselves. However, by taking the money away without first giving them a chance to say how they would make better use of it next time around, the task has been made that much harder. If they fail to progress in the next four years it will be used as evidence to show the ‘unlikely to win medals’ justification was correct. If they surprise everyone and make real progress it will be claimed that the UK Sports kick up the backside was what they needed to get their house in order. Nothing will show what could have been achieved with continued funding as there is no sport where this is being tested out.

Investing in them would obviously have been very risky, given the lack of medal prospects, but why give large increases to sports where we already win most of the medals? How many more medals can we gain from this investment, when there are so few that we don’t already have?

The increases to the elite sports of cycling, athletics, rowing and sailing, are probably needed to consolidate, and protect, our position, in case other countries decide to target the sports we cornered the market in when no-one else was interested, but will they do that? And if they do, will our increased spending have any say in whether or not they succeed. The evidence from Football suggests that if someone wants success really badly, they will pump inordinate amounts of cash into achieving it irrespective of what the current winners invest to preserve their position. One of the main factors that will determine the lead we have in our elite sports, will be how bothered other countries are to try and take them off us. If America or China decided to extend their dominance into cycling or rowing, we’d probably find that no amount of cash would keep our medal haul at a similar level in 2016.

Maybe we should anticipate this, and rather than pump new money, and divert old money, into these sports we should look for the next set of Olympic events that no-one is paying attention to so that we can then become trailblazers in them. Perhaps we should look at any nation that got one or two Gold’s in London, see what the Gold was in, revert to our imperialist traditions and draw up plans to take them away from them next time round.

Or maybe we should look beyond the immediate medal count, not try and pass off the cuts as something that won’t affect grass roots funding, and so is not as damaging as these sports claim it will be, and use the additional money to at least keep their funding at 2008 levels while developing more meaningful ways to decide if the money is being well spent. It’s just a thought.

In Defence of the BBC

Bashing the Beeb sounds like it should be a euphemism, but it’s fast turning into a new national pastime, taking over from the short-lived but intimately related sport of Hunt the Celebrity Paedophile. The Beeb came late to this sport, with the result that they missed the opportunity to be the first channel to bring it to the masses in 2011, and then tried too hard to play catch-up last week. And now the media have moved on from this sport and on to Bringing down the Beeb, a Jenga-like game where they aim to take out as many BBC executives as it takes for the ancient structure to collapse.

First up, of course, had to be George Entwistle, the hapless Director-General whose 54 days in office represents the most disastrous short-term tenure since Brian Clough took the helm at Leeds United in 1974. David Peace is probably writing the book about it already.

Entwistle’s ‘crime’ was to behave like a rabbit caught in the headlights when faced with the Lord McAlpine allegations. The headlights were the flurry of accusations levelled at the Beeb over its decision not to air allegations about Jimmy Savile. Blinded by these, it immediately jumped at the chance to redeem itself by outing another public figure. The cautiousness it showed about Savile had got it into trouble and it wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice. The end result was a story that soon fell apart, but it was a story they would never have run if the glare of the Savile headlights hadn’t been harming its ability to make rational decisions.

Now they are condemned for doing what they failed to do in 2011, which is to run a story without double and triple checking the facts first. They can’t win. And not just on the expose that wasn’t. If Entwistle hadn’t quit there would have been demands for him to be sacked and allegations of contempt at their failure to react given the significance of the mistake, but once he did the honourable thing and resigned, there was an immediate reaction against the £450,000 payoff he gets. The payoff was included in terms of employment drafted long before anyone knew the BBC could get caught up in a crisis that appears to be this large. It equates to one year’s salary. To me it seems entirely reasonable and indeed less generous compared to ‘get-out’ clauses in other Chief Executive’s contracts. Next to what it took to get rid of Bob Diamond, who presided over a bigger institutional disaster at Barclays, it’s peanuts. And even if it isn’t, the issue is the BBC appointing people on contracts that give them a year’s salary if they resign, rather than giving a year’s salary in this instance. But in Bringing down the Beeb, finer details are avoided and glossed over.

This brings us to a closer examination of what the Beeb did and didn’t do in relation to Savile and McAlpine. In the case of Savile they chose not to report allegations that, for all they appear to be genuine and the tip of an iceberg, are still unproven in a court of law. They were allegations that, for whatever reason, were not pursued while Savile was alive. If they had gone ahead with the Newsnight report, and the allegations had turned out to be unsubstantiated, the public reaction would have been outrage. ‘The memory of charitable hero Savile being defamed so soon after his death and with him unable to defend himself. How disgusting’, would have been the condemnation from the newspapers that now condemn them for not publishing it, in spite of never running stories about him themselves.

In the case of McAlpine, the BBC reported allegations without naming the alleged offender, responding to the general public frenzy for anyone who might possibly have ever done, or been accused of, anything to be named and shamed. The internet did the rest. How does this differ to the wave of super injunctions we were told were stifling the press and protecting the guilty last year? The only difference is that the allegation turned out to be misplaced. Is that enough to justify the wholesale witch hunt and seeming desire for destruction of the BBC that is going on now?

Okay we expect the BBC to have higher journalistic standards than tabloid newspapers, but it’s still worth noting that allegations and retractions have been going on for years and normally they are settled with compensation and apologies, not wholesale resignations, unless they achieve the same scale and critical mass as the phone hacking scandal, which this one doesn’t.

Of course it’s distressing for McAlpine to be named, but various other celebrities have been accused, arrested, and even prosecuted, in relation to underage sex or rape allegations that have turned out to be false. The law and the press have not afforded them anonymity. One or two bad journalistic decisions do not constitute a major crisis and should not be allowed to bring down a great broadcaster, but that’s what it seems the media are hell bent on doing. In the meantime, the genuine victims of child abuse in the Welsh care home are forgotten and the caution that lead to the Savile story being shelved last year may re-appear just as quickly as it went, with obvious consequences for other famous perpetrators and their victims.

It’s time for some perspective. Large sections of the public got caught in a shameful moment of voyeuristic desire, insanely excited by the imminent naming of famous paedophiles. That desire lead to an ill-advised decision to jump the gun, and now the people who caused them to make that decision, by stoking the desire, deny all responsibility and turn on the organisation that made the decision, without considering how easily it could have been them in the firing line instead. It’s time to move on from Beeb bashing and get back to real stories and sensible behaviour.

Great Expectations

Ed Milliband almost let me down this week. The reason for this had nothing to do with the contents of his speech, but everything to do with the fact that it seemed to come as a surprise to every journalist and political commentator wheeled out to talk about it afterwards.

Until his speech I’d been getting wound up to the point of blogging about how nothing in politics comes as a surprise any more. Every speech, be it to a conference or Parliament, is preceeded by a news story beginning with the words ‘in a speech today x is expected to say...’

If you haven’t noticed this just google the words ‘expected to say that’and over several pages you’ll find a dazzling array of examples including‘Danny Alexander is expected to say “Fair taxes in tough times means everyone playing by the same rule book,’ ‘ Yvette Cooper is expected to say: "Look at the Libor scandal that emerged this summer. It is a multibillion pound fraud,’ and ‘George Osborne is expected to say that he’s never ate a pasty in his life, but did once have a sausage roll and understands the dietary issues that face the working class.’

All of a sudden, Milliband appeared to have bucked the trend, and I lost the chance to moan, but then I came across this on the ITN website “In a highly personal keynote speech to the Labour conference, Mr Miliband will draw on his own memories of attending a comprehensive school in north London, and speak of classmates failed by the education system because they were not suited to academic exams and university.” Normal service was resumed.

Why this irritates me so much is that it’s another example of a world where people are so impatient that they can’t wait for an event itself, and everything has to be trailed in advance. For example, unlike any other person ever to sing a Bond theme, Adele cannot wait until the official announcement, she has to tweet about it to a world who also don’t want to wait four days till something that we all knew anyway is finally made public. Newspapers do the same. The Guardian a few weeks ago had at least two ‘stories’ that were little more than teasers for interviews elsewhere in the paper. One was with JK Rowling, and the other was, once again, Danny Alexander. Is there such a lack of real stories that papers have to make quotes from their own interviews into separate articles? Just take some pages out rather than repeat the same thing twice.

This trend for sneak previews began with TV, and the same nervous executives with attention deficit disorders that decided we couldn’t be trusted to tune in on two seperate weeks for a mini-series, we had to watch on consecutive nights in case we lost all interest and forgot about it. They then decided that even if a programme was on the next night, we might still not tune in if we didn’t have some idea about what was coming, and as a result they gave us the twenty-second glimpse of the next episode that is meant to give us a scene that we’ll be eagerly waiting for, but actually destroys any of the suspense by showing us the hero will still be alive, and the villain will strike again.

I can only assume that political advisers believe they have to satisfy the same level of impatience and imagined anticipation when it comes to political speeches, but political conferences are not rock gigs. Do they imagine a whole conference, or nation, full of people sitting through a 90 minute long speech waiting for the words ‘Look at the Libor scandal’ to emerge, just as they would wait for the opening bars of Mr Brightside to tell them their favourite song is on the way at a Killers gig, or for the lights to focus on the guitarist at a rock gig to tell them this is the long solo and it’s time to go to the bar?

It doesn’t happen, and, with the exception of the power and style of delivery that Milliband managed on Tuesday, it just means there are no real surprises coming from the party conferences or any other political speech. Maybe it’s ‘focus group’ politics taken to its logical end with every announcement tested in advance for consumer satisfaction, so that any unpopular ones can be quickly replaced with a sanitised family-friendly ending. I seem to remember that this was what happened with David Cameron at last year’s Tory party conference, where a controversial part of his speech was trailed and quickly altered after it was clear that it was not popular. I tried to google this to find out what the announcement was, but googling ‘David Cameron u-turn announcement’ produced more results than ‘expected to say that,’ and discovering this was where I decided to end this post.

In my next post, I’m expected to say a lot more rubbish about anything that is getting on my nerves. Bet that’s got your attention.