Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1 - 19)

TUESDAY 20 NOVEMBER 2007

MR PETER KING, MR CHRIS BOARDMAN MBE, MR ED WARNER, MR DAVID SPARKES AND MR IAN MASON OBE

  Chairman: Good morning, everybody. This is the first of several hearings which the Committee is holding to check up on the progress for the preparations for the London 2012 Games. I would like to welcome, first of all, Peter King and Chris Boardman of British Cycling, Ed Warner of UK Athletics, and David Sparkes and Ian Mason from British Swimming.

  Q1  Mr Hall: One of the yardsticks we set for a successful Olympics is the number of medals that we actually win. On your shoulders, gentlemen, rests a lot of the national pride—cycling, athletics and swimming. Do you think it is appropriate we should use this as a yardstick for a successful Olympics—the number of medals we actually win?

  Mr Boardman: I think it is appropriate that that is ultimately how we will be judged. If you set out a stall to achieve something then you are more likely to achieve that. I think it is probably the only way that we can ultimately measure our success.

  Q2  Mr Hall: The Sydney Olympics were judged a success and then we got a couple more medals in Athens. If we are going to be coming fourth in 2012 and we want to be eighth next year in Beijing are these targets actually achievable?

  Mr Boardman: I think they are very challenging. I do think they are achievable but it is going to be quite close, frankly. There is perhaps possibly an over-reliance on three sports at the moment—cycling, sailing and rowing in particular. There is a lot of expectation around those sports. That is a particular challenge for our sport.

  Q3  Mr Hall: We are looking for a much better performance next year in swimming, are we not? Is that on the cards?

  Mr Sparkes: I think the reality is that we are very much on-track for a substantial performance in 2012, and that remains our long-term goal; but the reality is that we are facing in Beijing a massive challenge. Just to give you some idea—we will be facing about 160 nations in the swimming pool. We have seen recently at the World Championships a massive re-emergence of the Americans who got themselves back organised in the swimming pool. Any of you who watched Olympics many years ago will have seen the Americans dominate in the swimming pool. The Chinese are a massive swimming nation. The Japanese will not want to be seen to be stepping back from that. The Koreans are investing enormous sums of money into the swimming pool. Swimming is truly a world sport, and I would guess that, very similar to athletics, we face a massive challenge, and every medal we win will be hard-fought for, but we are hopeful. We have got more youngsters in the medal zone than we have had for many a year, but getting onto the podium is extremely difficult to predict.

  Q4  Mr Hall: This year's World Championships has 41 medals. That gives us quite a good springboard, does it not, to move forward in Beijing next year, in Olympic disciplines?

  Mr Warner: In all disciplines absolutely. Going back to your first question there are two things I would say to you: first of all, you have to realise that the medals table is very specifically gold-medal ranked. Looking at it absurdly, you could get 100 silver medals and no gold medals and appear halfway down the medal table and you could have done incredibly well. It is not a very elegant measure. Fourth in the medal table is fine to aspire to but that is a very narrow way to judge the success of Olympic sports. Secondly, will the Olympics be a great Olympics? Every summer, as long as it does not rain, we tend to have a fantastic fortnight at Wimbledon with hardly any British success and people come away saying, "That was a great Wimbledon". London 2012 will consist of two things; one is, is it a great show, yes or no? I think it will be. It will be an even better show if we get British medals as well. I think it is more than just medal delivery in 2012. We need medal delivery in a great show.

  Q5  Mr Hall: I agree with that. Finally, and this relates to how we are doing in the Paralympics, we are extremely successful in the Paralympic Games yet we are still aiming to be second. Should we not be a bit more ambitious and aim to overtake China?

  Mr Mason: The British Swimming Paralympic Team were top of the World Championships in December in South Africa, but the key message coming away from that event was the emergence of new countries; because people are now beginning to wake up to Paralympic sport in terms of investment. The United States, which was a sleeping giant in swimming, made tremendous strides forward in terms of the medal count, and in fact came second to us by only one gold medal; that is how close it was. Going forward to Beijing, we anticipate disability swimming to be in the top three because we see China as emerging as a country which has previously not had a record in this area. With the vastness of the country and the home games, we actually think China will be the team to beat come Beijing.

  Q6  Mr Hall: Is that across the piece—athletics as well?

  Mr Warner: In terms of China, absolutely. Tanni Grey-Thompson, whom we all know of, is joining the Board of UK Athletics at my invitation as a non-executive director, and I was talking to her about this recently. She had been on a trip to Beijing and was amazed at, frankly, the number of disabled athletes that are being brought through the system there. I think there are specific challenges in the UK, and one of the things we are very keen to do is to work, for example, much more closely with the Armed Forces in converting injured soldiers coming back from Iraq and from Afghanistan into athletes. I think there are some challenges there with regard to the Armed Forces not necessarily wanting to publicise the number of injured soldiers coming back, but we have to look for our Paralympians where we can find them. There is a challenge there of identification and then of convergence into athletes and training. I do believe that UK Sport and Lottery funding gives us sufficient resources to do that work, but a lot of it is about talent identification.

  Q7  Mr Sanders: How do you ensure that the money (and there is never, ever enough for sport) is directed into the right areas, and is not directed into chasing medals?

  Mr Boardman: I think that is really about definition of the goal from the word go. It is actually defining what you want as a return and then measuring that particular sporting body against it. That is pretty much how we have taken it.

  Q8  Mr Sanders: Who should define that, Government, a funding body or the sport itself?

  Mr Boardman: Perhaps that is not for me to answer. I would suggest it is a consultation between both parties. If I was handing over money I would specify quite clearly what I wanted in return.

  Mr Sparkes: My position on this is quite straightforward coming from swimming. I believe that swimming can contribute significantly to the medal tally. We have a significant number of shots at the podium in a swimming pool in the Olympics and in the Paralympics; and I think we have demonstrated we have the capacity to get onto the podium, as tough as it is to get there.

  Q9  Mr Sanders: Which would you prefer? Would you prefer one medal winner, or a thousand swimmers?

  Mr Sparkes: The answer is: I want both.

  Q10  Mr Sanders: You cannot have both.

  Mr Sparkes: At the end of the day, to answer the question, we also have a responsibility as a sport to actually deliver more people having more fun in the swimming pool more often. I think we are working hard on that agenda. Some of the work we are doing in terms of the everyday swimming project which we are doing with Sport England (and reports on where we have got to on that have been circulated to all MPs) show considerable success in changing the culture in the pool, getting more people swimming and getting more people sticking with swimming. I think that is really important. To my mind it is not just about medals and/or; it is about doing both. I see no difficulty in achieving both. They are not necessarily in some people's eyes good bedfellows. Some people are very focussed on medals and our coaches are probably in that area; but we have got an awful lot of people who are focussed on getting more people swimming more often.

  Mr Warner: I agree entirely. We have to aspire to have both. There are two pots of public funding that come into all of our sports: one through the National Sports Council, Sport England and so on; and the other is Lottery funding for our elite athletes. We have clearly heard a lot from Sport England about the risk of funding being cut for our participation programmes. We have to fight very hard to retain that or find other sources of income to sustain it. For us it is jargon but there is an athlete pathway which starts in the playground and hopefully ends up on the podium. If you starve that pathway of talent coming in at the playground level and developing then you are not going to get your podium athletes of the future. We talk about a legacy from London 2012, that has to be many more people participating in sport and for athletics. I want lots of people to go jogging for health and fitness purposes, sure, but I actually want people participating in track and field in athletics as a sport and not just as a recreational health discipline. We have to do all we can to take 2012 and make that an inspiration to people to want to go to a club to throw things, to run, and to jump; and not just to go for a jog to keep fit.

  Mr King: Cycling is a clear example of the fact that you can have both. We have had success in Sydney and success in Athens, and during that period of time the number of people taking part in competitive cycling has gone up by 60%.

  Mr Boardman: We have actually had a programme of testing in schools as well to bring people into the sport and then into talent clubs. The last figures I can recall were 15,000 school children were tested in a single year. With those rises in cycling participation we only actually have two feasible tracks, one in Newport and one in Manchester, to achieve that. We have a participation part on the disability side which we think is very important as well. It is an integral part of what we do. They actually train with the able-bodied; they use the same equipment by and large. We are top in the medal table there as well, so I think it is possible to service all areas.

  Q11  Chairman: Looking at swimming, I attended a launch you had here last week where you brought along Duncan Goodhew, who plainly is a role model but he is now a slightly ancient role model. It is a long time since we had a household name as a British swimming champion. Why are we not doing better at swimming?

  Mr Sparkes: I want to answer that historically—why are we not doing better—to be honest with you there are a number of factors in that. Number one, I think we certainly did lose our way a little bit. We did not have adequate funding. We did not have sufficient 50-metre pools, and you have probably heard me say that a few times. It is very difficult to train Olympic champions, and we did not get enough access to the 50-metre pools that we have got at affordable prices. The whole thing was a little bit of a mish-mash. What we have now done is built what I believe is a very sustainable system, whereby we are now developing around the new 50-metre pools the opportunity for affordable access where we can get good coaches into that environment so that youngsters can come through. The last gold medallist we had was Adrian Moorhouse who came from Leeds if you recall, a Bradford boy. At the end of the day what we need are more Adrian Moorhouses. What we have developed without doubt is a whole raft of young talent that is very close to the podium. We now believe that we have got adequate funding and adequate systems in places and, I have to say, some exceptional world-class coaches, and they have now got to convert those finalists into medallists, which is what we all want. That takes time and you cannot do it in a day, not when there are another 160 nations all wanting to do it at the same time. The trick is that you need the talent, you need the coaches and you need the pools. I believe we are on the right road and it just will take time.

  Q12  Chairman: Swimming was the one discipline where at Athens there did not appear to be a target for medals at all and yet you actually came back with two. What is the target for Beijing?

  Mr Sparkes: Four.

  Q13  Chairman: Are you confident?

  Mr Mason: As confident as we can be within the context that David has set of 160 nations. Just exemplifying what David has said, in March we were down at the Australian Institute of Sport specifically to see the new swimming training centre and this epitomises what we are up against. This was a dedicated, high-tech training facility on a no-compromise basis. No public access; no student access; a three-metre, ten-lane pool with 26 analysis cameras purely dedicated to success on the international stage. This is a country that is relatively small in comparison to the UK, and they now reckon that to keep ahead of all other countries bar America they must invest in quality daily training facilities in sports science and sports medicine and that is the bit we have still to get to. Big improvement because of the vast investment in the last few years but in swimming terms (and I cannot speak for other sports) we are a mile off having excellent daily training facilities across the board which is required for international success.

  Q14  Alan Keen: Could I ask about cycling. I was at Herne Hill in 1948 watching Ed Salas beating the Italians so it goes back a long way with me. I was at Windsor Great Park watching the road race in 1948 and that was an amazing sight. In those days cycling was a massive sport as there were not many cars about. There are not many tracks now, are there?

  Mr Boardman: Two. We have numerous outdoor facilities, but indoor Olympic comparable facilities we have Newport and Manchester.

  Q15  Alan Keen: We have seen a tremendous upsurge, certainly in central London, with lots of people cycling who did not use to cycle before. There cannot be any way that is fed into the competitive sport, presumably? Where do the young cyclists come from? I am speaking as somebody who lives in London and sees no sign of competitive cycling obviously. How do you get youth fed into competitive cycling?

  Mr King: As you said there about all the people you see cycling in London that can actually be fed into the competitive cycling arena. We have a programme called Everyday Cycling and it is all about taking people who are already on their bikes for one reason or another and actually bringing them into the structured programmes which lead right the way through as a continuous pathway to the medal level. That is a programme that has been funded by Sport England. We are not yet confident that it will be funded going forward but actually it is the base of our pyramid in terms of your ordinary everyday cyclist. In terms of the children coming through, we have a lot of programmes where we physically go into the schools; we take the equipment with us; and we introduce the schools, through our coaches, to the joys of cycling; teach them the skills and transfer them through a programme called Go Ride into elementary cyclists and elementary competitive cyclists. Cycling is a very tough sport and it is a very long road to take people through from just riding a bike to actually becoming competitive cyclists.

  Mr Boardman: That pathway is in place. We have talent team coaches who are our talent scouts. They liaise with those affiliated clubs, the clubs that have a coach there and they have the facilities to be able to get that designation as a Go Ride club, so we have that link from playing field all the way through.

  Q16  Alan Keen: Is it a good link between the cycling clubs and the schools? Is it structured?

  Mr King: It is a good link in some areas. We have an accreditation programme for the clubs and the better clubs link well with the schools and local communities. We are trying to expand that as fast as we can.

  Q17  Alan Keen: How important is the Olympics for cycling? You have, in a way, punched above your weight in cycling as far as medals go. We have been very proud of you and others. How important is the Olympics? Does it inspire a lot of people to get into competitive cycling?

  Mr Boardman: I think it is our advertisement. It is our shop window and really that shows people what we can aspire to. Certainly with that level of success—and we are quite expecting that to increase at the next Games—success does breed success. It is an old adage but it is actually true because it shows the juniors coming up (and because of the limited facilities we train in Manchester and today the youngsters are often integrated into senior teams) all the way through there is genuine belief that if I work at this I will get where I need to go, and it seems to be working.

  Q18  Alan Keen: What do you really need? As far as medals are concerned you are one of the top sports, certainly in the Olympics and World Championships. What do you need to compete with swimming, rugby and football really? There is no reason why the whole population cannot have a chance to be fed through into competitive cycling. What else do you need?

  Mr Boardman: Perhaps I can answer from one end and you can answer from the other. From the performance perspective coaching-wise and everything else, we have got what we need now. What we are really short of probably, certainly not what you want to hear, are facilities. We have got two facilities, and they are fantastic and working at capacity but we are competing for space on the Manchester track with the Olympic team training and the local schools. You want to serve both and we cannot do it. We have facilities but they are working at capacity which is great but that is one thing that we need.

  Mr King: It is facilities all the way down, actually. It is not just facilities for the elite to train on, but facilities for people you see riding down the streets and the kids coming out of the schools, to actually go and cycle somewhere safely. We have very, very few closed road circuits, off-road circuits, even outdoor tracks. We use all that we have to the full. Unfortunately we are the one sport that has suffered because of the London 2012 Games because we have lost the most heavily-used facility we had which is now being redeveloped. That is fine because, going back to your earlier question, for us the Olympic Games is absolutely fundamental. London 2012 is the biggest opportunity we will have in our lifetime to take sport out to the people and change the whole culture which surrounds it. We are very up for doing that and we know there are more people riding bikes today than there are swimming or running, so we have a bigger pool of available talent than probably any of the other sports; it is just how we tap that and bring them into our sphere of influence.

  Q19  Mr Evans: How would you best describe our performance in Athens as far as athletics was concerned?

  Mr Warner: I think one athlete and one amazing performance by the men's 4 x 100 relay acted as something of a fig leaf for overall a disappointing Games, although clearly I only joined UK Athletics this year so it is just looking back. Kelly Holmes and that relay squad did fantastically, but it did not bode well at that point for the future of British elite athletics; so we are working off that base really. I think that tells you a number of things about all the sports that we are helping to manage. One of those things is that the dividing line between what is perceived to be a success and a failure is incredibly fine. We go back to the question earlier about medals tables and so on—it is a very fine dividing line all the way down. The inheritance of Niels de Vos my Chief Executive and me when we came in this year is of an improving sport from a base which I think we would all agree is unacceptably low.


 
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