Examination of Witnesses (Questions 240
- 251)
TUESDAY 4 DECEMBER 2007
LORD MOYNIHAN,
MR SIMON
CLEGG AND
MR PHIL
LANE
Q240 Mr Hall:
I am familiar with Sir Clive's approach and I fully approve it
and we have to be very, very concentrated on those athletes that
are going to perform in 2012. Does that mean that are looking
at 12-year old gymnasts?
Mr Clegg: The programme, as I
am sure you have read and indeed is in the written submission
that we have provided to you, over the last 12 months has been
developed with someone outside of the Olympic family, a lady golfer.
Clive is now working with the support and agreement of UK Sport
exclusively with a judo player, Euan Burton, based up in Scotland,
and based upon the outcome of this next phase of the development
of the programme we will then roll it out into the other sports.
As a result of our launch Clive now has 15 Performance Directors
who have rung him up over the last couple of weeks and has meetings
in the diary with 15 different Performance Directors in January
and February. So the intention is that this programme will roll
out with the support—and this is absolutely fundamental
because we are a service provider and we do not dictate to our
governing bodies—of the Performance Director, with the support
of the governing bodies, and it will be different for every single
sport. What we will do is to identify people who we collectively
believe have the potential to be on the podium in 2012. It is
going to be a very, very tight programme.
Q241 Mr Hall:
You alluded to this in an earlier answer that we have some sports
where I think we perform superbly well—we over-perform probably—cycling
and rowing to give you two examples. Sir Clive Woodward said that
we have some sports that do not need any input whatsoever and
others that need cranking up. Is there anything else that you
would add to the list of those that need cranking up? You have
mentioned the martial arts.
Mr Clegg: Of course, we would
aspire to have all 26 sports at the same standard as sailing and
cycling. Clive was with me in Qingdao in China for the sailing
test event and he described the preparation and performance structures
around the sailing fraternity of the British Team as being "Formula
1" class. That is really the challenge for us over the next
five years, given this wonderful opportunity of staging the Olympic
Games in London in 2012, for us to work with our governing bodies
to get them to that standard. Therefore, really there are only
a very, very small number of sports, who I believe and who Clive
believes, for which very little of his programme would be of benefit.
Lord Moynihan: This is one of
the services that we are providing to the Olympic governing bodies.
Another is to help the governing bodies themselves be absolutely
professional in everything they do, and to achieve that we have
spoken to top FTSE companies and we have partnered them with each
of the governing bodies without any accountability of report writing,
for example; but the opportunity for a top company such as British
Airways, to come together with Snow Sport—and we are talking
a lot about the summer games at the moment—to build a relationship
and identify ways in which British Airways can directly assist
Snow Sport to deliver better services to the individual athletes.
Right across the Olympic sports we are finding these one-to-one
relationships really deliver results because of a much more professional
approach to what are effectively organisations which need to be
world leading organisations—those governing bodies need
to be the best in the world and aspire to be the best in the world
at delivering services. And to that end to have the benefit of
working with leading British companies who are out there competing
in a global market has been an enormous help already to those
governing bodies involved in such partnerships. But just as with
the Woodward initiative so with the FTSE initiative. These are
services, the Olympic governing bodies do not need to take them;
they can if they wish, and if they wish to benefit from receiving
those services from the British Olympic Association we stand ready
to support them as best we can.
Mr Lane: Could I make a fundamental
distinction here between the Olympic and the Paralympic, and I
applaud the efforts that my Lord Moynihan and Simon have put in
place in order to achieve potential success for the athletes,
but it is a very, very different picture in Paralympic sport and
I think it is important that the Select Committee understands
that. We are not talking about investment here in elite athletes
making that significant difference, what we are actually looking
at is investment in the pathway because there is a paucity of
young talent coming through in the development of potential pipeline,
unlike the Olympic one where investment has been able to build
on years of tradition and success. There is very little going
on in schools for young athletes; there are very few sports which
have developed long-term development programmes for athletes,
and in fact the British Paralympic Association has taken it upon
themselves to try and introduce some structure into this. You
may well be aware of a programme called Parasport, which we have
developed with Deloittes, which is designed to give young people
and those acquiring disabilities opportunities to get involved
in sport and to direct them to both the clubs and the level of
support that they need. We are having some success in talking
to the Youth Sport Trust about the schools programmes through
the PESSCL programme but that is very early days yet and the impact
of that is liable to go way past Beijing and possibly even past
2012 before it achieves any success. Sport England too are still
in a difficult position in terms of their support for athletes
with a disability, and only at this stage are we beginning to
get some clarity about their position. So we certainly welcome
what Simon has put in place. With Clive, I have talked to Clive
about how that might apply to some of our athletes and certainly
welcome his interest in sharing that with us, but there is a very
more fundamental position that needs to be looked at in terms
of the Paralympics otherwise achieving second place or first place
in 2012, whichever target is ultimately agreed upon, is likely
to be very, very difficult and remote.
Q242 Rosemary McKenna:
On that specific issue is this a by-product of the fact that we
now try and put people with disabilities into mainstream education
rather than specific special schools—an unintentional by
product?
Mr Lane: I think you are right;
it is an unintentional by product. We would wholeheartedly—and
I am an educationalist myself, a former head teacher.
Q243 Rosemary McKenna:
Yes, I am too.
Mr Lane: I would support the principle
wholeheartedly of youngsters with disabilities being in mainstream
schools where they are able to work alongside their peers, but
the upshot of that is of course that preparation for their sport
and physical education has not been at a commensurate level to
their academic education. Therefore, youngsters are really dispersed
over 26,000 schools as opposed to perhaps 500 special schools
and are now finding great difficulty in finding the potential
routes into the sport that they want to participate in, and more
particularly to find the level of coaching and support they need
to become high performance athletes.
Chairman: Paul Farrelly.
Q244 Paul Farrelly:
Just on that point, Mr Lane, the first person at my surgery on
Saturday was a representative of Deaf for Athletics. Where do
people fall between two stools of able-bodied, if you will pardon
the paraphrase and Paralympics? He was looking for some sponsorship
to take a team of ten to Deaflympics in Munich. Where do these
people stand and how can they get support?
Mr Lane: Deaflympics is a separate
category, it is not in the Paralympics; they have their own organisation
like Special Olympics and their own competitions. They do have,
as you say, a Deaflympics which happens every four years or so,
which mirrors what goes on in the Paralympic Games. Regrettably
it is not funded as an elite competition therefore they struggle
to get investment from the Sports Councils within the UK, and
that is a real challenge for them. I think it is regrettable because
I do think they should be treated equitably in that case alongside
our Paralympic athletes and so on. But that is the position that
currently pertains.
Q245 Paul Farrelly:
I will take it up on his behalf. Lord Moynihan, the conversations
about Sir Clive and his more recent experience at Southampton,
just begged that old chestnut of a question from of where do we
stand on entering an Olympics football team at the moment?
Lord Moynihan: Very quickly, then,
we would hope to enter both a men's and women's team for 2012.
Mr Lane: Can I say that there
will be a Paralympic British team in Cerebral Palsy Soccer and
Blind Soccer. We grasped the nettle.
Q246 Chairman:
Sir Clive will be coaching it.
Mr Lane: We hope Clive will lend
us some support.
Lord Moynihan: There is a very
close relationship, you will be pleased to learn, between the
BPA and the BOA and we certainly will exchange services where
it is to the mutual benefit of both organisations.
Q247 Chairman:
We only have a very short time to go. Christine Ohuruogu—this
is the third time in which you have overturned your automatic
lifetime ban policy. Do you think it is now time you revisited
the policy?
Mr Clegg: Obviously I cannot talk
about the specifics of the case particularly since we have not
yet received the reasoned judgment. What I would say, Chairman,
in response to that is that the British Olympic Association brought
in its automatic byelaw to take the moral high ground and to send
a very strong message to athletes that we would not tolerate performance
enhancing drugs. Interestingly enough, under the Chairmanship
of the late Sir Arthur Gold, the byelaw was introduced as a result
of direct pressure from the British Olympic Athletes' Commission,
who wanted to compete on a level playing field. Of course, the
whole issue of missed whereabouts tests, at that stage was not
party to the whole testing regime and obviously that has only
come about recently whereby three missed tests constitutes a doping
offence and as a result an athlete falls under our bylaw and has
to appeal. I think the Chairman will talk about the Anti-Doping
Commission that he has established which will be looking at all
anti-doping matters, but all I will say is that we constantly
keep the bylaw under review and once we receive the reasoned judgment
on the Christine Ohuruogu case we will reappraise where we are
at.
Q248 Chairman:
So UK Sport's suggestion that you should refine it so that the
ban is only imposed in the case of a serious offence, that is
something you will look at?
Lord Moynihan: The British Olympic
Association's Anti-Doping Commission will certainly look at any
representations from UK Sport and we are spending the first three
to four months really collating a great deal of international
information through our Secretariat on the anti-doping policies
around the world. The landscape is shifting rapidly and we do
need to review our bylaws in the context of that and indeed in
the context of the IOC's proposed changes post-Beijing. So the
answer to your question, Chairman, is yes.
Chairman: Lastly, Paul Farrelly.
Q249 Paul Farrelly:
My Lord Moynihan, you recently criticised the financial management
of the 2012 Games and in particular the information that you were
receiving from the ODA. What is your current position on the financial
information that you are getting from them to conduct your oversight
role?
Lord Moynihan: I think to be fair
my comments were about the provision of financial information
to the Olympic Board and that is provided to the Olympic Board
by the Olympic Board Secretariat. I very much take the view that
as one of the four members of that Board it is vitally important
that we have a clear view of the budget, a clear view of the cash
flow—as you know; the cash flow tells you a lot about what
is happening and what is not happening. We need a breakdown of
that budget in detail and we need the contingency allocated to
those projects, not least because the contingency allocation will
allow a sensible risk analysis to be made to which parts of the
overall project are on time, on budget, or likely to be under
pressures for whatever reason, and members of the Olympic Board
can then ask questions of the Olympic Board Secretariat or indeed
of the Olympics Minister, which is our function. The reason why
it is so important for the British Olympic Association needs to
be set in context. We need to look after the interests of sport
and recreation, particularly Olympic sport and recreation. The
Olympic sports legacy to us is vitally important; it is part of
our mandate from the Olympic Charter; it is part of our responsibility.
Unless we can undertake a comparative analysis of how much money
is being spent on the Olympic sports legacy is it wise that money
is being spent in that direction rather than on an infrastructure
spend? We are simply not in a position to argue that case. So
it is very important that that information is made available and
yes, I have, over a period of months during the summer and early
autumn, requested more detailed information in an interview with
Mr Bond and also highlighted the importance of making sure that
we have that information.[7]
I was pleased that the Olympics Minister responded in the way
she did. She has made it very clear that the January board will
be in receipt of the information that I have just requested as
being important and requested at an earlier stage. I hear today
from my colleagues from the ODA that they are anticipating that
it would be rather sooner than January—a fortnight if I
was not mistaken.
Q250 Paul Farrelly:
Two weeks.
Lord Moynihan: Which I welcome—this
will give me a lot of material over the Christmas break—in
order to undertake that comparative analysis. But is vitally important.
We need to look not just from the BOA's point of view at the funding
of the team; we need to make sure that the oversight role that
we represent as one of the members of the Olympic Board can be
undertaken comprehensively and professionally and we need to be
able to argue the case that there is a strong Olympics sports
legacy which achieves what Lord Coe set out when he talked about
touching the lives of young people throughout the United Kingdom
is very much part of hosting the Olympic Games in London 2012.
Rosemary McKenna in her earlier comments highlighted the importance
of that in the nations and regions. It is vitally important that
the Olympics sports legacy reflects that. If I may conclude by
saying that at the announcement that was made recently about the
sustainability programme, it was equally made clear the Mayor
would be providing a sports legacy programme for London; that
the Olympics Minister would be providing an Olympics sports legacy
programme nationwide and that Sport England will also be undertaking
that, although I understand from recent announcements that that
may be delayed a few months. The importance of those three documents
cannot be over-estimated and we at the British Olympic Association
with the agreement of the other members of the Olympic Board will
be reviewing those documents in a public engagement which will
also include not just those documents but, as we move towards
an election, no doubt we will be looking to seek the support of
all parties for the objectives that the Chancellor of the Exchequer
set out two years ago in what is now termed his Olympics Manifesto,
which we fully applauded and which we need to see delivered. But
we need it to be delivered not just as a series of promises but
costed promises against a budget which is deliverable on a timescale
which we can all look at and hopefully all applaud and work together
to achieve as a real legacy for hosting the Olympic Games in 2012,
so it is well beyond the Olympic Park.
Q251 Paul Farrelly:
To be quite clear, in terms of the breakdown of the budgets, the
projected cash flow and the allocation of contingency you are
in the same position as this Committee and still waiting for the
information.
Lord Moynihan: The information
is due to be forthcoming in January but, as we heard today, it
may be a little earlier, yes.
Chairman: Can I thank you very much.
7 Note by witness: David Bond, journalist
for the Daily Telegraph interview on 2012 finances published
on 25 October 2007. Back
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