Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport Minutes of Evidence


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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