A good sports policy is also a good health, education, law and order, social cohesion and economic policy

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This may be my story but I know it is replicated across multiple sports in multiple countries over multiple years.

The day after I successfully defended my 1500m Olympic title in 1984 in Los Angeles, Neil Macfarlane, then sports minister, (actually a rather good one) came to the Olympic village.  In Macfarlane’s case this didn’t need prompting by a smart private office.  

As sports ministers go Macfarlane was naturally comfortable on those occasions.  He sat with me and a group of athletes and asked a simple but purposeful question.  “What can I do to make sure we have better performances in 4 years’ time at the Seoul Olympics?”   In British terms the LA Games were reasonably successful.  A young Steve Redgrave appeared on the scene.  Daley Thompson, was again unassailable in the Decathlon.  Tessa Sanderson won Gold in the Javelin and a good smattering of medals were won across a range of sports. 

I was appointed to the old UK Sports Council the year before LA.  I had already absorbed a year of the byzantine structure of British sport and it’s even more mercurial funding.  Around that time I was taken aside by our world class weightlifting coach, John Lear. He cornered me and bluntly told me what I needed to remember.  “You’ll never go wrong if you remember Lear’s law”, he said, going on to explain:  “It’s really simple.  The weight a man can lift above his head is directly proportionate to the size of the Sport’s Council grant.”  Mindful of this conversation, I ventured down the same path with McFarlane.  The most important thing you can do Minister is to increase funding for Olympic preparation, I told him.  To put this into perspective, when two years later I became deputy chair of that same Council, the annual budget from Government for every aspect of British sport came to the grand total of £43 million - a sliver of the Arts Council grant.  McFarlane listened, nodded his head and said leave it with me.  Actually, he left it with me.  Weeks after returning from LA he asked me to chair a working group on exactly what more money for Olympic preparation amounted to and to which sports it should go. A year later I presented the report which resulted in an extra £5 million for our 1988 Olympic preparations.

There’s something else I remember about my return from LA.  Days after landing I went back to my athletics club, Haringey to thank my club coach and training partners.  The New River Stadium was also Daley Thompson’s training base.  Word got out that we were coming down so when we arrived there was a queue of kids all wanting autographs, mostly from Daley.   Then came the sobering moment.  The club Chairman explained he was overwhelmed by applications to join the Club.  My initial response was “that’s a good thing, isn’t it?”  “Yes,” he said “But we don’t have the funds, coaches or frankly the ability to cater for them.” 

I often wonder how many of those kids we had to turn away could have been the next Daley.  And that was when I realised that the tiresome arguments about whether funding should be targeted at elite OR community sport were desperately wrong.  You can’t have one without the other.  McFarlane also knew that the Olympic shop window was catalytically linked to the vibrancy of grassroot sports. 

Sadly, Haringey Athletic Club, in the top handful of European clubs that decade, through lack of funding and lack of recognition, in is no longer based at the New River Stadium.  That bedrock of all that was good in my sport, more often than not, began in the clubs which fell by the wayside when Local Government cuts bit deep.  

I cannot think of a single athlete from my time in the British team that didn’t come through the club network and wouldn’t pay homage to those club coaches, officials, volunteers who gave up hundreds of hours to support athletes of all abilities.  It is all too easily forgotten that the Mo Farahs and Jess Ennis’ of this world aren’t born with Olympic medals around their necks.  Long before they graduate into elite performance structures, the hard yards of burning hope and ambition are forged in community sport and clubs who nurture and develop their talent.  It’s the same across the sporting spectrum. 

And coaches that have responsibility for elite performers so often cut their teeth and develop their skills in community sport.  

A good sports policy is a good health, education, law and order, social-cohesion and economic policy.  Yet, all too often politicians fail to recognise this connection.  

There has to be a greater understanding of the role of community sport across all  demographics - from kids playing five-a-side to octogenarians joining Park Runs.  I fervently believe this can be done in safely and sensibly. Trust sport and grass roots organisations to get this right.  The historic diminution in school sport is also an acute problem globally. It cannot be beyond our collective wisdom to bring these back into line with what society needs and wants.  And it must not be beyond our collective ambition!

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