John Bicourt: Do the public get value for money from UK Athletics?

16 March 2010

For those trying to justify the £150 million public monies invested in athletics as insignificant by comparing it with the health costs associated with level of obesity in the nation, the private investment in health clubs and with what happens in the United StatesCollege system is entirely spurious and irrelevant.

Football, for example, has massively more money but it's not tax payers’ money and they're not accountable to the wider public. Neither is motor sport or many other sport and leisure related activities.

The MP’s expenses row involved the "trifling" sum of "only" £1.2 million and the Government spent more than that to investigate it and bring those responsible to account. Why? Because it was public money being improperly used and the public expected it to be challenged.

The only proper way to assess value for 12 years of public money being spent by this unelected and unaccountable national governing body is to look at the state of our own sport in this country and what development was promised and expected to be achieved, not JUST at a tiny  elite level but also through the critical and essential development of the grass-roots and the sustainable pool of  talent at every level where clear evidence  from recorded results shows dramatic decline both in standards in depth and participation  particularly after the age of 16.

UK Athletics' original remit was to develop the sport from grass roots-right through to elite but they have instead concentrated purely only on the elite once they have risen, unaided by them, up through the grass roots and in that cause have employed 150 staff, including part time, at a salary cost of over £5 million per year whilst the grass roots [the clubs] that actually produce the sport and its athletes relies on volunteers only and no public funding.

UK Athletics continues to be funded on the success and presumed success of a very small elite group - some of whom have won medals without UK Athletics and lottery support - to give the impression that the whole of the sport from the rest of the elite down is thriving and vibrant, when it fact it isn’t. And the long term prognosis is not good. So something is not right.

At the Beijing Olympics and the Berlin World Championships, look at the number of events with no British representative and further, the number of events with only one out of as possible three? So why does UK Athletics continue to employ those directors of events and event coaches responsible who cannot deliver?

Look at the number of GB athletes who seem to produce season’s best and some personal bests in the qualifying of global championships but then fail to reproduce it when in matters in the semi-final or in a final for the few who make it?

The spending [and largely wasting] of public money on a costly and ineffective administration for an elite few may not matter to the likes of those on the BBC athletics forum who have their own agenda to support UK Athletics but it does to others and the issues - continually advised to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport - won’t go away, much as they would like them to.

John Bicourt was an English record holder and represented Britain in the 3,000m steeplechase at the 1972 and 1976 Olympics. He has coached, advised and managed a number of Olympic and World Championship athletes from Britain, Australia, South African, Kenya and the United States, including medallists and world record holders. He is an elected officer of the Association of British Athletics Clubs

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Zac  - Measuring the performance of UKA |16-03-2010 22:25 What makes it all the more disgraceful is the refusal of UK Athletics and their funders UK Sport and Sport England to engage with clear measurements of success and failure. Athletics statisticians have used the performance of the top ranked individual, as well as the 10th ranked and 100th ranked in each event to measure standards. UKA refuse such transparent scrutiny of standards. The best measurement of participation is the numbers of athletes entered in the different county championships held up and down the country each year. Once again UKA refuse to engage with such a transparent mechanism for counting participation. If the funding bodies refuse to measure UKA's performance in such a simple and transparent way, and they retain control over the priorities of UKA, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that UK Athletics has been created as a shield to protect UK Sport and Sport England from responsibility for the damage they have done with public money.

slimjim  - mr |17-03-2010 10:52 It is not just a coincidence that all the changes to the governance of athletics in this country started a year after the present government came to power. Their "we know best" and "management down" philosophies have led to the burgeoning number of quangoes in this country including sport. Roger Draper left the LTA to head Sport England in 2002 and in 2004 his Board member Sir Andrew Foster was charged with a root and branch review of athletics which has led to the present over large and over weaning NGB - UKA Athletics Ltd. On the way he saw to the demise of the world's first Athletic Federation the AAA's - an event which passed with hardly a comment except by the then (2005) newly formed Association of British Athletic Clubs which is the only truly democratic organisation in track and field athletics in the UK. Having reaked havoc in athletics Draper returned to the LTA where he then repeated his club destruction programme while at the same time ensuring that all the top brass were well remunerated. The Special Commons committee meeta next week and I hope the do abetter job grilling Draper than the Chilcott enquiry did of Blair and Brown

Kinder Egg  - Unsurprising |18-03-2010 21:12 ... that Mr Bicourt is coming out with his usual trash under the guise of a respectable column on ITG. Sad really that you've given him a forum. He's much happier on his own forum usually. Poor choice of contributor.

slimjim  - mr |19-03-2010 18:06 Would you be kind enough to explain where in Mr Bicourt's article there are inaccuracies?. Too many quango apparachniks are in denial about waste of public money and general inefficiency.

fangio  - Reply for Slimjim |22-03-2010 15:45 Certainly mr Bicourt misrepresents the position of atheltics in this county. It is hard to say inaccurate because he article gives very few facts and those that it does give are mostly irrelevant to the poitns at issue. In fact it is more an article of soundbites and polemic than any substance. His first paragraph (having been someone who has made the point to him about US collegiate funding and other countries non public sector fuding being as relevant as funding of the NGB, and about the need to overcome the scoietal changes which have seen rising child obesity) is a total misrepresentation of the points raised to him. The discussion was in regard of his assertion(which is comepltely ridiculous) that UKA should be performing better than other countries because it has the largest public funding of any NGB. That is of course a ridiculous suggestion, a track fudned by the NGB would not effect the performance of the atheltes who use it any more than the same track fudned by non NGB monies. However Mr Bicourt chooses to represent the perfectly logical arguments fo those who oppose him as people saying that US collegiate spending efects the relative VFM of the NGB. Mr Bicourt then goes on to say that the value of the public monies being spent should not be assessed against teh elite but he grass roots. Well, as Neils De Vos has poitned out, the public money was provided specifically for hte elite programme and has been spent as it was provided for. The grass roots expenditure has come from other sources. So Mr Bicourt's assertion is of course inaccurate. He goes on later to say that "The spending [and largely wasting] of public money on a costly and ineffective administration for an elite few" well RM De Vos has quite clearly sated that the overheads of UKA are fudned by commercial revenues not public spending. Of Course Mr Bicourt ignores this when sensationalising salary figures and headcount. He has often been challenged to say which jobs he would cut, and asked to show whether those jobs were funded to specifically comply with sponsors and funding body requirements, so I have no doubt he will continue to give the impression that all jobs as public expenditure despite knowing they are not. Mr Bicourt goes on to suggest that the long term prognosis is not good. On what basis we don't know as he blandly states it and we should all take his word fo it apparently. Personally having debated in forums with Mr Bicourt I know that he has a poor track record in prvoding statistics to back up his points, and surprisingly almost every time he makes an error it is one that makes the current position seem worse than it is, rather than the other way around. His representation that there is something wrong with having no atheltes in some events, or not having 3 in some events and that this means that event coaches are failures is of course entirely misleading. How many hammer throwers int eh entire history of UKA have ...

john bicourt  - Fangio still in denial |31-03-2010 08:20 Fangio, In what way am I wrong? The facts speak for themselves.It's just that you don't want to recognise them. If we have so many events and places available but toom few athletes capable of being selected then why is it unreasonable according to you, to question those tasked with ensuring that athletes are developed sufficiently to make the grade. Now, I don't say and I haven't said that each and every possible place has to be filled but any reasonable person would want to know why considerable sums of money put into each event, with paid coaches and managers and a support system to deliver that event, results in no representation? The fact is we have too many empty events and too many empty places. But all you and your cronies do is make pathetic excuses and claim it's not the coaches, or UKA or the money it's only that we can't compete at the world level in certain events BECAUSE we don't have the athletes! That's not good enough. If people are being employed to deliver events and athletes are being paid and supported then we should have better than we have otherwise someone's failing and its not the athletes. No school or business would get away with your logic.

Biggut  - Specifically you are wrong because... |31-03-2010 21:21 You are wrong because the money came with specific KPIs attached. Medals was not one of them. Medallists was. Mr De Vos has quoted the stats that rate specifically to the KPIs required by UK Sport in the funding agreement for 2005-2010 and UKA are in fact performing against those specific indicators. Whether you or I or anyone else believes these indicators to be flawed is irrelevant. They are the indicators laid out by the funding body for the money spent on the WCP. You are also clearly wrong with your constant assertion that it is only NGB funding which should be considered against success. If two tracks are built for public access and one is built by the governement directly and one funded by the governement through the NGB what diference to the relative value of the track to performance is there from how the money was spent? It is of course a rhetorical question there is no diference to the effect on performance, and yet one would show as 4-500k spent by the NGB and one would not. Why is this concept so hard for you to grasp? Zac I understand your issue with the 10th and 100th rank, but that isn't what the money has been provided to address. So you cannot argue that UKA are wrong to not address it with this money. If Mr Bicourts article were to be UK Sport enforce stupid KPIs onto athletics, then maybe the majority of what has been said would have some bearing on the debate. But since it is about UKA and money provided to address specific indicators which they are actually addressing the only answer has to be YES they are providing the value for money that they were asked to.

Biggut  - oh and.... |31-03-2010 21:26 Football does get public money and so do many other professional sports. In addition the collapse in public health does have an impact on athletic performance that cannot be easily addressed by the tiny amounts of funding to sports and health clubs have undoubtedly taken people who in the 80s would have been runners and given them a warmer posher way to excercise that impacts on the numbers of people who join athletics clubs. These are specific points, I await you reasonable and specific responses to these points.

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