The Olympic success was great, now we need to do the same for club and grassroots sport.
In the last couple of weeks, a national debate has begun to gather momentum in Great Britain about Olympic success, compared with the realities of grassroots club level sport and the low levels of physical activity in the general population. I’ve had a couple of letters published in The Guardian on the subject, necessarily quite brief, so here’s a fuller explanation of my contribution to the debate. Obviously, my references are largely about cycling, because that’s my background.
To start on a positive note, I welcome the many successes of the Great Britain cycling team (and of course the GB teams in other sports) at the Paris Olympics and indeed over the last quarter of a century, largely fuelled of course by the National Lottery. Congratulations to all involved.
For cycling, the trajectory that began with Jason Queally’s game-changing Gold in the Kilometre TT at Sydney 2000, and continued through Athens, Beijing, London, Rio and Tokyo Olympiads, has certainly been astounding and transformational for our sport. But the first signs of a downturn, and wider issues for our sport, are clear and must not be ignored.
We must not undervalue the many positive aspects of what has been achieved, but meanwhile there are some deep-rooted problems, and much of this applies not just to cycling, of course, but to all sports, throughout the UK.
The clear problem here is that the elite level sporting success, driven by that huge investment from the National Lottery, has not been followed up during the same period with the equivalent and necessary levels of investment in grass roots sport, at every level.
On the contrary, schools, local authorities and sports clubs have been overlooked or deliberately starved of funding. Meanwhile, participation in sport has taken a back seat for the many families struggling to make ends meet. As sport becomes increasingly commodified, if you can’t afford to pay for it for yourself or your family, then you simply don’t do it. If that applies to cycling (and it does), then it certainly applies to other sports too, of course.
For many, sport used to be a way out of what we now call a deprived background. Increasingly, this is no longer true. Unless you have a decent family income and the time to spare, you and your kids are going to face difficulties in participating, in almost every sport. So, unless youngsters are picked up early for support, coaching and development by their national governing bodies (or professional clubs in some sports), they are being lost to sport, their potential remains unfulfilled, they adopt less healthy lifestyles and perhaps have other negative consequences in their lives.
Of course organisations like British Cycling, with Sport England, the other home nations’ bodies, and the county-level Active Partnerships (one of which I chair) have been working hard on these issues for a long time. Lots has been achieved, and there are many good people working their socks off to do even more. But two things occur to me; 1. These organisations and people have been grossly underfunded, and; 2. Initiatives have increasingly been targeted in recent years not at club level sport but at getting inactive people into healthier lifestyles.
Certainly this latter is very valuable work which needs to be done – low levels of physical activity have driven us into a huge health crisis, particularly in areas that were already suffering from economic downturns over several decades. So we need to keep doing something about that.
Active Travel England is another worthy activity addressing some of these same issues, and we have seen some great success stories there too. So let’s keep that up and maybe bring it into greater co-ordination with Sport England’s strategy and operations. It should help that Chris Boardman chairs both organisations.
But it’s not the same as supporting sport. That’s where we need a step-change in funding and investment. If we are seeing declining numbers of participants in both our traditional and our newer sporting disciplines, with age profiles getting older and older, fewer young people coming into sport and from ever more restricted backgrounds, then something needs to change.
What’s needed now for sport is a major programme of investment and funding (both capital and revenue) into grass roots and club level sport. Maybe it’s time to revive the old "Sport for All” mantra which many of us involved in sport will remember. Sport needs a new clarion call and a new political commitment to make a difference.
Perhaps, you might say, the new UK Government has many calls for funding and many priorities for action, it can’t afford to do everything all at once. Of course that’s true. But again, let’s be clear. It is political decisions that have got us where we are today, so it is political decisions that can start the process of getting us back to where we need to be.
So here’s a respectful message for the new Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport the Rt Hon Lisa Nandy MP, and her Under Secretary of State for Sport, Media, Civil Society and Youth, Stephanie Peacock MP. And of course for the various agencies, organisations and individuals involved in making sport happen.
We cannot be a healthier, more sporting nation, just for the few. We have to make sport more accessible for everyone, whatever their backgrounds. Lots has been achieved, but an ever-widening gap has occurred between elite level success and club level sport.
We cannot let that gap become an unbridgeable gulf. It will take time. So, like the team events on the Olympic velodrome, let’s get lined up, start the countdown, and accelerate out of the start gate.
Brian Cookson OBE
16 August 2024
All photos by Henry Iddon.