When Gail Emms was asked about UK Sport’s decision to reject the desperate pleas of seven sports, including GB Badminton, to be funded for the Tokyo Olympics, she was poetic in her response. “It’s like someone just taking your heart, your emotions, your dreams and basically tearing them up,” said Emms, a badminton silver medallist at the 2004 Olympics, with a sigh.
But UK Sport has a tin ear for poetry. Its language is cold, hard, medal-economics. Once it had decided in December that badminton – along with archery, fencing, goal ball, table tennis, weightlifting and wheelchair rugby – had little chance of winning any medals in 2020, any representations to the contrary were always likely to fall on deaf ears.
When these sports appeared before the UK Sport board earlier this month they had 20 minutes to explain why they should be moved from band four – for sports with little chance of success in 2020 – to band three, for sports with a genuine chance of at least one medal. All of them failed.
That meant they inevitably followed in the forlorn footsteps of synchronised swimming, water polo, wheelchair fencing and visually impaired football – all of which lost their elite funding in 2014.
It means GB badminton will be scrimping around for cash for the next four years, instead of working out how to spread around £5.7m of investment, while fencing (£4.2m), wheelchair rugby (£3m) and archery (£2.9m) have gone from chasing medals to relying on a begging bowl from whoever is kind enough to donate.
Badminton, which believes it has a strong group of youngsters who will be at their best by the 2024 Olympics, called UK Sport’s decision “staggering”. Its fear, and it is an understandable one, is the best talents will be lost and it will enter a funding death spiral – no medals in Tokyo leading to no funding for 2024 leading to no medals in 2028 – from which they have no chance of recovering.
Certainly the decision not to throw a few pennies badminton’s way seems harsh, given that Marcus Ellis and Chris Langridge won a bronze medal in the men’s doubles in Rio only six months ago. Some inside the sport bitterly compare their treatment to that of modern pentathlon, which was awarded £6.97m over the next four years – allowing it to fund 18 athletes, most of whom will never see the inside of an Olympic village – despite no medals in Brazil.
But for UK Sport the decision is entirely consistent with its “no compromise” approach – which it points out has delivered enormous success over the past 20 years. As its chief executive Liz Nicholl put it: “The outcome that we are charged with delivering is investing in best medal success to make the nation proud. So we are investing in our very best medal prospects to deliver more medals and more medallists in Tokyo. Unapologetically. That is our remit. That is what we are here for.”
But while the headlines were about the defenestration of more sports, there was also a sense at UK Sport headquarters on Monday that a chilly wind was blowing in its direction too owing to a combination of greater inflation, a weaker pound, and the growing cost of entering athletes into qualifying competitions.
As Nicholls put it: “We’re disappointed we can’t fund every sport with medal potential and we don’t want that line to be drawn any higher because of ongoing increases in costs and international competition expenditure.”
Rod Carr, the chair of UK Sport, did not want to get into the politics of the Brexit vote. But, he acknowledged, that was a factor too. “Its exactly that. Air tickets, hotels and so on are more expensive. The cumulative bundle of those issues means that in real terms we have less money.”
That tightening of the belts is likely to be compounded in four years. Because, as Nicholl admitted, there is no guarantee the £550m UK Sport gets from the government and the national lottery to support Olympic sports will be maintained at the same level after 2020. As she admitted: “We need to reduce our dependency because we can’t keep going cap in hand to government.”
According to Nicholl the organisation will have to “get creative and get the best brains around a table” over the next 12 months to find ways of bringing more money.
It is a challenge that badminton, archery, fencing, goal ball, table tennis, weightlifting and wheelchair rugby are having to face immediately.
