UK Sport split over cuts – Telegraph.co.uk

The lack of unanimity within UK Sport over how it spends its budget of £550 million over the next four years raises further questions about a strategy that has already led to redundancies on the elite programmes of those sports that have lost out. As will the revelation that the quango’s latest board meeting on Wednesday deferred for the second time a decision that threatens to strip wheelchair tennis of all its funding.

All this comes ahead of formal representations by archery, badminton, fencing, weightlifting and wheelchair basketball against the withdrawal of their UK Sport funding, which will be heard tomorrow and on Tuesday.

The December board minutes show that decision was reached by “majority”, with UK Sport admitting there had been one abstention by a member who opposed a policy under which, for the first time, a sport that had won a medal at the previous Olympics – badminton – lost all its funding.

The cutting adrift of wheelchair rugby has already been condemned by the chairman of UK Athletics, Ed Warner, the first time one of the big winners of UK Sport’s ‘no-compromise’ model has spoken out publicly on behalf of one of the losers. Warner’s intervention was followed by the revelation that wheelchair tennis – the nation’s most over-performing sport at Rio 2016 – had threatened legal action over attempts to strip it of all its funding.