The era of ploughing every available pound of public funds into chasing Olympic and Paralympic medals at the expense of all else is set to end following the 2020 Games in Tokyo. A discernible shift in the strategy of UK Sport was confirmed yesterday as the agency took the wraps off the findings of a lengthy consultation which asked the public whether it wanted its wealth to remain concentrated or to be shared more widely.
In reality, they desired both but with the political tides ebbing, it has been accepted that a revamped approach must be taken which offers something for everyone rather than everything to the high-achieving few. Although no exact budgets can be determined until the UK Treasury determines its contribution, there will be a new tier of ‘Progressive’ funding which will offer longer-term investment in sports like basketball, without the promise of short-term medals, and avoid any disruptive shift from boom to bust.
“We’re committed to develop a longer-term and wider competition structures in a more coherent strategy,” UK Sport’s chair Katherine Grainger declared. “We have specific programmes that we fund and wider coaching competition structures underpinning it. It would allow more sports to benefit from funding.”
With a recognition that social impacts must be part of the future, there will - inevitably - be winners and losers among the established sports who have been enriched over the two decades of National Lottery funding. “Opportunities and threats,” one governing body’s chief executive remarked.
For Scotland, there appears little prospect of the diversion of capital spend that had been called for, with no significant tinkering to a high-performance system which - bar curling - is England-based. But with cost savings required and strategic shifts coming, UK Sport has acknowledged criticisms that it has cut itself off from the rest of the developmental pyramid overseen by the four home nations.
“It’s never good to separate participation and community against performance,” Sportscotland’s chief executive Stewart Harris said. “It’s good that they are connected so it’s logical we look at how we have that joined-up sports system in which Scotland plays its part, along with UK Sport. We’ve seen a lot of the other things we’ve asked for, including how you enter and exit investment, and how sport talks about its impact on society. We’re at the start of conversations but I’d like to see commitment.”
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