‘Tough decisions’ on sports funding needed
“Tough decisions” on which sports and athletes to fund are needed if UK sport is to build on its achievements in Athens.
That is the conclusion of a National Audit Office (NAO) report into the returns elite athletes, and British sport by extension, have reaped from large amounts of Lottery funding.
It concludes that whilst UK Sport met its performance targets in the Athens Olympics, return in medals terms was mixed.
Between April 2001 and March 2005 UK Sport awarded £83.5 million to its elite sports programme with the aim of improving results at major international championships.
Though athletes reported to the NAO that the facilities and support available to them had dramatically improved, half of the Olympic sports funded did not meet their individual medal targets.
This meant the cost per Olympic medal was £2.4 million as opposed to the target £1.7 million.
Head of the NAO Sir John Bourn said: “Supported by lottery money, British athletes delivered some outstanding performances at the Olympics and Paralympics in Athens last summer.”
Looking ahead to Beijing 2008, he said that UK Sport needed to “strengthen the management” of its performance programmes and “identify the factors that helped certain sports perform well in Athens and the barriers to success in others that did less well, so that the lessons can be acted upon promptly.
“After the Athens Games, it is in a position to review which of its funded sports have delivered, and remain capable of delivering, world class performance.”
UK Sport said they were pleased with the recognition that the target of a top ten medal table finish in Athens had been met, and accepted that there was room for improvement in the elite programme.
Acting chief executive Liz Nicholl, said the report had “in many ways reached the same conclusions, as our own investigations into the outcomes of the Athens’ Olympiad.”
She said that the organisation has begun a restructuring process to put in place staff “whose skills and experience means that they are better able to challenge plans put forward by individual sports”.
Ms Nicholl added: “There is no doubt that the advent of Lottery funding has enabled us to take the package of support we can offer to our leading sports to a new level, as the results from Sydney and Athens clearly demonstrate. But British sport will collectively have to up its game again to improve in Beijing and UK Sport must play its part in full.”
