A response to the Tony Shiret blog on his |
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| Tony Shiret Blog dated May 2017 | Response from Zac, Webmaster of www.british-athletics.co.uk | |
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| I write this two days before the election to decide my successor as Chair of the National Council. So it is my last blog. My aim in writing has always been two-fold – to keep members informed of the more significant matters going on at England and UK Athletics and, perhaps more importantly, to get readers interested in how the whole system hangs together and how they need to press to increase their power within that system. |
Thank you for your efforts which I believe have been well intentioned, though misguided.
If athletics "power" exists at all, it is in the even handed application of the rules of competition, and the natural ability of the athletes. Anyone who believes they have power outside of those two elements is deluded. |
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| Why do members – clubs and individuals - need to do this? In my experience the National Governing Bodies (NGBs) do not directly represent the views of the member clubs and associations as such but rather they determine the framework you have to operate in on the basis of the views of their own professional staff. These people in my experience generally have limited experience of the issues you face every time you go to your club night and quite often their needs are not the same as the needs of the grass-roots of the sport. So it seems logical that a system set up this way will likely produce outputs/strategies more aligned to the NGBs’ interests than their members’.
Most times any attempt to validate grass roots support for these strategies is via very indirect consultation processes which in many case rely on selected groups of people rather than taking the view of all clubs. |
The idea that people who wish to compete in athletics be required to submit to governance outside of competition rules, is authoritarian and counter productive.
Participants in athletics are subject to the laws of the land, and the rules of competition. UK Athletics and England Athletics authority to govern is built on sand. Ridiculous organisations should not be surprised if they are constantly ridiculed. |
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| If the strategy setting process and its validation are very difficult for clubs and individuals to influence, then your best option in terms of being represented at some high level of decision making is to have an effective lobbying voice. The only two bodies with this voice in theory are the National and Regional Councils and the Members Council of UKA. The latter is again mainly appointed people with extremely limited directly elected representation. The England Councils are open to all to stand for and have had some success at influencing debate at both England and UKA. | If the athletics governing bodies disappeared today, clubs would be free to rediscover the skills of organising competitions locally. They would challenge neighbouring towns, cities and counties to athletics matches. They would organise championships, and celebrate their Champions It is really that simple. The top down management of UK Athletics and England Athletics undermines the basic premiss of the sport, which is to harvest the local talent, and feed it up the pyramid. |
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| The way athletics is organised in the UK is also very fragmented with NGBs, regions, counties, schools, universities and leagues all having their own separate constitutions and managements. In a more commercially successful sport there would be a greater degree of control running through the sport with these bodies agreeing to implement common policies in return for financial support. But while athletics’ total revenues continue to be a fraction of more popular TV/spectator sports like football, cricket and rugby that is not the case in our sport.
This wide range of semi-independent organisations in athletics itself contributes to the absence of a “common view” at the grass roots level of the sport. NGBs can determine strategy largely because they are more organised than the multiple organisations, generally under-funded, which represent various smaller parts of the sport. |
The fragmentation of athletics represents its vibrancy. Each fragment with its own organisers, crowning its own champions is the beating heart of athletics.
The challenge is to encourage them all to respect the need for a stable athletics calendar. No organisation has been more ignorant of this need over the last twenty years, than UK Athletics. Athletics wealth is counted in the man hours donated by its volunteers. Athletics is a participation sport. Those who wish athletics to organise itself into being a spectator sport for television might be happier going to the circus. |
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| So does the future look the same as the recent past? Not much money despite the 2012 and 2017 Games and the sport is still in broadly the same place as 10 years ago (and in some cases well below that level). It could be argued that there is no reason for the sport to get whole heartedly behind NGBs which are pressed to provide financial support in return because they do not have the money themselves, and which struggle to show that they have their members interests as their first aim.
This sounds bleak. But I have greater faith now than when I came into the England system as one of the first elected Regional Councillors 12 years ago that the sport is becoming more aware of the issues and why it needs to act on its own behalf rather than expecting NGBs to provide solutions. |
UK Athletics and England Athletics were imposed onto the sport by Tony Blair's Labour Government with the intention of distributing lottery funds in support of various social causes.
It is the bad luck of Athletics that it was used as a vessel to deliver cheap PE lessons into schools, reduce obesity, and generally fight heart disease caused by inactivity. It is naive to say the NGB's have no money. They have a steady flow of public money which they spend on ensuring the gravy train continues. The question being overlooked is what benefit has the hundreds of millions invested in athletics actually delivered? The answer is nothing. UK Athletics and England Athletics must have all funding cut, and be allowed to fold. The AAA's are needed only to act as the guardian of the rules of competition, and for organising the National Championships in England. This process will only start after UK Athletics and England Athletics have been assigned to the dustbin of history. |
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| But the mechanism for members to express their views remains weak despite meaningful efforts by England Athletics to improve accountability through directly elected Board Members and annual consultation. There are no comparable channels in UKA.
These debates may seem irrelevant to a coach or an athlete interested in the next session or result. But they may in turn ask why the coach gets paid next to nothing (or in most cases actually nothing) and why a career in the sport stretching beyond the days of competing is limited to areas like race promotion, agent or part-time work supported by a non-athletic career. |
The idea that athletics is a forum where participants wish to express views is nonsense. The only view which resonates at consultation meetings is "will you people on the stage please just bugger off".
Coaches get paid no money, because they have no value to anyone except the people they directly coach. If coaches would care to ask their charges to start paying them, they will soon discover exactly how much they are worth in cash terms. The fact that public money protects some coaches from these harsh economic realities does not make them any less true. |
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| The answer is because the income generating capacity of the sport has become focused around mass participation non-performance road races and supporting a very small amount of elite track & field and off-track activity. | The income generating capacity can be found in real, passionate athletic competition. The wealth is owned by the organisers of the competition, or the Associations they are working on behalf of. That was once the AAA's working on behalf of the clubs who owned the wealth.
When UK Athletics and England Athletics took charge of the National Championships, they kept the wealth for themselves. It is a technique known as looting. When their is nothing left to loot, UK Athletics and England Athletics will disappear, blaming the clubs and the volunteers for their failure. It is a myth that mass participation athletic events are stealing income from track and field. |
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| For this to change for the benefit of the vast majority of the participants and would-be (if it were financially more attractive) participants the way we do things as a sport has got to improve. In the most recent feedback work that the English regional councils have done with clubs it is clear that the clubs have little desire to engage with policy setters in the sport and few common desires above that basic support needs are provided more efficiently. That in my opinion is not good enough. We should not just complain about stagnation, lack of resources, ageing officials, weak IT and lack of modernity. We need to do something about it. The NGBs will not. | This is exactly the finger wagging mindset that guarantees failure.
Park Run did not explode because Paul Sinton-Hewitt got out of bed in Bushy one Saturday morning and started wagging his finger at the rest of the country. He led from the front, and others followed. The looters from Sport England, England Athletics and UK Athletics continue to speculate on how best to tax the Park Runs without killing them. If a wrong answer exists, you can be sure these "professionals" will find it. |
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| I would like to thank all of the Regional and National Councillors who have served the sport over the past 12 years and I would like to offer my best wishes for the future to the current group of Councillors. The Councils and their leadership will I am sure continue to represent the sport to the best of their abilities. But they will be made stronger if the sport itself develops a stronger common view of what it wants. It is time for the clubs/members to get more organised and politically motivated. | I would like to thank all the Club's who have kept their Club Championships alive, and the Counties who have kept their County Championships alive since the inception of UK Athletics twenty years ago.
Clubs and Counties should use their Committees to network locally, and force the Regional Championship Committees to once again open their competition to all individuals who meet the standards, to test themselves in athletics. It is shameful that the Regional and National competition organisers have caved in to the demand for money by England Athletics and UK Athletics, and turned track and field into a closed sport, where only those who have paid the tax by registering with England Athletics are now welcome. This is not an opinion that needs to be heard by individuals who are deluded enough to believe they occupy seats at the top. It is a recognition that the sport of athletics is merely a mechanism for harvesting the talent which exists everywhere in the United Kingdom, and the only requirement for moving from the grass roots to elite level is the demonstration of the athlete's ability in fairly organised open competition. |
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