Track Chat

Can You Hear Us?

2009-10-20T03:53:00.000-07:00

Will athletics still be the major Olympic sport by 2020? It’s a good question but unless, as one time member of the European Athletics Association (EAA), Luciano Barra wrote in 2007, we face major challenges with the political will to effectively overcome them, then the answer is almost certainly, no.

Other sports are fast modernising, making themselves commercially viable by attracting investment, ensuring their product is worthy of television coverage and looking to their future by making sure young people find it attractive enough to want to participate. Fatally athletics is doing none of these things.

You don’t have to scratch far below the surface glitz and glamour of the IAAF events to discover a sport in penury, reliant entirely on meagre government handouts and the goodwill and financial generosity of volunteer officials and coaches. Like much else in athletics this is a throwback to a different age but we seem loathe to depart from it. Even at international level anyone visiting any of the 2009 Golden League meetings for the first time in 25 years would not find that much has changed apart from an over preponderance of East African runners in the distance events.

The IAAF and its regional and national federations have failed for years to translate the pulsating excitement of Olympic, World and European championships into its other promotions. They appear as parodies of the real thing. In 2002 the Commonwealth Games came to Manchester; it was a week of exhilaration and success unparalleled in British athletics. In the polls, for the blink of an eyelid, athletics moved ahead of football in popularity. But nothing subsequently changed. British Athletics and its commercial arm were incapable of cashing in on the enthusiasm generated. The stadium switched to football and it seemed symbolic that athletics was demoted to the warm up track.

Two years before Barra wrote his comment the IAAF was told all this, quite forcefully, at a workshop in Monaco. Television representatives pointed out their declining interest in a sport that seemed unwilling to change. Heads were sagely nodded but this year has seen a further drop in viewing figures for a major championship.

At the beginning of this century television audiences in Britain for international athletics ranged between 5 and 7 million but as the decade has progressed that average has dropped, according to the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) to between 2½ and 3 million for Berlin. There is a similar pattern in other major western countries. It’s caused by the failure of international and national athletics bodies to keep the sport alive in the public eye for long periods of time; it’s caused by a failure to think radically.

Although the projected Diamond League has some innovations that will bring encouragement to more events when you look at the meetings involved there is a distinct sense of déjà vu. Ten of the currently projected fourteen meetings are in Europe, meetings that were criticised at the 2005 workshop for their repetitious nature.

A major event in this year’s Golden League was the 5000 metres. Of a total of 91 entries 76 came from East Africa, many taking part in more than one meeting. Only six Europeans were invited for the whole series. Can the promoters not correlate these figures with a lack of media and therefore public interest?

The top stars are sucked clean away by the IAAF and the European promoters into the World Athletics Tour to be rarely seen in their own countries. Blanka Vlasic competed only twice in Croatia; Phillips Idowu three times in Britain; Andreas Thorkilsden three times in Norway and Derval O’Rourke not at all in Ireland. And without television coverage how can a sport sustain interest if its stars are so rarely seen domestically?

There is a domino effect. In Britain the top athletes rarely compete below national championship level, the regional championships and major leagues are bereft of such stars. In terms of sponsorship and public interest the organisers have nothing to sell.

Ernest Hemingway, in his great panegyric to bullfighting and toreros, Death in the Afternoon, wrote: “...that is one test of a true amateur sport, whether it is more enjoyable to player than to spectator (as soon as it becomes enjoyable enough to the spectator for the charging of admission to be profitable the sport contains the germ of professionalism).”

Old Papa was right. The problem we have is that immediately below international level track and field is more enjoyable to players (athletes, coaches, officials and families) than to spectators (the general public). Below that level the general public are rarely seen, indeed are rarely welcome. I can only write of Britain but under the national championships (and sometimes even there) if you asked coaches, administrators, parents and friends to leave the stadium, the stands would be empty. Admission is rarely charged, publicity is conspicuous by its absence and the atmosphere is generally unwelcoming. At such levels athletics is totally uncommercial. It’s become extremely self indulgent.

You may well say that it’s the same with most major sports, that there is no correlation between Sunday morning park soccer and the English Premier League. The difference though, is clear. In soccer there are many layers, many of them professional and semi-professional between your Regents Park Sunday kickabouters and Arsenal; in athletics there is an almost instant brutal dichotomy from the professional 0.1% (rich) to the amateur 99.9% (poor) once form, for one reason or another, deserts you. As an athlete one moment you are feted, the next you are yesterday’s man or woman.

Competition is the raison d’être of all sport, it’s certainly the life blood of athletics. So why is it that it’s so piecemeal? Why is it that nationally and internationally there is no holistic approach? In Britain we have had numerous reports on the future of competition but no metaphorical puff of white smoke has ever emanated from Athletics House; the current hotchpotch of mediocrity serves only to turn people away from athletics, especially the general public.

There’s an old proverb that says there’s none so blind as those who will not hear. As the sport collectively turns a deaf ear to the expert advice that it is given, as it sees Usain Bolt as its sole saviour and as it ignores shrinking participation at its grass roots you know deep down that we are in trouble.

Concrete Ceilings

2009-09-27T11:47:00.000-07:00

It is ironic that in a recent interview Gerry Sutcliffe, the British sports minister, castigated the Football Association for not honouring a pledge to make its council more inclusive with greater representation for ethnic minorities , women and fans. “Rugby and cricket got rid of old farts,” Sutcliffe said, “football’s old school cannot continue.” He should look at UK athletics and then pause for further thought as to the action to be taken with soccer.

British athletics discarded its blazerarti but replaced it with an inexperienced bureaucracy supported by selected compliant volunteers that has led the sport into the worst state of its 129 years of existence and will take years to correct. This is the saga of on-going white, male, middle-aged dominance of the control of athletics in Britain that has existed since the AAA was formed in 1880.

In the 1920’s the AAA brusquely rejected overtures for affiliation by a newly formed women’s association despite the fact that English athletes had swept the board at the first women’s international meeting in Monte Carlo. Peter Lovesey wrote in his history of the AAA: “Whether male chauvinists won the day or the AAA simply took fright at controlling what was regarded in some quarters as at best risqué and at worse dangerous to health the WAAA went its own way.”

After almost seventy years the era of separate associations came to an end with the forming of the British Athletics Federation and inexorably positions of power in BAF were immediately and greedily swept up by the men.

In the eight global championships held this century black athletes have won 57% of UK medals; in the same period our women athletes have won just over 56%. Both these percentages are higher than they are both demographically and in terms of athlete participation, with the black athletes considerably so. But in the administrative corridors of power, where vital decision making takes place, both groups are highly conspicuous by their absence. By appointing an ex-black sprint champion and a woman Paralympic champion as non-executive directors UK Athletics believes it has satisfied any criteria laid down by its paymasters. Not so.

The impact of black athletes, mostly but not exclusively from the Caribbean, on our international success, has visibly grown over the last few decades. Indeed it has to be said that our record would be much the poorer without them. Yet the viewpoint of the black athletics community is rarely heard at any level in the sport.

Fringe organisations like the Association of British Athletics Clubs (ABAC) and the British Milers Club (BMC) follow the same pattern as the main governance in being white male dominated.

The autumn of 1967 in the USA saw the emergence of an angry, black sociology professor from San Jose State, Harry Edwards. His athlete acolytes were sprinter Tommie Smith and 400m runner Lee Evans. Both were to win gold at the forthcoming Mexico City Olympics but both had supported Edwards throughout the autumn of 1967 and spring of the following year, in calls for a black boycott of the Games.
The issue was the rampant racism that was still extant in the USA, a racism that was reflected in the Jim Crowism in sporting structures. Edwards was, as one writer put it, “pushed by anger not to radicalism which is only an argument for change, but towards violence or at least the threat of violence.” He orchestrated demonstrations that turned violent at the famous New York Athletic Club (NYAC) indoor meeting at Madison Square Garden in 1968 because he alleged that the NYAC barred blacks and Jews from membership; he demanded that South Africa should continue to be barred from the Olympics because of its apartheid policies. More interestingly Edwards called for the “desegregation of the United States Olympic Committee administrative and coaching staffs.”

There was no boycott but a podium demonstration in Mexico by Smith and John Carlos that was beamed around the world, a silent iconic moment of such power, intensity and even beauty that it helped to shift significantly (but by no means absolutely)attitudes to racism in the US. On a much lesser scale it set in motion changes that would impact on women and black participation in athletics administration with the dissolution of the white, male dominated Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) and its replacement by a solely track and field association.

In 2008 a black woman, Stephanie Hightower, was elected President of USA Track and Field and is Chair of its Board of Directors. Hightower, a former world class hurdler was, at election, Chair of the USATF Women’s Track and Field Committee. Would that happen in the UK? Of course not.

Contrast the democracy and structure of the world’s strongest athletics nation with what occurs in Britain: Hightower’s equivalent, Ed Warner, is appointed (with the mandatory approval of the government’s sporting quangos), not democratically elected by the sport. He has at best little or no background in track and field. Along with the USATF the IAAF has a women’s committee. No part of British athletics has such a committee. Earlier this century a Valuing Diversity programme was set up by UKA covering women, disability and ethnicity. It withered on the vine.

Black coaches have made a great impact on our sport over the past decade. Many of our great sprinters and jumpers have moved from the competitive arena to coaching with ease and success. Only one, the former European triple jump champion and Australia Chief Coach, Keith Connor, has been considered for a major role. But he was twice turned down; firstly for a regional coach’s job in 1990 and secondly in 2003 for the UK Athletics Director of Performance post when he was (along incidentally with van Commenee) extraordinarily overlooked in favour of a sports psychologist with no coaching background, Dave Collins. Rightly disillusioned he returned to Australia; Collins was sacked after four years.

Those male coaches that have been appointed by UKA are on short term contracts. There is no career path for them. When the curtain falls on 2012 a number of those contracts will be terminated. It must be galling for our coaches to find that they (32 global medals this century, 10 gold) are overlooked in favour of an influx of coaches from Canada (7 global medals this century, no gold).

Women have been unable to make such an impact. The only woman coach to be professionally appointed in Britain was former Olympic discus thrower Meg Ritchie who was appointed National Coach for Scotland in 1999. Her background though was not in the UK but as a professional coach in the USA at the University of Arizona and later at Texas Tech. There are other former women international athletes at Level 4 (one even has a MA in coaching) who are producing Olympians but in terms of international duty and other appointments such as the recent national mentor posts or the England managers they are ignored.

And on those rare occasions when women have reached positions of regional responsibility they are met by alien macho behaviour, posturing, shouting down, condescension, caustic e-mails and, in coaching, poaching by predatory males. So when this subject is mentioned to those who govern us, who look sorrowful, metaphorically wringing their hands, saying it is dreadful and something must be done but you see women just don’t apply, it’s a cop out. The real question is whose responsibility is it to ensure far more equitable representation at the decision making levels of the sport (which the IAAF is doing as far as women are concerned)? It is that of UK Athletics and England and the other national bodies who have the power to bring about change.

In his book Souled Out? How Blacks are Winning and Losing in Sport American journalist Shaun Powell surmised that the percentage of blacks participating in a sport should be roughly reflected in the numbers that coach and manage them. The same of course applies to women. Why? Because those who govern athletics in Britain are only hearing one-third of the story; everything that comes to them comes from a white, male perspective. How many of those working in the respective headquarters in Solihull understand the needs of women athletes and coaches? How many can empathise with black athletes and coaches and their lifestyles? Without such understanding there is no mutual way forward. A century of white, Caucasian thought will be further sustained for decades to the detriment of the major Olympic sport in Britain.

And should a woman or black man be lucky enough to be considered for a position in the sport often a dialogue with the deaf ensues and candidates then find, as Powell points out, that the interviewers “rely on a tired formula: Go with whom you know” (and with the present UK hierarchies, whom you employ).

Those who have tried to right these wrongs have soon realised that they have taken on a task of Sisyphus. In order to drill through the concrete ceilings that stop their advancement more cooperation and spirited lobbying is required. Suffrage did not come through women deciding not to ruffle the feathers of men; blacks must remember the courage of Tommie Smith, John Carlos and indeed of the white sprinter Peter Norman who joined their protest on the podium. Each paid a price for his bravery.

In the USA there is a Black Coaches Association and a whole raft of women’s coaches associations in many sports. Over a hundred women athletics coaches turned up in Croydon in August for a women’s coaching conference. They could form the power base of a women’s athletics coaching association. Are these the ways forward to bring about a radical change in a century long age of stereotypical thinking? Only time will tell.

That's All Folks!

2009-09-11T04:53:00.000-07:00

As with Bugs Bunny so it is with the ever shortening athletics season. For the general public Athletics 2009 has been about nine, pulsating days in Berlin and Usain Bolt; for aficionados it’s been around nine weeks. But now it’s all over and it’s time to lower the curtains. It is not finis, of course, if you live in the southern hemisphere, where the season is just starting. Not so you’d notice in the northern half of the globe because news from the south is minimal.

When the IAAF launched its new Diamond League in March its President, Lamine Diack said: “It has always been one of our dreams to see the circuit of our best meetings going to each corner of the world. And today, we are all sitting here and are proud to say that the dream has come true.” Well, not quite.

Of the fifteen selected meetings eleven are in Europe, two are in the USA and one each in Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. By not travelling south of the equator great cities like Sydney (2000 Olympics); Melbourne (2006 Commonwealth); Rio de Janeiro (bidding for 2016 Olympics); Auckland (1990 Commonwealth Games); Johannesburg (1998 World Athletics Cup); Cape Town (2010 FIFA World Cup); Jakarta (2011 South-East Asia Games) will not see the world’s very best athletes in action.

How can this be? How is it that other sports like rugby, cricket, golf, tennis, soccer, play at a high level for nine or more months of the year, taking their competitions to southern climes when it is out-of-season in the north (or vice-versa) whilst athletics, apart from some cross-country and indoor, goes into training hibernation after more like nine weeks?

It’s partly habit, of course, the old “well, we’ve always done it this way” beloved of so many in athletics including, regrettably, many coaches. Little research has been carried out on the comparative physiological requirements of different sports but I find it difficult to believe that they are so much greater in track and field than they are in, say, tennis, where the best players, for nine months or so, can play upwards of fifteen hours competitive tennis in a week between flying to venues around the globe. And still train.

Anyway, many athletes run week-in, week-out arduous cross-country races and sprinters and jumpers compete in indoor meetings; athletes of undoubted talent from Australia and New Zealand in particular have always travelled northwards in search of fame and fortune after their summer seasons.

John Landy did it in the fifties as did Herb Elliott, Ron Clarke and Murray Halberg in the following decade. The late Andy Norman persuaded the New Zealanders John Walker, Rod Dixon and Dick Quax to come to Europe every year for the summer season with no detrimental effect on their performances. Most of the above set world records in the northern hemisphere. More recently Craig Mottram ran the Europe circuit for a number of seasons. So it appears that talented southern hemisphere athletes can endure up to eight months of combined competing and training without harmful effects on performance. It surely follows that European and American athletes can do likewise.

To truly reach, with the Diamond League, “each corner of the globe” as Diack put it, the IAAF has to do one of two things. It either has to extend the programme by another six meetings or so or it has to cut down on the number of European meetings on the circuit. Given the close ties between the European promoters and the world governing body this might prove difficult. Some of the proposed meetings have a long history with the Weltklasse at the Leitzegrund track in Zurich, for instance, going back over 80 years.

But if we are to embrace what the IAAF calls “the athletics family” south of the equator, if we are to help develop the sport in that vast area, then tough decision will have to be taken.

The IAAF is to be congratulated on its concept which is certainly more equitable in terms of the distribution of events and of prize money but its success will be governed by the television coverage that it can attract. The whole series needs to be aired ideally on terrestrial television but at least on mainstream satellite and certainly not tucked away on obscure pay-to-view channels in various countries. Without television world-wide the Diamond League will be just another self-indulgent exercise by a sport that needs to frequently convince itself that it is more important than it really is.

A Pretence of Democracy

Steve Backley, one of the world’s all-time great javelin throwers, is the interim vice-president of the UK Members Council a body that meets twice annually to sustain the pretence that democracy reigns in our sport in Britain.

He now has to go through an election process to confirm his original appointment. Knowing Steve as I do then, should there be such an election process (doubtful as you will see), it is more than likely that he would get my vote being perfectly capable of expressing robust views where necessary.

It is the process of this election that should give grave concern to the vast majority of the sport. It is a similar procedure as is operated by England Athletics where recently, some may remember, a challenger to the incumbent chairman was rejected by an Establishment vetting panel appointed to assess candidature suitability.

A similar all-white, all-male athletics establishment junta has been set up to decide whether suggested candidates can become nominations to challenge Steve. Whilst not suggesting that the vetting panel has anything but fairness and the good of the sport at heart it is surely right to point out that the process is open to abuse and manipulation. It is also a process (no doubt instigated by our unelected sporting quangos)that looks so daunting that very few would seemingly wish to undertake it which is probably the whole purpose of the exercise.

What is extraordinary is the submissiveness of the rank and field of British athletics to the processes that have over the past twelve years eroded its ability to influence the development of the sport. Typical of the docility has been the total lack of protest and even comment on the administrative changes made by England leading to the abolition of the nine regional offices and as a consequence the demotion of the nine regional councils to talking shops. The auguries for the replacements are not propitious but all this has been greeted by a deafening silence.

“To stand in silence,” said Abraham Lincoln, “when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men.”

Pawns of Power

2009-09-03T06:53:00.000-07:00

Twice in twenty-one years two young South African women athletes have been caught up in the power politics of world sport. In 1988, Zola Budd a 21 year old white woman from the highveld near Bloemfontein became a pawn in the battle to save the Seoul Olympics from yet another boycott. In 2009 Caster Semenya an 18 year old black woman from Aganang in Limpopo province has been deemed the victim of sexism and racism by no less a man than Jacob Zuma, President of South Africa.

Budd was an extraordinarily talented runner who set records in South Africa that would never be recognised because the country was ostracised from world sport through its apartheid policies. As her grandfather was English the 17 year old was rushed to Britain by her avaricious father Frank, received a passport almost overnight and was thus eligible to compete in the Los Angeles Olympics. Controversy rode her back from that moment.

Whilst in LA she inadvertently tripped-tumbled to the track the American favourite Mary Slaney ensuring that neither of them would win a medal and earning for herself a lasting notoriety. Over the next three years she won two world cross-country championships and set British and Commonwealth records. But most of the time she was homesick, spending more and more time in Bloemfontein finally catching the eye of Sam Ramsamy, the powerful head of SANROC (South African Non Racial Olympic Committee). The frail, diminutive runner, it seemed to him, was a God given gift as the epitome of apartheid.

The 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh had been boycotted because of renegade rugby and other sport’s tours to South Africa. New Zealand was fearful that its 1990 Games in Auckland would suffer the same fate; it was also due to stage the World cross-country championships in 1988 where Budd was due to run. Horse-trading took place between the country and SANROC. The deal was that if the Kiwis kept Budd out of the championships SANROC would ensure there would be no boycott of the Commonwealth Games. The campaign was successful; Budd was harassed on cross-country courses in England; Scandinavian and African countries wrote to the IAAF asking for an investigation. The story was world-wide news; the pressures on Budd were enormous. The British Amateur Athletic Board (BAAB) reluctantly withdrew her from the team as much for her sake as anyone else’s.

The President of the IAAF, Primo Nebiolo had assured the International Olympic Committee (IOC) President, Juan Antonio Samaranch that Budd would not be in Seoul thus preventing yet another boycott. In March, 1988 the IAAF suspended Budd until its next Council meeting, ironically to be held in London, alleging that she had “taken part” in meetings in South Africa.

The IAAF Council and the world’s media descended on the Park Lane Hotel in April. It was a weekend of obduracy on all sides. Press conference followed press conference. The BAAB, to its everlasting credit, refused to condemn Budd until evidence was produced that showed that she had participated in meetings in South Africa. That evidence was never forthcoming. All she had done was follow a road race on a bicycle and then at a track meeting been introduced to the crowd. The IAAF construed this as “taking part”; the BAAB did not.

Sensing blood after the New Zealand affair the big guns of African sport joined in, including Lamine Diack from Senegal, IAAF Council member and President of the African Athletics Confederation (CAA) who led the attack on Budd and the BAAB. This is the same Lamine Diack, now President of the IAAF, whose organisation has been accused of racism in the matter of Semenya.

The IAAF instructed Britain to conveniently ban Budd for twelve months. Failure to do so would lead to the country being banned from the Olympics. The BAAB demurred and decided to hold its own investigation. Zola’s formidable Afrikaner mother Tossie flew in, saw the state of her daughter and sent her back to South Africa. The saga and the investigation were over.

There is no doubt in my mind that if the BAAB inquiry had followed its course the conclusion would have been that Budd did not compete in South Africa and a massive confrontation with the IAAF and IOC would have taken place. Budd’s return to South Africa halted that. This had been power politics at its worst and did the IAAF little credit.

South Africa re-entered the sporting fold with the release of Nelson Mandela and the return of democracy. Budd represented her country at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
On the surface there is little similarity between the cases of Budd and Semenya but dig deeper and they soon appear. Declaring just hours before her running in the 800 final in Berlin that gender tests were to be carried out on Semenya was an act of insensitivity for which the IAAF has been roundly condemned. The last thing that SANROC, CAA, IAAF considered in their eagerness to outdo the others in the Budd case was the athlete herself, taken at age 17 from a cloistered environment in Bloemfontein and cast on to the world stage in a matter of weeks. In both instances a duty of care was absent.

The disingenuousness of Athletics South Africa knows no bounds; its president Leonard Chuene comes out of the Semenya affair with little credit. It studiously ignored the extraordinary improvement of over 16 seconds in 13 months by the young woman; it never asked the question ‘why?’ Clearly without forethought Chuene immediately accused one of the world great multi-ethnic organisations and its black president of racism, an accusation that is so crass as to deserve the derision heaped upon it. Nonetheless such nonsense hasn’t stopped prominent politicians like Jacob Zuma and Winnie Mandela getting in on the act. Inexorably it seems both the IAAF and South Africa are backing themselves into corners from which it will be difficult to extricate themselves without losing face.

In 1986 Diack refused to present Zola Budd with the gold medal at the world cross-country championships; 20 years later at an IAAF Golden Gala he invited her to be his special guest, calling her ‘one of the athletics family’. Budd, now living in South Carolina on a two year work visa so that she can run (successfully) in the American Masters Classics road running series, was stunned. I wonder what she, now 43, thinks as she views the Semenya case.

The media frenzy that followed Zola for four years in the eighties is long gone; for Caster, I suspect, it is just beginning. What is clearly needed is not wild speculation and even wilder headlines but compassion for the young woman from Limpopo.

Honouring Arthur

It’s good to know that moves are afoot to celebrate the life of Arthur Wharton, the world’s first black professional footballer, by erecting a statue to him in the town of Darlington where he arrived in the 1880’s from what is now Ghana. As a goalkeeper he played not only for Darlington but for Preston, Rotherham and Sheffield United. Perhaps athletics should follow suit in view of his achievements.

Wharton was also a great sprinter, I guess the Usain Bolt of his time. In the AAA Championships of 1886, running on cinders at the old Stamford Bridge track in London he set a world best time for 100 yards of 10 seconds, the celebrated ‘even time’. It was later ratified by the AAA for record purposes.

Wharton was a great all-rounder (he represented Darlington Cricket Club at the AAA’s) who after his triumph joined the famous Birchfield Harriers based in Birmingham. He won the AAA’s title again at Stourbridge Cricket Club the following year and then became a successful professional ‘pedestrian’. In 1889 Arthur turned full-time professional footballer. His running days were over for, as Peter Matthews drily points out in The Guinness Book of Athletics Facts & Feats (1982) his goalkeeping “presumably giving him little chance to exploit his speed.”

After his sporting career Arthur Wharton worked for 15 years as a colliery haulage hand in Yorkshire. He died in 1930 after ‘a long and painful illness’ (presumably emphysema) and was buried in an unmarked grave in the pit village of Edlington, a forgotten star. In the late 20th century a football fund raised the money for a headstone which has been in place since 1997. If you want more details go to arthurwharton.com.

Who is we?

I frequently go to the UK Athletics website in the vain hope of gleaning information about what is going on in that organisation. For far too many weeks now I’ve been greeted by a large photo of Olympic champion Christine Ohuruogu standing somewhat sheepishly in front of a blackboard, chalk in hand, on which is written 3½ times, We must get kids more active. Presumably she has been given one hundred lines for not doing so. What I really want to know before the photo is thankfully removed is: who is the 'we'?

Berlin Reflections - 3

2009-08-24T07:15:00.000-07:00

By providing excitement, earth shattering performances and drama the vibrant world championships in Berlin have been an enormous success. It is amazing to think that just twenty years have elapsed since the city was divided by the Wall behind which probably the most evil of the satellite communist regimes operated with an Orwellian intensity.

For these were above all a happy championships in which dourness seemed to have no place. Led by Usain Bolt and aided or hindered, depending on your point of view, by the mascot Berlino, athletes let their hair down even at moments of high tension(Asafa Powell seem to have undergone a personality change within the nine days).

And it is only a blink in historical terms since the last time major athletics was celebrated in this stadium under the gazes of the Nazi hierarchy whose dreams of Aryan supremacy were shattered by the brilliant Jesse Owens. It was a poignant moment when the grandchildren of Owens and the German long jump silver medallist, Luz Long, saw their grandfathers honoured for the courageous friendship in sporting combat that they displayed in 1936. It was an inspirational thought that saw the initials JO on the vests of yet another victorious US team, tiny compensation perhaps for the shameful treatment that he suffered from the hierarchy of the American Athletic Union (AAU). By withdrawing, through tiredness, from the subsequent American tour of Europe, Jesse was banned for life from his sport.

Before we get carried away we, and in particular the IAAF, must understand that these championships have been but a fleeting comet in the sporting universe. For just nine days in three years out of four, athletics impinges on the public’s consciousness. Otherwise it remains in the shadows cast by soccer, rugby, tennis, golf and cricket (in a few countries) et al. The reason has been clear for some time: athletics provides the competitive excitement for just over a week that the rest of sport provides almost year round. The championships are meaningful competition; the World Athletics Tour meetings are not. Apart from the odd tweak here and there the format of the meetings has not changed in thirty years. The stars appear, the spectators cheer; if it’s Friday it must be Zurich. Those meetings that once were on terrestial television are now banished to satellite. In The Guardian the day after the championships concluded seven pages were devoted to cricket and half a page to athletics. The evidence is clear enough but there seems to be a dangerous complacency that has been detectable among the hierarchy since this was discussed at a workshop in Monaco a few years ago.

Enough. We have witnessed greatness this last week and come to realise one thing: that there are no limits to human endeavour. Well done Berlin and Bolt.

It was clear from the first day of the championships, even watching on television, that there was a more positive attitude from British athletes, certainly a lot more can do than can’t manage. The result was six medals, one ahead of target and more importantly twenty top-eight placings giving UK a total of 81 points. Put into context this equals our medal performance at the 2000 Olympics and is our best top-eight global points total since that year. What has happened?

What has happened is that there is someone in charge who knows about performance, who recognizes the pressures of global championships, who understands coaches and coaching, who doesn’t accept lame excuses, who tells it straight. We haven't had that for some time. Charles van Commenee has partially lifted the dark pall that has hung over the UK’s overall performances at global championships in recent years.

Interviews with members of the team have shown that this is a significant change. World bronze medallist Jennifer Meadows described him as ‘hands on’; silver medallist Lisa Dobriskey said that the coach told the team that athletics was “yesterday’s sport”, especially after Beijing. “That hit home,” she said. This is in sharp contrast to the eyewash delivered by the sport’s spin doctors. In recent years there is no doubt that some of our athletes have believed the publicity spun around them to sell tickets for our major meetings.

Add this to the fact that in the various age group championships this summer Britain’s young athletes have accrued a total of thirty-nine medals and you may think that we’re on the yellow brick road to 2012.

Hold it there for a moment. The top echelon of the sport cannot exist in isolation. The base of the pyramid must be strong and in our case it isn’t. The vast majority of the clubs in the UK are dysfunctional; the coaching scheme is in disillusioned disarray; our competition structures, especially at junior level, only serve mediocrity. Unless urgent, radical attention is paid to this general malaise the flow of promising talent will swiftly dry up.

Breaking News
The IAAF today said that it had requested the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) to test Usain Bolt to ascertain that he was human. This followed rumours and innuendos from fellow athletes and their coaches that the Jamaican was, in fact, an alien being. “These performances are out of this world,” said one sprinter. “The guy aint human,” said another. “I mean he runs faster than I drive,” said the grandmother of another 200 metre finalist.

“We have had to act,” said an IAAF spokesman. “What has clinched it for us are persistent reports from Jamaica that on 21 August 1986 a UFO was spotted hovering over the village of Trelawney. NASA tells us that verification of Bolt’s status may take between 3000 and 5000 years owing to the number of planets from which he could have arrived. We’re prepared to be patient. This is a very sensitive issue especially for the athlete and his family. If it is proved that he is an alien then we’d be happy to submit full verification of his times in Berlin to the relevant association on whatever planet.”

When questioned on this possibility Bolt stared very hard at his interrogator who promptly melted away on the spot. He laughed off suggestions that he was the forerunner of a number of aliens being sent to earth to eradicate present world records in preparation for a takeover of the planet.

Kenenisa Bekele was unavailable for comment.

Berlin Reflections - 2

2009-08-21T03:15:00.000-07:00

The way that the IAAF has brought its querying of the gender of the women’s new World 800 metre champion, 18 year old Caster Semenya, into the public domain just hours before the final of the race in Berlin either indicates a complete insensitivity to the effect of its pronouncements to the world’s media or that a leak of its negotiations with the South African federation was about to take place.

Either way, in its eagerness to indicate its vigilance against “cheating” in whatever form it might materialise the world governing body has shown that such vigilance takes precedence over what should always be foremost in its actions: a duty of care to the athletes.

Media reaction across the world has been inevitable with lurid headlines and sensationalist news bulletins. The family has not been spared. If the way that the story was handled on BBC News is any indication of world reaction this is something that will not do the sport any favours and will tarnish what has been a great championships. That the IAAF did not foresee such a reaction is extremely worrying.

The organisation is right to investigate the rumours and innuendo that have been circulating since Semenya burst on the world scene a few weeks ago but it should surely afford a vulnerable young athlete and her family the same privacy and protection that it does to those who have failed an A drug test by withholding any information until all procedures, including a B test, have been completed. Rumours are one thing, a factual statement quite another.

The IAAF has yet to tell us why it decided to suddenly produce such a bombshell pronouncement just hours before Semenya was to run in the most important race of her life. Very cynical speculation might suggest that it was in the hope that the athlete would withdraw from the final thus avoiding possible future embarrassment should she win gold.

Platitudes of sympathy towards Semenya from IAAF officials have done nothing to lessen the impact of their statement. This is a story that will run and run to the detriment of the organisation and to the sport.

Gender verification is a complicated process and almost twenty years ago the IAAF recommended that mandatory testing, so degrading to women, should cease. The IOC followed suit at the turn of the century. One is reminded of the story of the Polish sprinter Ewa Klobukowska, a European champion and individual Olympic medallist. In 1967 she was banned from the sport, her records and medals expunged for “having one chromosome too many.”

In the case of young Caster the suspicions of athletes have turned to sympathy as the world media turns its glare on a vulnerable young runner and her remote village in South Africa. Not a day the sport can be proud of.

Not many athletes have fairy tale endings to their careers but on Tuesday night in the magnificent Berlin Olympic stadium, in front of a German crowd highly desirous of the country’s first gold medal, 37 year old javelin thrower Steffi Nerius achieved just that. To me it was reminiscent of the first World Championships back in Helsinki in 1983 when Tiina Lillak, also in the javelin, battled to give Finland its only gold.

There was a significant difference. In Helsinki it was a foreign athlete, the British thrower Fatima Whitbread, who put the crowd through agonies with a first round throw that was to lead for six rounds till Lillak’s final effort; in Berlin it was Nerius who took the lead with her first endeavour and then, with the increasingly anxious crowd, had to sit out six rounds whilst the world’s best throwers, including the world record holder Barbora Spotáková, attempted to overtake her. Nerius had just one other serious throw, 65.81m, which would not have gained her a medal of any hue.

It was meant to be just a fond farewell to one of Germany’s greatest throwers; after all she was not top ranked in her country in 2009. That honour, along with the accompanying pressure to win, fell to Christina Obergföll (who finally finished fifth). Apart from winning the European title in 2006 Steffi had always, as the saying goes, been the bridesmaid in global championships. Who was to say that, in the avowed very last international competition of her career, it would be any different?

This time the Gods that decree these things smiled on Steffi, in the same way that they smiled on Tiina twenty-six years ago. The Finnish crowd roared her last throw to the gold medal and the champion then embarked on, as I remember it, a lap of honour that would have seriously challenged the Finnish 400 metre record. Steffi, as becomes a veteran, just soaked up the adulation of the crowd.

She says that she is determined not to change her mind about retiring and you can see her point. How do you follow winning your only global title just three years before your fortieth birthday in front of your home crowd in a stadium filled with so many ghosts? In the 1936 Olympics Ottilie Fischer won the javelin for Germany. Perhaps it was she who had lobbied the Gods.

The condescending put down of Jessica Ennis’s coach, Tony Minichiello, by UK Athletics Chairman, Ed Warner, is a classic example of the crass man management that has plagued the sport for decades.

After the coach had, in a press interview, indicated that he felt Ennis’s preparations had been hindered by UKA’s actions in “decimating” her support team Warner said that he felt that Minichiello had spoken thus because he “was feeling some of the pressure himself just ahead of the competition.” Complete nonsense. What the chairman did not do was answer the points that Minichiello had made: that he had lost a nutritionist, a physiologist and a performance analyst. “They [UKA]” Minichiello said, “changed the way they deliver services and some people had foreshortened contracts. There was no guarantee of jobs.” The above trio voted (as so many others in the sport are doing) with their feet.

All Warner talked about on BBC Radio 5 was future systems, beloved by his organisation and by UK Sport. Evolve a system, tick the box and all will be well. What UKA since its inception has constantly failed to grasp is that systems depend on experienced people for their success. The present highly successful season hasn’t been produced by any system but by individual coaches working, day in and day out, with talented athletes.

It's good to see that someone has sense at UKA. Minichiello, it is reported, has been offered the job of taking charge of milti-events.

Berlin Reflections - 1

2009-08-17T07:44:00.000-07:00

Thanks to modern technology (which I don’t pretend to understand) I was able to watch Jennifer Ennis’s regal progress on the first day of her golden Heptathlon and then on my laptop, courtesy the New York Road Runners website, Paula Radcliffe looking equally majestic winning the New York City Half Marathon.

Whether this run will persuade her to run the marathon in Berlin remains to be seen but the manner of her winning over a classy field that included the leader of the US road running circuit Mamitu Dasku of Ethiopia, her old rival Catherine Ndereba of Kenya and Olympic marathon bronze medallist Deena Kastor (USA) would indicate that she is, to put it at its mildest, in very good shape.

The marathon world record holder broke away after eight miles and in hot and humid conditions pulled away from a pack that never chased her, finishing almost a minute and a half ahead of Dasku and two minutes ahead of Ndereba.

Paula said that she knew her approach to test her fitness was “unorthodox”; Britain’s chief coach Charles van Commenee called it “extreme”. But whichever way you look at it in the end the gal done good.

*

In a song from the musical South Pacific the female lead is described as having every inch of her “packed with dynamite”. The same could be said for the new world Heptathlon champion Jennifer Ennis, only 5’4” (1.62 metres) tall but, in Berlin, high jumped 1.92 metres (and has cleared 1.95m) which indicates quite an extraordinary power-to-weight ratio. If the IAAF website is still correct Ennis has overtaken the Greek high jumper Niko Bakoyanni by one centimetre in clearing a bar 33 centimetres over her own head.

The event was all over almost after the opening discipline and though the shot put has been billed as a hiccup her winning margin of 238 points is the biggest since Carolina Kluft’s Olympic win in 2004. Compared with Kluft’s European record Ennis’s performances in Berlin exceeded the Swede in three of the eight events.

Van Commenee, after a turgid few weeks in which he feared picking up the phone in case it was to herald another withdrawal through injury, can now smile. The UK has more than a world champion it has someone who can spearhead the sport towards 2012.

*

Leaving aside Usain Bolt’s breaktaking new world 100 metres record the interesting man to me in that epic race was the bronze medallist Asafa Powell. Heavily criticised for “bottling” at previous attempts at global championships, panicking when challenged and tightening up, Powell looked a totally different man at the start emulating his fellow countryman with dubious antics to the camera.

Whether all sprinters will now emulate Bolt’s actions before races remains to be seen but they clearly do not suit Powell’s style but what I think has really helped him is Usain Bolt. By running that extraordinary world record in Beijing Bolt clearly showed his fellow Jamaican a superiority that for him, at least, is insurmountable. He’s lost the world record; the pressure is off so there was no ‘tying up’ in his bronze medal run in the German capital.

As for Dwain Chambers he showed a maturity and humbleness throughout that the European promoters would now do well to match. If he had breathed in at the finish he could have well gone under 10 seconds.

*

Remember the ballyhoo when it was announced some months ago that the great and the good of British endurance running past were to help Ian Stewart rise to the challenge of reviving this particular ailing section of our sport? As it turns out it was pure PR-speak.

When questioned on BBC television Brendan Foster and Steve Cram both admitted that the group that also includes Paula Radcliffe, Seb Coe and David Bedford, “hadn’t met yet.” Moreover Steve said that they hadn’t really got any brief. Clearly this is one of those ideas that seemed good at the time.

Leaving aside the question as to why endurance running should be singled out for special treatment when so many other events in British athletics are in equally bad shape one has to comment that all this was and is part of the puff that continually emanates from UK Athletics. The rose tinted spectacles with which they view the sport are certainly not curing their myopia.

When the Blind lead the Blind

2009-08-12T12:21:00.000-07:00

The blindness of those currently running the governing bodies of British athletics to the current disillusionment, frustration and inevitable anger of voluntary administrators, coaches and officials is matched only by that of the quangos who govern them. It means that the promised great new dawns for the sport frequently handed down from on high have remained ephemeral. Ten years of disenfranchisement have taken a severe toll. The enthusiasm and innovative entrepreneurship of volunteers that were once a hallmark of British athletics have been sucked dry by a bureaucracy that doesn’t perceive that athletics has a soul let alone understand the nature of it.

Whether UK and England athletics will be ready to deal with the enthusiastic aftermath of the London Olympics is already questionable just under three years before 2012.

The recent cynical emasculation of the voluntary regional councils by those who run England Athletics displays the contempt with which they view experienced volunteers. Funding has been cut off making the councils more impotent than they were before. In the very north of England (and it may very well be the same elsewhere) important competitions and other programmes for the benefit of athletes have had to be cancelled through a lack of funding.

There has been no explanation of why, just a few years after they were heralded as the right way forward for the sport the professional offices of the nine regions were abruptly shut down creating an unsavoury game of musical chairs for jobs in a hastily concocted new hierarchy. But what’s new? Those that run British and English athletics are so comfortably entrenched that they see no need whatsoever to account for their actions to the rank and file of the sport.

Illustrations of that entrenchment can be seen in the literal farce of the2008 England AGM when nobody knew who was supposed to turn up and in the end only eight did. The recent explanation on the England website as to why the incumbent chairman will be unopposed to serve a further term beggars belief. There was one other candidate but it was decided that he or she did not meet the criteria laid down by three people: the Chief Executive of UKA, a member of Sport England and the Chairman of the England Athletics National Council. So, in a supposedly democratic Britain, you have to apply to even be considered as a candidate, meeting criteria laid down by a tightly knit group of the Establishment. Thomas Paine you should be living at this hour.

In what, I suppose, could be considered his acceptance speech, the incumbent chairman said that he was “delighted to have been part of the successes and development of the sport over recent years.” This is pure PR-speak. Those of us with rather less rose-tinted spectacles wonder what successes and what development he is referring to.

Is success measured by the fact that, despite avowals to bring about change in its structure he has managed to avoid introducing, at board and council level, any ethnic or gender diversity, retaining a cosy all-white, all-male, middle-aged hierarchy in a total contradiction of Sport England’s policy? Or that England has been successful in steering clear of tackling the most urgent developmental task facing the sport: producing a radical, exciting new competition structure for all levels of athletic competence? Or that the organisation has succeeded in having no policy to stem the increasing haemorrhaging of athletes, officials and coaches? Suddenly the expression Drop Out doesn’t just refer to teenagers.

It is the failure to grasp the simple fact of the old adage that you can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him drink that is UKA’s and England’s most serious problem. Top to bottom dicta from those whose management experience outweighs their knowledge of the sport are treated with scepticism. What has developed over the last decade is a tendency for most coaches, administrators and officials (and therefore most clubs) to decide solely to do their own thing. There is a definite “thanks but no thanks” attitude to policies dreamt up without prior widespread consultation.

Communication to the sport from the two major organisations is woeful. Leave aside the fact that athletics no longer generates any interest to sports editors it is worrying that nobody, except for a chosen few and not always then, knows what is going on or what their future intentions are. The target age for the UKA website appears to be between fourteen and seventeen. The England website (including, extraordinarily, messages from the now cashless, impotent regions) tells us little. There is no forum left where the rank and file administrators and coaches can meet with the mostly unelected few to discuss the state of the sport and its future. Hence the fact that so many volunteers are metaphorically in dark cinemas heading for the Exit signs because they do not like the film.

The present administrators clearly had no idea of the poisoned chalice that was being handed down to them. Ten years of virtual carnage of the coaching scheme, of creating tick-a-box organisations obsessed with quantity rather than quality, of observing an obsequious complaisance to the paymasters have taken an enormous toll. And the voluntary sector, in failing to supervise its finances adequately, must also take its share of the blame.

It is responsible on two counts. Firstly by bankrupting the British Athletics Federation in 1997 and then compounding the deed by refusing to even contemplate the institution of a registration scheme that would give athletics some independent financial control over its affairs and partly unshackle it from the quangos’ iron grip. A conservative figure of 100,000 athletes registering to compete at £30 per annum would bring in £3 million that could be shared amongst the nine English regions to carry out much needed work. It would give some power to the voluntary sector who, given its record, would need to provide tightly controlled and well audited business plans. I can hear two howls of dismay already: firstly from the club stalwarts who think government owes them a constant free lunch and secondly from the current professionals who would see some of their power ebbing away.

For the last decade and counting we seem, as Shakespeare put it, to have been “wedded to calamity”. Spending millions on a chosen few athletes whilst the rest of the sport languishes in relative penury has been an act of blind lunacy that has come home to roost. But then when the blind lead the blind you inevitably blunder into disaster.

Speed

2009-08-03T06:25:00.000-07:00

In 1973 Andy Carter stormed to an AAA Championship 800m win at London’s Crystal Palace in 1:45.12, slicing a full second off the UK record. Thirty six years on his time would, to date, head the 2009 UK rankings.

Mel Watman wrote of him: “His attitude is refreshing, he does not like slow races and usually avoids them by imposing a fast pace.” Here was a 'can do' runner of the type we are sadly lacking today.

His attitude is exemplified by his run at the 1971 European’s in Helsinki. In the final, despite having had attacks of asthma and tonsillitis earlier in the season, he was full of aggression leading at halfway in 51.3; after slipping to fourth he stormed back and took the bronze. He finished fifth in the 1972 Olympics and won the European Cup in 1973. Significantly, as we shall see, he also ran 48.0 secs for 400 metres.

Only three British athletes this century have beaten Carter’s time. We haven’t had a global finalist since 1993. Solihull we have a problem.

Steve Ovett beat Carter’s record in 1978 and a year later Sebastian Coe set a new world record of 1:42.33. In 1981 he amazed athletics by taking it to unimaginable heights with 1:41.73.

Peter and Seb Coe transformed the world of 800 metre running. Peter’s work, as a recent Blog discussed, will surely form the basis of the, as yet, elusive 1:39 man. The problem is that the lesson that Seb and Peter taught us in Britain has palpably been forgotten. Speed is the essence in the event; not that of a Usain Bolt but of a Johnson and Warriner.

What Seb also demonstrated with his two world records was that a British athlete could set extraordinary times. When he ran 1:41.73 he was around 18 metres ahead of the next fastest Brit ever, Steve Ovett and 26 metres ahead of Andy Carter. This was phenomenal and when middle-distance runners got their breath back we entered a golden era of British two lap running.

In the eighties and early nineties Steve Cram and Peter Elliott ran below 1:43, three others below 1:44. Medals came our way. Following Ovett’s Olympic win in 1980, Coe won silver in 1980 and 1984; Coe, McKean and Cram won a clean sweep of medals at the 1986 European’s; Cram won Commonwealth gold in 1986; Elliott won silver at the 1987 World’s; McKean won the European in 1990 and the World Cup in 1991 along with a string of European Cup victories. Indoors Coe,Harrison,Sharpe,Heard and McKean all won European titles and the latter won the World Indoor in 1993. But, once the Scot left the scene we have been but a pale shadow of our former selves.

How can this be in such a relatively short space of time? The lesson that we have forgotten is that world class times at 800 metres are the products of extended sprints.

Seb ran a 4 x 400 metre relay leg in 45.5; in his fastest world record run he completed the first lap in 49.7, a differential of 4.2 seconds. Now assuming a more reasonable differential of 3.5 seconds it means that a current British runner hoping to sustain a first lap of 51 seconds should be capable of 400 metres in 47.5. Of the current UK top six, those who have raced 400m at all are running in the late 48 to 49 second range. Only the second ranked Darren St. Clair and Sam Ellis have run closer to 47 seconds. Peter Coe believed that a world class 800 metre runner should be able to run between 46 and 46.5 seconds.

Although he never advocated moving 400 metre runners up to 800 he recognised that 400 metre training had to be part of the armour of the 800 metre runner. He had to attain repeatable 400 metre sprinting speed.

“There is no way you can escape from speed in middle distance running, including 5000m,” Peter said. “So you should never get too far away from it in training.”
He felt that once the developing athlete has achieved a high level of cardio respiratory efficiency he can reduce the volume of steady distance to that which will maintain the condition. He believed that there is more time spent in steady winter running than is necessary. But in the present day, isn’t that still the conventional wisdom?

I conjectured in 1:39 Man that, as 800 metre running became faster with sub-50 secs opening laps the anaerobic/aerobic ratio would move more towards that of the 400 metres (75:25). All such ratios, of course, assume that the distance is covered at the athlete’s best running speed, i.e. as fast as he is able. So if a runner runs 49 secs for an opening 400m but is capable of 45 secs then obviously the ratio 75:25 would not apply. The closer to his personal best he runs then the nearer to that ratio he can get. The question then surely is: is he doing the necessary training to sustain the momentum into the second half? In a recent race in Monaco Michael Rimmer went with the pacemaker and reached the bell in circa 49 seconds. His second lap was around 60 seconds. It was a hard way to discover that presently he cannot sustain such a fast lap.

British coaches and athletes today seem content with mediocrity. This century the number of runners under 1:47 in the top ten is 38, the number over, 62. There is an aberration as well. In 2006 the ratio was 9:1 in favour of runners under 1:47. This was thanks to a British Milers Club (BMC) paced race in Watford where three runners – Hill, Rimmer and Ellis, all broke 1:46; two more, Watkins and Coltherd, both ran under 1:46.5. It was heralded as a moment of truth, the breakthrough the event had been waiting for, the plateau for faster times. It didn’t happen.

There is another factor that coaches should ponder. The top performances of the three men, McIlroy, Hill and Rimmer who have attained the UK all-time top 25 this century have proved transient. McIlroy (who ran fourth in the European Championships of 2002) ran only twice below 1:46 following his best of 1:44.65 in 2005. He retired last year bitter at the lack of support he had received. Hill has run below 1:46 only once since his lifetime best of 1:45.10 (2006). It is too early to judge Rimmer for he only set his best last season and this year, as his coach Norman Poole told me, he has had a recurrence of asthma.

And what of Sam Ellis, the bronze medallist in the European’s in Goteborg in 2006? His only excursion below 1:46 has been the aforementioned BMC race at Watford. He has cruelly suffered both from injury and in 2006 misguided advice regarding future coaching.

What the running of McIlroy, Hill, Ellis and Rimmer has shown is that the tap of talent hasn’t been turned off as some believe but has been left dripping. To continue the analogy it needs a new washer. What coaches must ask themselves is: am I training athletes correctly for what is fast becoming an extended sprint? Am I stuck in old approaches to the event?

Should we treat the 800 metres more specifically and uncouple it from the 1500?
Some critics will say that all this talk of the 800 being an extended sprint is nonsense. They feel such a suggestion is heresy. They reasonably point to the fact that Coe, Ovett, Cram and Elliott were all highly successful at 1500m.

However a study of their major races at both distances shows that 800 metre races were not a priority. Only Coe ran an equal number of 800 and 1500/1 mile world class races during his long career. Ovett virtually abandoned it after his Olympic win; Cram’s ratio is 3:1 in favour of 1500m/1 mile, Elliott’s 2:1. What these great runners would have achieved had they concentrated, like Tom McKean, on racing two laps would make an interesting debate. McKean (47.60 for 400) never ran a serious 1500 in his life.

Investigation of this sick patient is urgently required. It should be carried out by the British Milers Club whose formation came about in 1963 because of the dire state of British miling. The current 800m situation is no less atrocious.

We need to interview our leading athletes and coaches; we need to know the basis of their training (not for any recrimination but for knowledge); we need to know about attitudes to racing; we need frank discussion between coaches and athletes about training methods; we need to talk to the greats of the past. Until we have the facts we cannot move forward. The short-term aim should be a modest one: to have three runners in the 800 in 2012 and at least one in the final. Achieve that and we can move on and up from there.

1:39 man

2009-07-23T14:07:00.001-07:00

It is almost thirty years since the Englishman, Sebastian Coe, first ran under 1:42 for the 800 metres; only two other men, the Kenyan born Dane, Wilson Kipketer (1997) and the Brazilian, Joaquim Cruz (1984), have equalled the feat.

Coe’s world record of 1:41.73 set in 1981 lasted sixteen years before Kipketer first equalled and then eclipsed it in 1997. His time of 1:41.11, set at an IAAF Grand Prix meeting in Köln still stands twelve years on. The question is why has such fast running been at a premium in all that time?

Coe, Kipketer and Cruz came to their destinies from different backgrounds. Coe was born in London but reared and nurtured to greatness, by his father-coach Peter, in the northern steel city of Sheffield. His Olympic achievements are legendary. Kipketer, who was just ten when Coe set his second world record, was born in the Nandi Hills on the edge of the Great Rift Valley, birthplace of many great Kenyan runners. In 1990, to better his athletics career, he moved to Copenhagen where he met his first personal coach, the Pole Slanomir Novak. Cruz, son of a steel worker, was born near Brasilia, showed promise as a youngster, went to the legendary University of Oregon and won Olympic gold in 1984. That year he ran 1:41.77.

Physiological ultimates in athletic performance have been grist to the mill of much statistical discussion since the dawn of modern athletics. When, in 1886, Walter George ran 2:01.8 for the first half of his 4:12.8 mile there was speculation about the possibility of a 4 minute mile but it was often dismissed as being physically impossible. It took a while but the feat finally arrived 68 years later.

A New Zealand statistician, Hugh Morton, once forecast that 1:42 for 800m would be broken in 1984 and that sub-1:40 would be achieved in 2020. He projected an ultimate performance of 1:33.0!

But can we be so certain that sub-1:40 will ever be achieved? Not only have there been very long gaps between recent world records but the pace of 800 metre running appears to be slowing. Three runners eclipsed 1:43 in the 80’s and eight in the 90’s. Another eight have achieved that feat since 2000 but only two since 2003.
How will a sub-1:40 world record be run? What clues do we have as to the make-up of the man who will achieve it? Is our persistence in considering the 800 metres a purely middle-distance event, inexorably tied to the 1500 metres, thwarting progress?
If it was to be run at even pace it would require two laps of 49.99. But we know of course that such even pace is probably not an option. The vast majority of world records have been set with a faster first lap; only two, by the Americans Jim Ryun in 1966 (880y) and Dave Wottle in 1972 were achieved with a negative split.

Why is this? From Professor A V Hill onwards physiologists have stressed that the fastest times will be set by running at even pace and may well explain why most records have been set in paced record attempts (but not why the prospective record breaker always asks for a faster opening lap). However, in competitive races, as the great American authority Kenneth Doherty pointed out, runners are never obliging enough to allow an even-pace exponent a clear run to the finish! Thus, post-war, only two men’s 800 records have been set in Olympic competition.

Five of the runs below 1:42 (including the last four men’s world records) have seen sub-50 opening laps, the fastest being by Kipketer in his second world record run in Zürich with 48.3. Undoubtedly future world records will require such a pace and 1:39 man will have to consider carefully the speed at which he races the opening lap: too slow - no immortality; too fast - utter disaster. Precise and unerring pace judgement will be a vital characteristic of our barrier breaker.

Now we’re into the realm of what Tim Noakes in his great book Lore of Running calls the “physiology of oxygen transport.” Up until now the consensus has been that 800 metre running is very roughly one-third anaerobic to two-thirds aerobic but as we approach the era of 1:39 man it seems to me that a more equal ratio might apply, as in the 400 metres.

Adopting more of a 400 metre approach to the 800 might well be required if runners are to overcome the 1.12 seconds that separate the present world record from the 1:40 barrier. Depending upon the individual the opening lap will be between 48 and 49 seconds, which will most certainly mean that the runner will need a sub-46.0 secs performance to his name. Kipketer’s best for 400m is 46.85; Coe’s split of 45.5 in a relay leg at the European Cup of 1979 was the fastest of the team but it is a sobering thought that, as I write, only eighteen European one lap specialists have bettered 46 seconds in 2009.

Split Differentials In 5 Fastest 800m Runs
Name	Record	400m Splits	Differentials
Coe	1:41.73	49.7/52.03	2.33
Cruz	1:41.77	49.7/52.01	2.37
Kipketer	1:41.73	49.61/52.12	2.51
Kipketer	1:41.24	48.3/52.94	4.64
Kipketer	1:41.11	49.3/51.81	2.51

Top international 400/800 metre runners have been thin on the ground down the decades. The greatest male exponent in history is the Cuban, Alberto Juantorena, the double Olympic champion of 1976. In 1997 he set a world 800 metre record of 1:43.44 in Rieti, Italy; his splits were 51.4/52.0 (0.6), almost even pace. In winning gold in Montreal he set his fastest 400 metre time of 44.26 with estimated splits of 21.8/22.46 (0.66).

In 1985 Juantorena admitted to an audience at the Athletics Congress of the USA that he did not know why his Polish coach, Sigmund Zabiezowskay, introduced “the necessary means to also run the 800 metres”. Clearly the fact that injuries the Cuban suffered in 1974 which needed surgery both in that year and early 1975 required changes in training emphasis. What the Pole did was introduce more of a mix of 800 metres and 400 metres training. This saw, for instance, an increase in volume both at runs over 1000 metres and 200 metres with the necessary adjustments to times.

Very few top 400 metre runners have converted successfully to 800 metres, (though Billy Konchellah, World champion 1991 who ran 45.38 and Paul Ereng, Olympic champion 1992 who ran 45.6 are obvious exceptions) and this maybe is the reason why the world record currently appears so unassailable. Peter Coe always stressed that the training that he promulgated was strictly for Seb but the underlying principles are for everyone and will apply even more so in the future.

“The speed of an 800 metre runner,” Peter said, “has to be equivalent to a good 400 metre runner. It does not have to be world class but it must be close to national standards and I would suggest a 400m time of 46-46.5 seconds....It is repeatable fast 400 metre speed that can be called upon and more than once at any stage of the race and it must be sustainable speed.”

1:39 man will have followed the Coe dictum: “If speed is the goal, then never get too far from it.” He will also be mentally tough enough to believe that the feat is possible.

Until we shake off our 1500 metres mentality to the 800, the present world record will probably remain sacrosanct.

“Most runners,” Peter said, “come off high mileage and go to speed work. What I am suggesting is that there is more time spent in steady winter running than is necessary.

“If we accept that the world class 800/1500m man needs repeatable 400m sprinting speed then we must see that this training will provide the necessary strength to achieve it....I believe that it is rather late to start thinking about it when the training speeds up a bit in the spring”.

When I hear one of our 800 metre (or even 400 metre) runners on television trot out the mantra “I haven’t started my speed work yet” in the middle of July, I think of dear old Peter, on high, angry and frustrated and I half expect to see a bolt of lightning strike the centre of the arena.

For the world of two-lap running it’s time to move the event on, probably back to the future.

References
Progression of World Best performances and official IAAF records/Ed: Richard Hymans/ IAAF
Lore of Running/Tim Nokes MD/Leisure Press
The IAAF Symposium of Middle and Long Distance Events/IAAF -1983

Trials and Tribulations

2009-07-15T02:39:00.000-07:00

I watched the British World Championship Trials on television. It was a most depressing experience. It was doubly depressing because the television pundits seemed to be watching another, rose-tinted meeting entirely rather than the one that was appearing on my screen. Did Colin Jackson really say that Tyson Gay (9.77), Asafa Powell (9.88) and Usain Bolt (9.86) would now be looking over their shoulders because Simeon Williamson had clocked 10.05 into a 1.8mps wind? Sure it was a great run and sure it was worth a sub-10 clocking in more positive conditions but will they be as apprehensive of Williamson as they will be of the other four who have already achieved that clocking along with themselves? I think not and to give him his due neither does Simeon.

Every TV interview began with the words, “so, you’re off to Berlin,” as if it were some sort of prize holiday. Very sadly that will, in many instances, be the case.
It was a British league meeting masquerading as a World Championship Trial and the atmosphere appeared to match it. The competitors seemed to exude no sense of urgency; the spectators hardly warranted the epithet of a crowd. The weather didn’t help and neither did the extraordinary timetable.

The only podium contender on show on the form displayed in Birmingham was the ebullient Heptathlete Jessica Ellis. Christine Ohuruogu and Phillips Idowu both won their events but neither inspired confidence the latter confining himself to taking just one jump and shaking hands afterwards with fellow competitors. For someone who may have to be the first jumper to exceed 18 metres in eleven years to win gold in Berlin he seemed casually over-confident.

Ohuruogu lies 22nd on the 2009 world ranking list and though her trade mark is to come good swiftly at major championships you can be sure that Sanya Richards has at last learnt the lessons of Osaka and Beijing. The American has the four fastest times in the world this year, all below 50 seconds and she has seven performances faster than the Olympic champion’s current 2009 best of 51.14 secs.

Olympic silver medallist Germaine Mason duly won the high jump but was 7 centimetres short of the qualifying height. Currently the British high jumpers are 11 centimetres down on the world’s leading height.

In the men’s events most of the winning performances were first achieved (in the equivalent AAA championships) in the 70s whilst in the 10000 metres and long jump you have to go back a decade further. In the 5000 metres you have to return to another era entirely when the race equivalent was 3 miles to find that in 1957 Derek Ibbotson ran faster, in rain and on soft cinders, at the White City. Where was Brendan Foster with his usual pertinent trenchant comments on such dismal endurance performances?
It may be said of course that the middle-distance events at Birmingham were, because of a deterring wind, tactical. But these were the World Championship trials for God sake, where qualifying times had to be achieved.

The women competitors showed a sense of urgency as if they knew what the meeting was supposed to be about. Reputations were made and reputations were dented but come August 23 there is little doubt that our women competitors will have continued their current ascendency over the men.

The TV commentaries were full of stories of athletes either currently injured or coming back from injury. With so many athletes absent the meeting was a litany of disaster and an indictment of a decade of sporting quangos’ control of our sport.
I also spent a day and a half at the English Schools Championships in Sheffield with England’s greatest young talent on show. There were some truly amazing performances but if history is any criteria these are young men and women whose names we shall not see in a few years time. Why? Because there seems to be no system to ensure that such talent continues to thrive in the sport or even to continue within it. The millions futilely spent on attempting to gain short term medal glory so beloved of UK Sport and our politicians would achieve much more if it was invested in the long-term future of the young stars on show in Sheffield and those who won so brilliantly at the recent World Youth Championships.

The two day Grand Prix meeting at London’s Crystal Palace may reverse this doomsday scenario and the sun will suddenly blaze down on our Berlin prospects. Our Beijing medallists may sweep into majestic form, there will be open top bus parades and everyone will be vindicated. I hope so but I’ll not hold my breath.

No Throws

2009-07-08T09:20:00.000-07:00

Britain’s Head Coach Charles van Commenee whilst satisfied with the UK overall performance of third at the inaugural European Team Championship in Portugal described our performances in the throws and women’s jumps as “appalling.” It is a familiar ancient refrain.
Seemingly, since time immemorial, such lamentations about Britain’s field events have been expressed. We have always been aware of our deficiencies. When Walter Knox, the first ever salaried Chief Coach, was appointed by the AAA in 1914 he decided to give his main attention to field events. Because of the First World War his tenure was very short lived and we had to wait for 34 years before a similar appointment was made. When he returned from the Berlin Olympics in 1936 the 400m silver medallist Godfrey Brown strongly criticised our field event performances and bitterly attacked the AAA for being so dilatory in tackling the problem.
When Geoffrey Dyson launched his coaching scheme in the late 1940s one of the express aims was to improve field events; when I (and others) launched a national league for clubs in 1969 it was in the hope that field event standards would improve. Neither has worked. After sixty years there is a woeful shortage of field event coaches and after forty years there are still pathetic field event performances overall in league events at all levels.
Every country has its traditional weak events and Britain is no exception but our continuing low standards in jumps and throws should surely by now have warranted an in-depth investigation? Is it, for instance, that ethnically we in Britain cannot match the size and power of the Slavic peoples? Or is it that when we can match them such men and women gravitate towards sports, such as rowing and rugby, that are either more lucrative or more satisfying or both, than athletics?
Since the introduction of lottery funding there has always been a strong gravitational pull towards the more successful running events, especially the sprints. Millions of pounds have been spent and wasted in a mostly elusive quest for gold. It is a world where the rich have got richer in terms of lottery support and the poor have got poorer. What UK Sport’s one-suit-fits-all lottery policy fails to recognise is that in throwing events, in particular, athletes mature more slowly than their sprint counterparts. Unfortunately over the past decade the ends of all this spending have not justified the means and field event athletes and the decreasing band of coaches have become disincentivised. What, they ask, is the point?
In the women’s high jump the current UK record of 1.95m was first set twenty-seven years ago. Since the introduction of lottery funding only one woman, Susan Moncrieff, has been selected once to compete at a global championship. In the 2009 England regional championships a total of 15 women competed in the three competitions. Only one exceeded 1.85m (first achieved by a British woman in 1971); four exceeded 1.75m (first achieved forty-five years ago). Six jumped 1.65m or lower (a height achieved by Dorothy Odam at the 1948 Olympics, jumping off loose cinders into a sandpit using a scissors technique). The questions are: are our best coaches technically capable of taking athletes beyond 1.95m and are they capable of recognising talent when they see it?
In the men’s Hammer only one thrower has represented Britain at a global championship since the introduction of World Class Performance in the late nineties. In the women’s triple jump and shot put no one has represented Britain (nor look like doing) since the retirements of Ashia Hansen and Judy Oakes.
Most of our field events, especially the throws, are dead in the water. Our top proponents receive scant, if any, support. Philippa Roles (who actually was selected for Beijing in the discus) had to drive a suburban train in order to support her lifestyle and do athletics.
This year UK Athletics have adopted the IAAF entry standards for Berlin. In two events, the women’s high jump and Hammer, the UK record would have to be broken to achieve the A standard. In the men’s Hammer only one UK athlete, Martin Girvan, has ever achieved the A standard (in 1984). The litany goes on.
In its introductory blurb about the World Youth Championships UKA says that it “aims to provide experience for aspiring under 18 athletes.” Unless you’re a jumper or thrower that is. Of a paltry total of 19 athletes in Sudtirol there are just one male jumper and two female throwers. It is difficult to understand why the federation instead of choosing the IAAF entry standard adopted much harsher selection standards for the World Youth Championships, only aiming to take those who could finish in the top eight. In other words it has adopted a policy that will surely disencentivise potentially promising young athletes (and their coaches) especially in the field events. The highest differential came in the men’s Hammer with a 14.2% difference between the UKA and IAAF standard, both the women’s and men’s javelin standards, however, run that close.
Even when our throwers (with obvious exceptions) get to a major championship they do not perform well. Leaving aside the excellent javelin exploits of Backley, Hill, Whitbread and Sanderson, the number of top eight finishers since 1948 in each of the other events can easily be counted on the fingers of one hand. We’ve all watched in despair as British throwers seemingly freeze in the circle and perform well below their season’s best in qualifying rounds. There is seemingly little or no mental preparation for the task in hand. A cosy league fixture one week and facing the world’s best the following is too daunting a task.
So how can UK Athletics attempt to end almost a century of mostly despairing field event performances? Here are a few ideas:
(1) It needs to follow the endurance example and be advised by those who have been steeped in jumping and throwing almost all of their lives. They already have the excellent Bob Weir in charge of the heavy throws, and he should be joined on a panel that will draft a future policy document by the likes of Steve Backley, Jonathan Edwards, Steve Smith, Judy Oakes, Fatima Whitbread, Tessa Sanderson, jumpers and throwers who have performed excellently at the highest level.
(2) It needs to publish details of all Level 3 and 4 coaches in the various field events and their locations so that barren areas in the country can be identified.
(3) It needs to launch a campaign within the sport to recruit jumps and throws coaches, targeting former internationals and looking urgently at the professionalization of coaching to make such an exercise worthwhile for those taking part.
(4) It needs to arrange Jumps and/or Throws internationals for seniors and juniors against other European countries.
(5) It needs to put together a programme of support for those identified as having the necessary potential to reach international standards.
(6) It needs to review the sizes of implements used by those in the junior age groups.
(7) It needs to tell the various senior and junior league organisers that their meetings will not be sanctioned unless qualifying standards in field events are instituted forthwith.
(8) It needs to encourage the setting up of specialist clubs, like the Hammer Circle, in all eight field events.
(9) It needs to insist that more field events are staged at our televised meetings.
(10) It needs to ensure that entry standards for the various championships are always those of the IAAF and EAA.
One thing we can all surely be agreed upon: it isn’t rocket science.

Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'be

2009-06-17T08:58:00.000-07:00

If proof were still needed that men’s endurance events in Britain are now in paralysis a glance at the all-time lists will suffice. Performances set in the opening decade of the 21st century comprise just 12.2% of the top twenty all-time lists for men’s events from 800m to the 50k walk. This is fractionally worse than the percentage of performances from the 1970s that are still extant there.
It is generally believed that European endurance is in the same parlous state but using the same criteria performances set this century by the continent’s endurance athletes comprise 47.2% of its all-time lists.
The great and the good of British endurance running down the years have recently met to cogitate on this. Ian Stewart, 5000m bronze medallist at the Munich Olympics (a man who, in 1975, won a European indoor 3000m title one weekend and an IAAF world cross-country one the next) has been handed the poisoned chalice of creating a revival back to more halcyon days. Whether he can successfully combine this task with that of promoting the televised events remains to be seen.
It is an indication of these sad running times that our current top male marathon runner, Andi Jones, with 2:15:20 running just five seconds faster than Paula Radcliffe’s best, complains of not being considered for the World Championships in Berlin. It is enough to make Jim Peters stir angrily in his grave.
A number of questions pose themselves: do we still have the natural talent; is our coaching good enough; do our athletes compete enough; is periodisation to blame; is ‘fear of Africans’ a factor; do our runners neglect speed?
Do we still have the natural talent? The emphatic answer is, no. Using the same criteria over five endurance events for the Under 20 athletes the situation is fractionally worse. Just 11% of the all-time top twenty performances by junior athletes have been set this century; worse still only 11% were set in the 1990s which means that only around one fifth of our best junior all-time performances have been run in the past nineteen years. In other words our reservoir of talent has dried up over two decades. There are dwindling fields in county and regional championships; there has been a steady decline in schools’ interest in athletics over a quarter of a century; our junior competitive structures are woeful involving hours of travelling to depressing league meetings often of pathetic standard.
Is our coaching good enough? There is no doubt that over the past decade or so endurance coaching (and therefore running) has been badly led and mismanaged and only the necessary cull after the Beijing Olympics gives any cause for hope. For our endurance runners to be told by one of the supposedly top coaches that “the Africans will never be beaten,” beggars belief, but it happened. There are too many coaches now operating who feel that attending a weekend course to gain the Level 2 award transforms them into highly qualified experts who require no further knowledge. All of this will take time to repair.
Do our athletes compete enough? Our summer season has barely begun and the one in the US is almost over, except that their best athletes now leave for competitions in Europe prior to the World Championships in Berlin. We have long had a culture in Britain of our best athletes “coming out late”, some even delaying a serious appearance until the championships/trials itself. The leading world performance at 800 metres as I write is 1:43.09 by Abubaker Kaki of Sudan set in early May. Five men have run under 1:44. Similarly the top British performance so far is 1:46.31 by Michael Rimmer with only six men below 1:48. Will Kaki and co be in contention come Berlin? Almost certainly. Britain? The last 800m finalist that we had in a global championship came in 1993 in Stuttgart. Are there lessons to be learnt here?
The man lying 20th on the all-time list for the marathon is Bill Adcocks who set his performance of 2:10:48 twenty-one years ago. Only three British men have run faster than Bill this century. In 1968 he finished fifth in the Mexico City Olympics run at altitude. That year he ran four marathons plus a host of other road races and track 10000 metres. To miss a weekly race for Adcocks, Hill, Alder, Kilby et al was something of a personal disaster. Racing was their raison d’être. “We were,” Bill once said to me, “learning our trade.” This notion of such regular, week-in, week-out competition was criticised by the former head of endurance, Alan Storey and although this sense of preciousness didn’t begin under his watch he continued to perpetuate it.
Should blame be laid at the concept of ‘periodisation’? There is much argument about this theory of training introduced by the Russian Professor L P Matveev and eagerly seized upon by western enthusiasts. It now seems to be generally accepted that although it might have suited Eastern European runners in the fifties and sixties international modern competition structures now make it obsolete. But are some of our coaches still rigidly adhered to the theory with disastrous consequences?
I have dealt with fear of Africans in an earlier Blog. Their total dominance of endurance events, their ability to maintain an almost metronomic tempo of fast running over twenty-five laps is disheartening to many runners. There was a similar belief in the 20s and 30s of the last century concerning the great Finns and although it is fairly certain that they would have continued such domination at the 1940 Olympics had they been held it is equally certain that it would not have continued ad infinitum. For all the theorising in western coaching no one has come up with ideas to counter the African success. Perhaps training as hard as they do would be a start.
Speed. That seemingly elusive quality (rather more speed-endurance than pure speed) that is ignored by so many coaches and so many athletes. It has been my good fortune to listen and talk to over the years to some our greatest endurance coaches: “The need is for repeatable speed always available on demand, ”said the late Peter Coe; “Speed has always been the dominant influence in my approach,” says John Anderson; “Speed is the essence,” says Wilf Paish. British coaches and athletes ignore it at their peril.
But in the end it is down to good coaching. And good coaching is about what it always has been: perpetual learning. I talked with former National Coach for Wales, Jim Alford shortly before he died at the grand old age of 90. He was coaching until the end of his life at the Tooting Bec track in London (when he got tired the athletes brought an armchair out for him). “I’m still learning all the time,” Jim said to me, “as a coach you never stop learning.” That is why it is encouraging to hear Kevin Tyler, UKA’s new coaching director from Canada, say, “ we interviewed over 50 of the world’s top coaches and without exception they identified mentoring and informal learning as the two most important factors in their development.”
Picasso said: “Bad artists copy; good artists steal.” This applies also to the world of ideas in coaching. When Cerutty brought to fruition the huge talent of Herb Elliott on the dunes at Portsea the world rushed to sand hills to copy him; when Lydiard had 800m runner Peter Snell running the marathon distance in training everyone began Long Slow Distance (LSD). As Bruce Tulloh once wrote runners are always looking for “something that will turn them from scrubbers to supermen, if not overnight, at least by next Saturday.” But the basics and terminology are now intrinsic and good coaches adapt the fundamentals to suit their ideas and their runners’ needs. They are always attentive to what is going on in their sphere and, like Picasso, have no compunction in stealing such ideas and maybe developing them further.
Where have we gone wrong? It is 21 years since our men won a medal at an endurance event at a global championship, two decades of perhaps believing that the triumphs of the golden era were the gifts of the Gods and would return. No longer can we believe that; no longer can we believe (and worse still announce) that every new bright talent is the next Coe or Cram. But we do need some derring do on the track, some courage to move towards the front in races and not, seemingly inevitably, towards the rear. Our coaches must awaken from their moribund slumber of despair and plan and prepare for a new dawn and as they do so whisper to themselves the million dollar question: why can’t our men run more like our women?

Innovation

2009-06-04T05:35:00.000-07:00

Watching (on television, in the dry) Usain Bolt splash his way to an astounding 150 metres world best time of 14.35 secs in a rain-soaked Manchester a few weeks ago was, for everyone, some experience. It certainly was for his fellow competitors who looked completely awe-struck at the finish. Marlon Devonish, who finished a distant second in the race, said in the understatement of the season so far: “I think Usain is in a different league right now.”
But this Blog isn’t about Bolt it’s about innovation and the good news is that some of the hierarchy of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) were present to witness the event. They must know in their hearts that track and field worldwide is in deep trouble as far as popularity goes and that radical approaches are needed if our sport is to undergo a renaissance.
Bringing certain events out on to the streets is one way of re-galvanising public interest. It’s not new; there have been town square pole vault competitions around Europe for many years and in a recent interview Seb Coe enthused about a shot put competition held in a Stockholm market square, that attracted 5000 enthusiastic spectators the night before the DN Galan track meeting. And there must be some way to integrate the street athletics series for youngsters promoted and organised by Linford Christie and Darren Campbell into any future similar programmes.
Innovation must be in the air for we also have the inaugural Super 8 inter-city meeting in Cardiff on June 10. This is an idea with enormous potential for every section of the sport. What club athletics in Britain has failed to grasp for years is the fact that six hour long meetings combined with up to six hours of travelling is not the way to attract young people to (or to keep older people in) our sport. Super 8 lasts for just two hours, covers eleven events for both men and women and has eight cities battling it out. Attractively presented and properly promoted, especially locally, this could be an awakening for track and field on a local level. Providing the people of Cardiff (where the prototype is being held) know about it, it will surely be a great success.
Next year, if the prototype is successful (as it surely must be with international athletes taking part and with Sky television giving it coverage) the competition will go nationwide with cities being invited to bid for franchises and this is where some uncertainty creeps in and a number of questions need to be answered. The most pertinent concerns finance because without sufficient backing the idea will struggle. But this is not the time to ask too many pertinent questions but to wish the concept well and await reaction.
There is, however, a difference between innovation and turning the sport into a circus and there are many who are concerned that the new European Athletics Team Championship is about to do just that. The European Athletics Association (EAA) has long been under the misguided assumption that the declining popularity of the European Cup competition was down to its structure and over ten years ago began reducing the number of attempts allowed in field events in the erroneous belief that such a gesture would be welcomed by television. But television never ever showed a complete set of jumps and throws anyway so it was a futile gesture. The decline in the popularity of the European Cup was that it offered no financial incentives to those taking part and so many of the continent’s top stars stayed away. The complications of the new competition are too numerous to include here and at the risk of being tagged a purist I forecast that the competition, like Jeux Sans Frontiéres (Its a Knock Out), just might entertain an unknowledgeable audience but will not impress a knowledgeable one.

The Emperor's New Clothes

2009-05-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

It’s Christmas day morning and the Beckhams, David and Victoria, are up early watching their children open their presents. There comes a ring at the door. Is it Santa returning with an extra gift? Is it family on a Yuletide visit? The younger children hope to see Donner and Blitzen. Victoria opens the door and there is no Donner, no Blitzen, just the man from the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA), with test tubes and all, come to random test her husband at an allotted hour. Festive pleasantries are not exchanged.
A fantasy tale? Perhaps but it’s based on factual probability. It’s an example of the increasing infringement of the human rights of successful sportsmen and women, by the constant tightening of the “Whereabouts rule” where a sportsman or woman on the drug testing register has to signify a place and an hour of the day when he or she will be available 365 days of the year.
The playwright Arthur Miller, writing about his play, The Crucible, said that ever increasing Draconian penalties would lead us to a time when “the repressions of order were heavier than seemed warranted by the dangers against which the order was organised.” The World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) has reached that time. It has reached it because its autocratic president, John Fahey, insists that it’s new Whereabouts rule is not open to negotiation. Orwell, if he had been at all interested in sport (which he wasn’t), would have well understood this moment in its history.
Miller’s play is ostensibly about the witch trials in the village of Salem in 1692 when nineteen men and women and two dogs were convicted of witchcraft and hanged. It was also an allegory on an equally Manichean period in American history, the 1950s, when the proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) saw many men and women jailed or blacklisted from their work simply for their left-wing affiliations. Some committed suicide. Fear and paranoia stalked the land.
In the summer of 1990 I went to the National Theatre to see an excellent production of the play. The similarities with drug testing – the repressive measures, the innuendo, the fear and the hysterical outbursts - stirred within me a distinct unease about how drug abuse was being tackled in sport. My wife Gwenda and I discussed this during the interval, at dinner and on the way home and the conversation formed the basis of a chapter, Sporting Salem, in my book Athletics – The Golden Decade. Twenty years on that unease has not abated, quite the reverse.
But now a surprising voice is questioning the Whereabouts rule. In a Blog published on the website Inside the Games, Michelle Verroken, one time Head of Anti-Doping for UK Sport and a noted hardliner on drug taking, questions the ethics of the rule. She notes that the footballing authorities, FIFA and UEFA, together with other sporting organisations and indeed the European Union together with leading sportsmen are opposed to the rule in its new form. She writes:
“This is a point of principle...this is an issue about winning the hearts and minds of our athletes to support drug-free sport. I doubt if it is really having that kind of impact. Whereabouts could be the nemesis that turns the ‘drug free willing’ into the ‘whatever’ generation. Athletes are the target of anti-doping programmes in the same way they are the target of those who would seek ways around doping rules and supply performance enhancing drugs. The system relies upon athletes being on side.”
Fahey, along with other international and national sporting leaders, particularly Olympic president, Jacques Rogge, clearly fail to recognise this salient fact. Fahey’s “do what we say or else” stance is alienating many top sportsmen and women. The attitude of the authorities mirrors that of a drug tester who blew his top at an international athletics match many years ago and rounded on the assembled athletes impatiently waiting to be tested. Pointing a finger at each one he shouted “I think you’re on drugs, I think you’re on drugs...” For too long the attitude has been one of athletes having to prove themselves innocent rather than the authorities proving them guilty. The Diane Modahl case of the mid-nineties was a supreme example of such bias and injustice.
WADA, the IOC and certain governing bodies vigorously propagandize a drug menace threatening sport that they cannot quantify. Why? With a 2009 budget of almost 25 million US dollars, provided by Olympic associations and governments worldwide, WADA has to justify its existence. It has to convince its paymasters that the menace is so great that it threatens the integrity, the very soul of sport. And when President George W Bush in a State of the Union speech said in 2004 that the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports is dangerous and that performance is now more important than character you have to say that the propaganda is working.
The one-time British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli was credited with saying: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” I am not accusing WADA and other testing authorities of falsifying statistics but I am suggesting that they massage them for their propaganda purposes.
Dr Babette Pluim is a respected worldwide authority on medical matters relating to tennis. Writing last year in the British Journal of Sports Medicine she reported that in her sport there were internationally 40 positive findings between 2003 and 2007 but that in 67.5% of the cases the independent reviewing panels accepted that there was “no intent to enhance performance”. So when it comes to an intention to cheat, 40 positives drops to 13 over the five year period.
Immediately her case became public World and Olympic 400m champion Christine Ohuruogu was labelled a drug cheat not only by the tabloids but also by her own federation. She can bitterly attest to her shameful treatment after she was found guilty of missing three tests and banned for a year. She suffered such abuse even though those sitting in judgement were categorical in their belief that there was no intention on her part to enhance her performances.
There is an ever-expanding WADA list of banned substances that by 2009 has already reached proportions that no sportsman could possibly keep abreast of (thus increasing the chances of minor accidental positives inflating statistics). Asthmatic sufferers and others with genuine medical conditions now have to go through a complicated, bureaucratic procedure to acquire a TUE (Therapeutic Use Exemption). And, as another medical authority, the Australian Dr Tim Wood has pointed out: “I also experience the frustration at the paperwork required to allow players with genuine medical conditions to take legitimate, scientifically proven drugs that do not advance performance.” This is also now required to allow an athlete to have intravenous fluid during elective surgery. Has sport gone mad?
There have been many appalling injustices over the years: Andrea Raducian losing a gymnastics gold medal at the Sydney Olympics for taking a Sudafed tablet; Filippo Volandri banned for three months for ‘abuse of salbutamol’ in treating a particularly violent asthma attack. The Italian tennis player was not only banned but fined the equivalent of most of his 2008 prize money. In athletics, in 2003, Bernard Legat’s ‘A’ sample test showed positive for EPO; he withdrew from the World Championships in Paris and did not run in any of the lucrative Grand Prix meetings that season. His ‘B’ sample proved negative. It was a botched test.
Ask any one in Britain what they think about athletics and they will almost certainly refer to it being a drug infested sport. High profile cases like those of Dwain Chambers and more recently that of the now former Olympic 1500m champion Rashid Ramzi have certainly confirmed that view for many people. But the Chambers’ publicity was actually self-inflicted by the British federation naively and vainly attempting to ban him from competing in 2008 even though two years had elapsed since he had completed his two year sentence for taking banned substances. Chambers’ return to the sport sparked outcries and much public breast beating with ex-Olympians on TV and federation officials talking of a massive menace and a war on drugs. It has always been thus but those determined to keep the propaganda going in order to justify the enormous financial outlay, have studiously neglected to mention that between 2004 and 2008 British athletics produced, according to UK Sport, just two cases that violated WADA rules (presumably one of those was that of Ohuruogu) giving just 1.1 positive cases in 1000 tests .
Finally do the statistics justify the hundreds of millions of dollars, the bad publicity and the abuse of human rights created by WADA and the independent testing agencies in the developed world?
In 1997 (two years before WADA was set up) international athletics totalled 68 drug cases, 62% of which attracted the maximum ban. In 2007, with WADA in full swing, there were 67 cases, 60% of which warranted the maximum ban. Not much progress there then. During that period, at a conservative estimate, a quarter of a billion dollars has been spent across the globe fighting drugs in sport with systems and procedures that are clearly not infallible. But it seems that WADA and Fahey have finally overstepped the mark. In a recent interview the IOC President Jacques Rogge, whilst defending the principle of Whereabouts (“because there is so much doping”) said: “This is something to be discussed between WADA and the athletes and between WADA and FIFA and other team sports.”
Like Hans Christian Anderson’s Emperor sport has succumbed to its own propaganda and persuaded the rest of the world to go with it. It is forty-two years since British cyclist Tommy Simpson died from doping and heat on the slopes of Mont Ventoux in the Tour de France and not much progress seems to have been made in tackling doping in sport in the interim. Is it time for the IOC and the major international sports bodies to realise that WADA isn’t working, was a bad mistake and to urgently look at a completely new way of solving the problem? I think it surely is.

Geoff Dyson and the Appliance of Science

2009-04-20T07:01:00.001-07:00

Tom Tellez was a top American coach, Head Track and Field Coach at the University of Houston. His finest athlete, Carl Lewis, was arguably the greatest the world has ever seen, Specialising at 100, 200 metres, long jump and sprint relay, Lewis won more combined Olympic and World gold medals than any other athlete in history. His sprinting and jumping techniques were impeccable.

At the drop of a hat Tellez would produce a well thumbed book and cry “this is my bible!” a book, written some twenty years before he was coaching Lewis, by an Englishman, G.H.G. Dyson and was titled the Mechanics of Athletics. Tellez told me, twenty years ago, that he had read it perhaps fifty times. “If I have had success as a coach I owe a great deal of it to Geoff Dyson,” he said. “His book started me on the trail of discovering the real facts about track and field.”

The Mechanics of Athletics, translated into French, Italian, Spanish and Japanese that ran to eight English editions, applied the immutable laws of motion of Sir Isaac Newton to every event. In his day Geoff Dyson, the British Chief National Coach of the time, toured the land preaching a gospel of the appliance of science to training, illustrating his mesmerizing presentations with turntables and film loops.

Dyson also instituted instructional booklets on every event that were soon coveted by coaches round the world; he encouraged those who were pioneering loop films, men like Guy Butler and the German Toni Nett, who obtained stadium access to film the greatest athletes of the time in action, which could then be globally marketed and repeatedly specto-analyzed in slow motion.. It was a trail-blazing, pioneering time, and for those of us privileged to be involved in Britain, very exciting.

It is somehow symbolic to me that the Mechanics of Athletics is out of print, symbolic of the fact that the scheme that Dyson conceived sixty years ago, that became the envy of the world and was re-constructed in Canada, has been desecrated over the last decade or more by those who don’t know what they don’t know.

He conceived of the idea of a team of national coaches who would ‘teach the teachers and coach (my italics) the coaches’ in the different regions of Britain. I think the mantra was deliberate. Teachers would be taught but coaches would be coached in the art of applying the science they had gained. Different men down the years have filled the role with distinction, highly respected not only in their regions but also, in some cases, around the world of athletics. Many left in frustration and anger and when the British Athletics Federation went bankrupt in 1997 national coaches were unceremoniously swept aside and a mess of pottage replaced their work.

Dyson fought a losing battle to earn respect for coaches and coaching against the philistines of the AAA establishment. In his time there were those who sneeringly referred to coaching as “bloody kidology.” His battle still hasn’t been won. If you consider the question of how important is coaching to the development of the sport worldwide and then study the websites of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the European Athletics Association (EAA) and in Britain, UK Athletics (UKA) you have to conclude that it’s not very important at all.

All you can find on the IAAF site are details of the various coaching awards available and information on how to obtain the very academic publication New Studies in Athletics; the EAA site is similarly bereft of information and news with just a link to the officers of the European Athletics Coaches Association (EACA) but not to the association’s website. In Britain, it’s the same story.

But as to what is going on in the world of coaching - who’s producing the current crop of great athletes, what’s their philosophy, who’s innovating in the various events, is there new information to be gained in the crucial areas of strength training, gender, nutrition, sports psychology etc then internationally (and domestically in Britain) - there is nothing at all. The idea of sourcing and collating all such relevant information seems not to have entered the mindset of any of the relevant personnel.

In some ways you could say that Dyson’s ideas were globally ahead of his time; certainly, in Britain, they appear to be ahead of our time. With the availability of modern technology you have to ask where are the DVDs that show us frame-by-frame analysis of the great technicians; where are the event booklets that maybe would encourage coaches to consider events other than their speciality; where is there a film, for instance, of the greatest long jump of all-time, Powell (8.95) versus Lewis (8.91w) in Tokyo in 1991?

In 1975 Dyson rose, at Olympia in Greece, to address the 19th session of the International Olympic Academy. It was almost thirty years since the creation of his coaching scheme in Britain and twelve since he had similarly launched the Royal Canadian Legion’s Sports Training Plan in Ontario. It was mainly a reflective lecture but in it he relevantly said:

“In his study of athletic performance the modern coach stands at the crossroads of several sciences. Thus, to the physiologist, athletic performance is a phenomenon of cells, humours, tissues and nutrient fluids obeying organic laws. The psychologist sees the athlete as a consciousness and a personality, while to the physicist he suggests a machine unique in its organisation, adaptiveness and complexity. To the imaginative coach the borders of these and other specialities are seen to overlap; the techniques of one science become meaningful and illuminating in others.”

2011 sees the 30th anniversary of his untimely death from a heart attack and surely the time would be right to resurrect his place in coaching history as a great genius, pioneer and innovator, the man who applied science to the most complicated sport of all. He has rightly been described as a prophet without honour in his own land.

British athletics owed him so much and yet deigned to honour him in his lifetime, though belatedly he was recently inducted into a England Hall of Fame. There are many ways in which he can be remembered but perhaps one of the most enduring would be to recreate the Mechanics of Athletics electronically with appropriate film and commentary from the book so that a new generation of coaches can benefit from the man who single-handedly changed the concept of coaching in Britain.

The Dyson Squad: Left to Right: Geoff Elliot (1954 Commonwealth Pole Vault Champion); Maureen Gardern-Dyson (1948 Olympic silver medallist); Dyson; Shirley Cawley (1952 Olympic long jump bronze medallist); John Savidge (1954 Commonwealth shot put champion).

A Good Vintage

2009-04-01T04:50:00.000-07:00

Since his arrival as Head Coach of UK Athletics (UKA), Charles van Commenee has shown how crass and destructive was the decision by the previous incumbents of Athletics House to appoint a sports psychologist to lead Britain’s international athletes, a man who misspent millions of pounds and subsequently failed to meet his own overly modest medal target in Beijing. The stupidity of Moorcroft’s decision is emphasized by the fact that van Commenee was working at UKA at the time, seemingly ignored because the CEO had decided, apparently on the advice of Sir Clive Woodward, that a coach was not the best person to lead athletes. The Dutchman soon flew back to Holland to take up duties there.
One fears that the decisions made between 1997 and 2006 will haunt British athletics for some years to come and indeed will have a detrimental effect on our performances in 2012 which is why (as I read somewhere) van Commenee’s resolve to resign if he does not meet his own target of eight medals in London is not one I agree with. He needs more time to right the wrongs of a decade of maladministration, especially in relation to coaching.
He may have problems in areas where he has no direct control. England Athletics’ unseemly rush to comply with its paymasters latest wheeze, abandoning its nine regions in the process, seems to have left coaching in an angry limbo. And coaches have been angry for some time, not so that England AA seems to have noticed. The new system, hardly in place, is already generating a lack of confidence in Level 3 and Level 4 coaches. Such coaches tell me that communication is non-existent, e-mails go unanswered. No one seems to know what is going on.
The current state of coaching would have made Geoff Dyson burst a blood vessel, something that those who knew him (as I did) would confirm he was always prone to do. With Geoff (founder of our coaching scheme back in 1948) it was always Apoplexy Now and it finally led to him being hounded out of British athletics in the early 1960s. But he left behind him a legacy that was the envy of the world. Traces of his work are still around us, some of it inevitably septuagenarian in nature, in men who have more coaching wisdom in their little fingers than the majority have in their whole bodies.
In van Commenee, by his actions and pronouncements, one recognises a man of similar persuasion, a man who knows athletics and athletes. He clearly does not suffer fools gladly so in British athletics he will have a hard time of it. He has been described as a volcano and I for one look forward to hearing the eruptions that are necessary to put Britain internationally back on the right track.
Talk Talk
Prior to the world’s finest athletes descending on Berlin’s Olympic stadium in August a few hundred administrators from around the globe will assemble for an IAAF Congress. I’ve been around a few of these massive talking shops and it has amazed me each time that so much time and money is spent and perhaps wasted on what, in the end, primarily turns out to be nitpicking of changes to the competition rules. It gives those who love to indulge themselves in such pedantry a field day. As usual on these occasions a very few self-appointed experts dominate the discussions; the rest are bored to tears.
It’s obviously too late to change the format for 2009 but surely the IAAF should think of doing so when mostly the same people gather again in Daeju, South Korea two years later. Our sport is not in such great shape that discussion on its future by the top administrators from each country would be a waste of time. Why not, over three days, have seminars on the three fundamental areas of athletics: coaching, competition (including officials) and facilities without which athletics could not function. It really is time that the world governing body interested itself in what is happening below its athletics ivory towers.
Living up to the hype
British performances at the world cross country championships in Amman disappointed many including many of the athletes themselves. The real question (and it applies even more to track and field as well as we shall see) is whether our athletes lived up to expectations. I think most of them did. What they didn’t live up to was the hype generated by good performances achieved in the gold fish bowls of British and European competitions. We were up to it again after last weekend eulogising runners for being in the top five in Europe; we have yet to learn that, in world terms, European standards no longer serve as any criteria.
One of the problems seems to be the spin spawned by the need to sell the televised meetings. Our young sprinters have had enormous pressure put upon them over recent years by being put on a par with the Americans and Jamaicans; heads to heads built up at Crystal Palace and Gateshead, arousing media and public expectation. The latest is Mark Lewis Francis “challenging” Usain Bolt in a street sprint at Manchester. Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous? A look at the world rankings lists is all it takes to bring about a sense of reality.
Let us take the careers of three young British sprinters: Mark Lewis Francis, Harry Aikines Aryeetey and Craig Pickering, all lauded to the skies as future Olympic champions, even world record holders. The former two won World Junior titles; Pickering was European Junior champion in 2005. After he won his title in 2000 Lewis Francis was named as his successor by the Olympic champion, Donovan Bailey; after his success in 2006 Aikines Aryeetey was dubbed Britain’s big hope for the 2012 Olympics. Pickering has somehow found himself to be the next big white hope. And of course it has been natural for the athletes to believe the stories, to revel in the interviews, to have expectations that, frankly, have exceeded their grasp. Such disappointments can be mind shattering.
90% of British athletes who will be contending in 2012 are probably known to us. Anyone contending for the final of the 100 metres in London should surely now be running sub-10 seconds. Only three British sprinters have ever run under that time, the last, Dwain Chambers, ten years ago. It is inconceivable to me that there will be a British 100 metre finalist, let alone a medallist, in three years time in London.
Shaping the destinies of sprinters in their teenage years to gain bums on seats is, to put it at its mildest, a dubious practice. Let us praise Lewis Francis, Aikines Aryeetey and Pickering for what they have achieved, not for what we would like them to.

More of the Same?

2009-03-23T02:48:00.000-07:00

Two initiatives, one international and the other national, have been put forward presumably to try and reverse athletics’ fortunes both in terms of public enthusiasm for and participation in our sport, both of which are seriously on the wane across the globe.
The first comes from the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) and the other from United Kingdom Athletics (UKA). In 2010 the IAAF is totally revamping the top tiers of its World Athletics Tour with the introduction of a Diamond League; UKA are hoping to introduce inter-city matches of short duration that will put the sport back on the map. The key element in both cases is whether the aim is to rekindle public interest rather than athletics being its usual self-indulgent self.
One of the factors in the decline in popularity of the major Olympic sport has been the stark contrast between the glamorous top competitions and the remaining levels of the sport. In favoured countries there is just one major international event that attracts the public; the rest of the fare is usually very lengthy and turgid. In Britain we are very fortunate in having two meetings lined up for the Diamond League that will be televised by the BBC but below that the level of competition gets progressively worse; the public doesn’t just not turn up to meetings, it doesn’t even know about them. My impression is that it’s the same across the globe with the possible exceptions of the USA and Jamaica with their intensive scholastic and university competitions.
What the IAAF doesn’t seem to recognise in its enthusiasm for its new competition is that by having central contracts with top international athletes it is hoovering up more stars who will not appear in their own countries. That was partly acceptable when the major grand prix meetings appeared on terrestrial television as they did in the golden era of the sport but it is quite another matter when the vast majority of meetings only appear in the outer reaches of satellite, pay-to-view television. That is why the role of IMG in selling the global television rights is so vital to the success of the Diamond League.
Part of the problem in recent years has been the repetitive nature of many events, American sprinters beating American sprinters and African runners beating African runners, all usually wearing the same new Nike vest. It was forcibly raised by TV representatives at a workshop on the One-Day meetings in Monaco four years ago but the penny seems to be taking an inordinately long time to drop. Even the magic of Usain Bolt would begin to pale for TV audiences if all his races became foregone conclusions.
On the plus side it is good news that all events will be catered for across the whole series with field event athletes and throwers in particular receiving an equal share of the $420,000 prize money available at each meeting and being able to win, along with their track peers, the top prize of a 4 carat diamond (worth $80,000) for gaining most points across the twelve or fifteen meetings series.
We really need to know a lot more detail about the proposed British inter-city competition, with a pilot this year and a launch in 2010, before due comment can be made but really the same criteria for the success of the Diamond League applies. Will the competition be sponsored thus giving it financial clout and publicity? Will it attract our top stars? And if it does will it attract television? Without the oxygen of publicity it will just be another valiant effort almost literally played out behind closed doors, like the current inter-city indoor matches and regional championships and league athletics. In my stint as Media spokesman for the sport I continually heard people bemoaning the fact that the public did not support their endeavours. I had a stock question in reply: Who knows? Almost invariably it transpired that no one did.
Globally and domestically there is not enough athletics competition going on. In the northern hemisphere summer the general public is aware of athletics from about mid-June to mid-August, too short a time span to create enthusiasm or even passing interest. Until that situation is addressed we will not move forward in any significant manner.
After the Ball
The Diamond League is good news for Britain which will be staging two of the meetings. It has also surely helped to finally settle the post-2012 debate on the downsized Olympic stadium, which will now become the national athletics stadium with a 25,000 seat capacity. Without it our capital city would have been almost alone in Europe in not having an athletics stadium worthy of the name.
The crowds that sweep to the now obsolete Crystal Palace will ensure that big meetings in East London are well supported but UK Athletics and England Athletics must guarantee that top meetings regularly go there throughout the track season.
The sport has done little, with an ongoing silence, to counter the speculation about the stadium’s future. Precious little has been heard from either UKA or England about their competition plans for post-2012. Luckily English soccer’s aversion to having a track around a pitch has killed off most of the conjecture but definite plans should be outlined as soon as possible
The UK and England Championships should be permanent annual fixtures; there should be other international events (perhaps a revival of the hugely popular floodlit meetings) and certainly opportunity must be made for young athletes to have their moments on the Olympic track. If accommodation requirements can be met surely it would be an ideal permanent venue for the English Schools?
Huge crowds of 40 to 50 thousand used to pack the old White City stadium half a century or so ago when, of course, other attractions were in short supply. Those days are well gone. But the new stadium can be the catalyst for revival. It is interesting to note that all the major sports have their headquarters and their major stadia in the capital, at Wembley, Wimbledon, Lords and Twickenham and British athletics must seriously consider moving its headquarters to what will always be known as the Olympic stadium. It would be a sign, worryingly missing to date, of serious intent by the sport.

A few words to the Wise
How wise of the IAAF Council to step back from the brink, accept legal advice and not attempt to ban Dwain Chambers for bringing the sport into disrepute through certain passages in his drugs memoir,masquerading as an autobiography. To have done so would have opened up a Pandora’s Box of legalities and prolonged the media agony of a sport in the grip of its own zealotry.
The Council could be wiser still if it now decided put its collective emotions aside, put its house in order as far as drug taking and punishment is concerned and ensure that there is consistency across the sport by setting rules that everyone - athletes, federations and promoters - must adhere to. Allowing the application of so called individual consciences creates loopholes and makes for bad law.

Racing Demons

2009-03-17T07:14:00.000-07:00

At the Seoul Olympics in 1988 the sprinter Ben Johnson, who had won gold in the 100 metres, tested positive for an anabolic steroid, was immediately stripped of his medal, his world record and unceremoniously bundled back to Canada midst a global media frenzy.
He became demonized. Humankind always seems to need an embodiment of what it loves or hates and as far as athletics and indeed sport was concerned Johnson perfectly fitted the bill for “cheating”. He was banned, vilified and hauled before the Dubin Enquiry in Canada and the nation expected public recantation and remorse. Other Canadian athletes were caught up in the Dubin net and confessed to drug taking. It was a dark time for Canadian athletics. But Johnson would not do what everyone wanted and creep away into the night. He attempted a comeback; it was unsuccessful. Sport was mightily relieved when he finally retired; it could pretend that the nightmare had never happened.
Fast forward two decades and we now have demonized Dwain, the new European indoor champion and record holder, the third fastest man over 60 metres in the history of the sport. The extraordinary thing about his case is that after testing positive Chambers was ‘sentenced’ to a 2 year ban for THG, served his time, tried out other sports and then decided to return to athletics for a second time in 2008, two and a quarter years after he was eligible to do so.
I say for a second time because what seems to have been forgotten midst the holier-than-thou chest beating and wailing is that he actually returned from his ban in 2006, ran second in the European Cup and, more significantly, competed in the Gateshead Grand Prix in June. So what had changed by February 2008 to make his second coming such a global cause celebre and to have him banned by European promoters and constantly vilified?
It was his association with the sensational revelations surrounding the Bay Area Laboratory Cooperative (BALCO), the jailing of Marion Jones for perjury, the insidious winks and hints from BALCO owner Victor Conte, the disclosures about world record holders Tim Montgomery and Justin Gatlin and baseball legend Barry Bonds. For the second time in two decades athletics had been dragged through the mud. In the eyes of many Chambers is a living personification of all that. And because he too will not creep away into the night the demonization continues apace, fuelled by avaricious tabloids.
This coming June the Gateshead Grand Prix will be held again but, as things stand, Chambers will not be there. He is the same athlete with the same sins that competed in 2006; it’s the same promoter and the same federation. The IAAF tells me: “There is no "ban" by Euro meetings - there is a recommendation NOT to invite doped athletes. They can’t ban anyone - only the IAAF can do that.” So why is UK Athletics welcoming back Dwain Chambers on the one hand (and revelling in his success) but banning him from its two lucrative televised meetings on the other? Who’s in charge, UKA or its promotions arm, Fasttrack?

I have asked UKA these questions but they have disdained to reply. We now have organizations that are no more than cabals under our sports quangos, cabals who believe that their actions are not the business of the sport as a whole.

The question as to who is the final arbiter as far as our grand prix meetings are concerned becomes even more pertinent with the news that Gerard Janetzky, the promoter of the opening Golden League meeting of 2009, the DKB-ISTAF meeting in Berlin, has decided that enough is enough and invited Chambers to compete at his meeting, on 14 June.

“I’m surprised Chambers is viewed as the root of all evil,” Janetzky said, putting it in a nutshell. “There have been plenty of athletes who were allowed to start after sitting out their ban, so why should Chamber’s punishment be worse?”

But Chambers seems determined on keeping himself a pariah. Firstly his book about his time as a doped up sprinter hit the stands around the same time as he was winning a gold medal for Britain. Secondly it has transpired that he is keeping in contact with Conte and taking his advice. Who is advising this man? Is anyone advising him? My argument is not about Chambers but about justice and underhand attempts to circumvent the law.

Chambers is a lost soul in the wilderness and if British Athletics is to continue to revel in his success it must do more to help him. It could begin by scourging the hypocrisy in its midst, and let him compete in its televised meetings.

The IAAF bemoans the fact that it did not have a rule, when Chambers returned to the sport, that specified that all his ill gotten gains from athletics (put at $200,000) when he was on drugs, must be paid back before he could compete again. With the Euromeets ban this would effectively mean a lifetime ban. The world governing body needs to make its mind up. If it wants a lifetime ban for drug taking then it should institute one and test it in the courts.

John Rodda
I was deeply saddened to read of the death of John Rodda, who wrote on athletics for the Guardian between 1960 and 1992. John was the doyen and most respected of athletics writers. His contacts with the sport were at the very highest level as those of us, on the other side of the fence as it were, all too frequently discovered.
I had known John for many years but we came into closer and more frequent contact during my decade- long tenure as Media spokesman for the sport. Those were the halcyon days of the 80s and early 90s when British athletes ruled Europe and in some events the world. John was an exceptional writer; his work was incisive and imbued with tremendous knowledge. His finest journalistic moment came in 1968 and had nothing to do with athletics. He was in Mexico City for the Olympics when hundreds of student demonstrators were gunned down just before the Games opened. John was the only Guardian correspondent in Mexico and his dispatches from the capital showed that he would have been a top journalist no matter what the field.
He wrote a history of the Olympics with the IOC President, Lord Killanin; he served on the IAAF Press Commission for many years; he covered ten Olympic Games for his paper; he helped Seb Coe make a report to the IOC; he assisted Andy Norman make a presentation to an IAAF Congress that changed the face of international athletics; he knew Olympic politics inside out. John was not only a reporter on athletics but a lover of the sport as well.
His other sporting love was boxing, which he also covered for his paper, writing on some of the great title fights of the second half of the 20th century.
My best memory of John is of the European Championships in Helsinki in 1994. I was walking through the grounds of the Athlete’s Village when my mobile rang. A familiar voice greeted me and then said: “Can you confirm that a British athlete has tested positive?” I couldn’t so I said that I would get back to him. I turned heel and went back to the restaurant where team manager Verona Elder and team doctor Malcolm Brown were in very close conference. They stopped talking. “I know,” I said, “what you’ve been talking about.” It was the celebrated case of Solomon Wariso and a supplement called Up Your Gas and John had obtained yet another scoop.
John’s retirement lunch was held at the celebrated Ivy Restaurant in London. One of the gifts presented to him was a photograph of him sitting next to the then IAAF President, Primo Nebiolo, who was obviously desperately trying to talk himself out of a probing question. The expression, peering over his reading glasses, on John’s face was wonderfully sceptical. He loved athletes but was rightly suspicious of most administrators.
When you think of John it is of a remembrance of times past, of an era when athletics was always in the news. Those days are gone but we will long remember him as, in the very best sense, a fine gentleman.

Men Only 2 (Gwenda Ward)

2009-02-18T10:52:00.000-08:00

Tony has invited me to follow up on his last Blog, and I’m happy to do so. When he referred to ‘those trying to establish gender equity holistically in British athletics’, he was referring, largely, but not exclusively, to me.

Debates about the best ways to get action have been quite frequent in our house. Tony has always said that I’ve been too soft, too amenable; that I’ve let the athletics authorities off the hook by not telling them plainly why and how they are wrong. But I’ve always said that the only effective way to get change is to work with, not against the organisations, an engendered difference of opinion in itself, I guess! He also says that they've given me the run around and, on reflection, that is all too true.

Anyway, I’ve networked, debated, proposed, joined working groups and committees, got elected to IAAF women’s committee, got co-opted to my regional council (not elected, mind, the clubs' brotherhood doesn't want my sort), written and researched and networked again. In 2002 I was asked by UKA to write a module and resource, “Coaching the Female Athlete”, now a self-funded website (womenontrack.org) currently linked to the England site, and in 2003 was invited to head the gender sub-group as part of Sport England/UKA’s Valuing Diversity Project.

But, dear athletics friends, none of this has worked and I’ve hit the wall. My way has not and will not work, you can lead the horse to water etc etc... I’ve made dozens of suggestions and offers, all in response to insiders’ acknowledgement of a problem, but nothing is followed up, invited calls and emails not answered, decisions perpetually avoided.
Yes, OK – in spite of my record in the field, (and the fact that no-one has ever told me that I am wrong in my analysis or approach), it could be me that is the problem!
But there are still some very experienced and knowledgeable women employed in England Athletics who I know have strong views about discrimination and inappropriate treatment against female athletes, coaches and decision-makers. Have they been asked by their bosses to come up with a strategy? No, of course not. Furthermore it seems they are very wary of standing up to be counted because of a real fear of losing their job in the almost inevitable next restructuring. It’s now obvious to me that the current athletics establishment is both unable and unwilling to address gender equity and nothing I, or anyone else outside our paymasters UK Sport or Sport England, can say will make any difference.

Its not that the strategists and managers don’t see a problem; it’s rather that the possible answers are too challenging and require an analysis of their own attitudes, assumptions and behaviour and those over whom they preside. That, of course, is not in any of the plans and certainly doesn’t suit the style. Any action for equity, they assume, must be added on, not integrated- a big mistake.

It’s OK to see women themselves as the problem. Programmes to promote “Leadership for Women” seem just about acceptable in some quarters, but of course that is a total misunderstanding of the issue. Women per se do not lack leadership, though they may well execute it differently to men. But, alongside any other disempowered group, they DO adapt their behaviour and expectations in the light of what they observe and experience, i.e., negative feedback, either direct or subtle, and negligible opportunities for themselves or progress by other women.

Frequently, disadvantaged groups also internalise these negative judgments, so that self-esteem drops, followed by commitment and performance, creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. If the context is voluntary, the undervalued sectors vote with their feet, enabling the predominant group to stay self-satisfied and in control. That’s exactly the situation that we face in athletics.

No, the leadership issues lie, not with women but within the organisational hierarchy who, because of their homogeneity and lack of intellectual curiosity on psycho/social issues, unwittingly and unintentionally perpetuate the very factors that excluded women to start with.

Here’s an example: I have recently been told by the head of coaching development for England Athletics that I am “not the right person to lead on coaching the female athlete”. Now, on one level I see his point. I have not spent years coaching and am only a fast-tracked Level 2 coach. But as an ex-Olympian, I have done other things in the sport, especially in this important field, as is self evident. Since ceasing to compete, apart from researching and promoting gender issues, I have held down various jobs in teaching and social care (specialising in work with at risk young people and their families, parenting and domestic abuse), brought up two sons, supported my husband’s career and run a home – typical athletics woman, really.

Indeed, when Maggie Still, who formerly headed up coach education for UKA, asked me to write the Coaching the Female Athlete” module I said “I don’t think I’m the right person to do that!” But no one else was willing, so I took it on, on the basis that it was fascinating and that I was collecting views, research and experience as a baseline for further debate and feedback from coaches themselves. Much of the material, and this is the key point,(Mr Wheater, please note) is not about traditional sport science which, being a product of the male dominated culture in sport, undervalues psychological and relationship issues and inadequately addresses biological gender difference, hence the problem we started with! The roots of gender disadvantage (Mr Wheater, please note) lie in cultural norms, assumptions, attitudes and behaviour, which in turn shapes the knowledge which is seen as relevant or not relevant to any given enterprise. Therefore I believe that my professional background provides more helpful tools with which to observe, analyse and assist practising coaches and female athletes than a pure coaching background would have provided. Undoubtedly this could be done better, but the fact of the matter is that it wouldn't otherwise have been done at all.

So, mainstream coaching still has little to say about gender, and female drop-out continues apace. This is, in microcosm, the brick wall that women in athletics face: "different approach, different experience, can’t be right, not what we want, thanks all the same". This seems to be a bit too ironic and challenging for the management to take on board and it is why I say now, with deep sadness, that gender equity in our lovely sport can only deteriorate, with the parallel increased disadvantage for female athletes of all ages.

Men Only

2009-02-16T02:41:00.000-08:00

“Equity underpins the basic premise of Sports England’s work.” Who says? Well, Sport England does, of course. It is also crystal clear about what should happen within sporting organisations:
“An organisation that is more diverse and reflects the community it serves in terms of staff make-up at management, executive, officer and volunteer level is likely to be more innovative and able to respond better to the varied needs of all members of that community.”
Which begs the question why are we, in athletics in Britain, being governed by a male dominated hierarchy? And what is Sport England, athletics’ paymaster, doing about it? Apparently turning a blind eye. Certainly in only two of the above categories do women fill any significant (but by no means majority) role. At decision making executive, officer and volunteer level they are conspicuous by the sparseness of their presence.
And when they are present on a council or committee they are more than likely to come across abusive male chauvinism. Following the Blog on the history of athletics administration in Britain I received an e-mail from a woman administrator who wrote that she, operating in many walks of life, has never “encountered such blatant sexism as I have encountered in athletics.” She goes on:
“I have by turns have been patronised and bullied and whenever I have spoken out I have been met with blank gazes of incomprehension. The bullying was not taken seriously and I was just told to get a thicker skin.... there seems to be a reluctance to change what is a very male club.”
The facts bear her out. Compared with the number of participating women athletes the percentage of women administrators, officials and particularly coaches is woefully small. If the treatment that is meted out to my correspondent is typical (which I think it is) then this can hardly be surprising. There are other instances: one male misogynist in one England region took to e-mailing his splenetic views on gender equity; on one of David Moorcroft’s nationwide tour meetings prior to the setting up of UK Athletics (UKA) two very unpleasant men reduced a young woman, brought in to assist with the changeover, to tears; Shelley Newman, in an interview with me, told of the verbal bullying by her one-time coach; more recently reports have surfaced of a well-known coach adversely commenting to an athlete on her physical appearance and finally there is the case of a leading coach sleeping with his athlete.
What is disturbing is what my correspondent calls the incomprehension of those in charge, an incomprehension which has made the task of those trying to establish gender equity holistically in British athletics seem very much like those of Sisyphus. In more modern parlance those men who run UK and England athletics just don’t get it.
Some see parity in competition (which has only taken 80 years after all) as the closure of the subject. Others pay lip service to gender but manana rules when it comes to action. They cannot comprehend that there is something very much amiss when only one woman (non-executive) sits on the Board of UK Athletics and the only woman on the Board of England Athletics is the professional finance director.
Two of the nine regional councils of England, all of whom are currently in limbo, are male only organisations; there is one woman chairperson out of nine; there are only 13 (17%) women out of 77 regional council members, seven of whom were not elected but co-opted. They were not elected because the election process was highly biased (as it was after amalgamation in 1991) in favour of the already male members of the club. The litany of sexual discrimination goes on.
Even if we step away from the ivory towers of national athletics management for a moment there is the serious matter of the education of those male coaches who coach women athletes, many of whom believe that men and women can be trained in exactly the same way and proceed to do so. Prevention of the female triad (osteoporosis, amenorrhea, and disordered eating) should be key factors in coach education from the lowest grade; so should the causes of acute female drop-out from our sport at the ages of 15 and 16 where the accepted wisdom of the cause is, to coin a phrase, “boyfriend trouble.” It does not seem to dawn on male coaches that they may actually in some instances be the problem. Finally there is the probability that women athletes require, in many cases, a different psychological approach by coaches in order for them to reach their potential. Is any of the above part and parcel of coach education as presently constituted? No it is not.
There are those who smugly say that women show little interest in the positions that are on offer, do not get themselves nominated and do not wish to take on too much coaching responsibility. But women can see a glass ceiling as well, if not better, than anyone because they’ve had a lot of practice. They sense when they’re not welcome and vote with their feet.
The International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) has long recognised the problem. It set up a women’s committee and then followed up by ensuring that at least two women sat on its Council, the sport’s overall decision making body. Then it ensured that at least two women sat on each committee and commission. Not ideal but a start. UK Athletics and its constituent bodies have ignored the recommendation of the IAAF that they should form a women’s committee; clearly they feel that a vibrant, questioning group of women in its midst would be just too much to bear.
I could never understand why the late, and mostly unlamented, doyen of women’s athletics, Dame Marea Hartman, frequently referred to me as a “friend of women’s athletics.” I could never fathom what it was that I had done to earn such a soubriquet. It is only in more recent years watching those who understand the important issue of gender in athletics battle impotently with those who don’t that the penny dropped. It wasn’t what I had done that somehow impressed Marea it was what I hadn’t done: I had never treated or written about women administrators or coaches as second-rate athletics citizens, which today seems to be totally de rigueur throughout the sport. Jobs for the boys rules OK.
“Equality for women,” wrote the journalist Polly Toynbee, “demands a change in the human psyche more profound than anything Marx dreamed of.” Too profound for those who run British athletics from top to bottom that’s for sure. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Of Rights and Wrongs

2009-02-09T02:31:00.000-08:00

Where does the self-created Euromeets Consortium, composed of the promoters of the major European athletics meetings, obtain the right to deny the British public seeing its fastest sprinter in action? Why does the International Association of Athletic Federations (IAAF) refuse to take action against a policy that infringes its (and those of the World Anti Doping Agency - WADA) code regarding doping? Why does UK Athletics allow its promotions’ arm Fast Track to deny its fastest sprinter the competition he needs to achieve medals internationally? How does the BBC regard the non-appearance of the country’s top sprinter on its screens? What does Aviva (the major British athletics sponsor who has invested £40 million in athletics up until 2012) think about media attention being diverted from their meetings as long as Dwain Chambers is elsewhere? You have to ask the question: who is running athletics and you have to suspect, to quote a British idiom, that the tail is wagging the dog.
The attempts by various organisations to circumvent the rules of WADA and the IAAF by introducing caveats and by-laws to suit their moral judgment is doing enormous damage to athletics in particular, cementing its reputation as a drug-ridden sport. For every time a former banned athlete appears at a notable meeting it sets up what Chaucer called a “wepe, and wynge and waille”, sparking huge debate which overshadows any publicity given to the event itself.
The Euromeets Consortium, a shadowy group with, it appears, unlimited power, lives in an opaque bubble. Year after year its members serve up the same athletics fare seemingly oblivious to the fact that the days when they attracted large audiences on European terrestrial television are long gone; now they scramble for coverage from satellite companies mainly because the viewing public has become totally bored with what they see. This out-of-touch body feels it has the right to practice restrictive practices but the fact that their meetings are part of the wider IAAF World Athletics Tour, with its million dollar jackpot, surely negates that point of view. Indeed it could be said that the IAAF is conniving in a restrictive practice because former banned athletes cannot compete for its lucrative prize. Yet it takes no action.
The Consortium obviously collectively feels that it holds, along with the British Olympic Association (BOA), with its lifetime ban, the moral high ground on drug taking in sport. They do not. They do not because by circumventing the universally accepted WADA rules by instituting their own by-laws they are flouting natural justice. And you can be sure that the proposed four year ban won’t satisfy their lust for greater punishments and more draconian abuses of athletes’ human rights with the “whereabouts clause”. And UK Athletics, anxious not to be found wanting, has joined the club by adding a ‘quarantine’ year to whatever universal ban is implemented, so that an athlete can prove, in an as yet unspecified manner, their ‘commitment to drug-free sport’.
The problem of drug abuse in sport is compounded by the fact that it is a highly emotive issue. To those who would like to see it become a criminal offence there is, seemingly, no greater crime. Organisations like the Euromeets Consortium and the BOA are trying to bring in lifetime bans by the backdoor. They are like the Wild West cowboys at Tombstone who would rather put a bullet through the heart of any man who cheated at cards than accept the ruling of the sheriff.
At the centre of all this is the much maligned Dwain Chambers. It is now annoying some that he is still attracting media attention, deviating the press away from our major televised meetings (who have actually banned him). The maligners just wish that he would creep away so that British athletics can resume its serene downward path. You have to remember, however, that all the brouhaha over Chambers’ reappearance in the sport this time last year came about because of UK Athletics totally misguided (through not knowing the rules) attempts to stop him running and its inefficiency in not testing him once his ban was over.
British athletics’ misfortune is not so much that Chambers took performance-enhancing drugs but that he got caught up in the biggest drug controversy in sport, the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative (BALCO) scandal in the United States. It is, of course, compounded by the fact that of all those British athletes who have served bans and returned to the sport he has been the most successful.
We are now just a few weeks away from this whole controversy boiling over again at the time of the European Indoor Championships in Torino when a biography of Chambers is also timed to be published. There is a strong likelihood that he will become champion and the television pundits and athletics press (what’s left of it) will have the proverbial field day with the European Indoor champion being banned from European meetings.
What those who publicly lament Chambers’ return to the sport must realise is that he has every legal right to compete and he is not going to oblige them by returning to oblivion. If they are to douse the fires of controversy, that they abhor, then they have to accept that fact, understand that they are consolidating the public view that athletics is a drug-ridden sport and cease their “wepe and wynge and waille” every time he appears so that other successful British athletes can get the publicity that they deserve.

Fear of Africans

2009-01-28T05:11:00.000-08:00

Writing in the Canadian magazine Athletics (December 2008) that doyen of British running coaches, Frank Horwill, reported that three years ago the then Endurance Director of British athletics, Alan Storey (no longer in that position) opened a symposium by declaring: “We will never close the gap on the Africans in distance running.”

Frank does not record whether the symposium immediately broke up, thus becoming the shortest in running history, but he does reflect that it is not surprising that the decline in British men’s endurance running continued under Storey’s watch.

This rang a bell with me. Forty plus years ago in Modern Distance Running I quoted the famed Hungarian coach, Mihaly Igloi reflecting on his days as a runner back in the 1920’s.

“To us,” Igloi wrote, “record breakers like the Finns Paavo Nurmi and Hannes Kohlemainen seemed singularly gifted and equipped: their performances out of reach of normal mortals. These records, said Hungarians, were the products of special components, not of any particular training systems, and were helped by climatic and other conditions in Scandinavia. We, it was alleged, did not have the same natural ability or the same conditions – so our athletes did not search for ways to improve.”

Fast forward seventy or eighty years and here is a British coach echoing the same sentiments. Igloi tells us that he and other athletes soon rejected such nonsense. He went on to coach three wonderful runners, Sándor Iharos, László Tabori and Istvan Rozsavolgyi, who had collectively set ten world records in just fifteen months in 1955-56 and whose undoubted Olympic destinies were shattered by the brutal invasion of their country by the Soviet Union just days before the Melbourne Games. Igloi emigrated and was highly successful in the United States.

The decline in European and British endurance running over the last few decades has been staggering. Olympic gold is the raison d’être of today’s politicians and sporting bureaucrats. Sadly Europe’s distance runners have been, to say the least, remiss in such provision. In the past twenty years Europe has supplied just 6 gold medallists out of the 36 available. In overall medals won the situation is much worse, just 14 out of 108 were won by Europe, a paltry 13% and two of the fourteen were of African origin.

In 1984 with 4 Olympic medals out of a possible 18 the African runners were coming; by 1988, with 11 they had arrived. In Beijing with 16 they were in total control. The only European runner to take a medal was of Algerian origin.

Compared with yesteryear standards have plummeted. Taking 1988, 1998 and 2008 as our yardstick of two decades and the tenth best performance in each event as an indication of overall health, 2008 produced the worst European performances in every event and the worst British performances in four out of the six (with the remaining two just a few tenths off being worst).

Horwill cites Professor Tim Noakes’ two variations, in his book Lore of Running, between European runners and their East and North African counterparts. Firstly, African runners devote one-third of their training to work between 80 and 100% of VO2 max; Europeans devote just 10%. Secondly, the height/weight ratio (a major factor in distance running) of the East African is superior.

There are also cultural differences. Running is a trade for hundreds of Kenyan runners. It is a way of extricating themselves and their families from the grim realities of agricultural life in that East African country. The 1990 ATFS Annual listed the winners of 85 marathon races for 1989 with only 3 (3.5%) being won by Kenyan runners. In 2007 the list had grown to 157 races with an astonishing 70% being won by Kenyans. Of the other 2007 listed major road races 65% of the winners were from Kenya.

So we know why the Africans are so good: running as a way of life from an early age; superior training, often three times a day; benefits from 60% of training time being at altitude; a good deal of training devoted to working at between 80 and 100% VO2 max and strong financial incentives to be successful. But why are the Europeans currently so bad even compared with their forbearers?

At the Atlanta Olympics I stood next to a well-known British coach watching the men’s 10000 metres unfold. The winner was Haile Gebreselassie in 27:07.34. There was a grunt of satisfaction from the coach when a British athlete ran in tenth, almost a minute behind. “Second in Europe,” was his satisfied comment as he went off to proffer congratulations. Back then I knew that we (and by we I mean Europeans as well as British) were in trouble.

But was Alan Storey uttering an unmentionable thought that is buried deep in the collective psyche of European runners and coaches? Do they see the exploits of Bekele, Gebreselassie, Tergat et al as being “out of the reach of normal mortals”? Is this why some British coaches ignore such exploits to lower their thinking and their runners’ ambitions to declining European standards? Is the problem more psychological than technical or physiological? Can African distance runners be challenged?

Occasionally Caucasians will emerge to do so, men like Craig Mottram, Alan Webb and earlier Bob Kennedy but the European challenge has been sparse, mostly coming from Spain. You have to return to what I have termed the “golden decade” of British athletics, the eighties, to find performances that would match those of African runners, especially at 800 and 1500 metres and when you study that period, when Coe, Cram and Ovett ruled the global roost of middle-distance running and David Moorcroft missed breaking 13 minutes for 5000m by a whisker, you find an interesting phenomenon.

To get into the British Olympic team in both 1980 and 1984 at 1500 metres was some herculean task. In 1980 there was automatic selection for Seb Coe and Steve Ovett; the third spot went to an emerging Steve Cram. Four years later the task was even harder with Coe and Cram globally ranked second and third and Ovett just over a second behind the latter. Did British middle-distance runners resign themselves to second best status? Did they consider the trio’s performances to be out of the reach of normal mortals? Were they psychologically shattered? Hell, no; in 1984 Britain had six men in the world top twenty at 1500 metres (Graham Williamson with his 3:34.13 would have made the Olympic team of every other country except Britain); similarly we had four at 800 metres. They rose to the challenge of their peers. As a result eleven of the top all-time British performances at 800 metres were set in the late 70s and the 80s, only three so far this century; at 1500m the tally is eight and two.

Not surprising then that the new UK coaching supremo, Charles van Commenee, appointed Ian Stewart, an uncompromising 5000 metre runner of the seventies, who won 5000m bronze at the Munich Olympics, to replace Storey. He will be supported by men like Coe, Cram, David Bedford and Brendan Foster as well as two of our finest women athletes, Paula Radcliffe and Liz McColgan. Initiatives have been tried in the past with generally disappointing results, including (as Horwill pointed out) establishing a centre of excellence at a college institution. It will be interesting to see if Stewart, also the promoter of UK televised meetings, will resurrect the 10000 metres to its rightful place at the UK Trials and Championship meeting as a precursor to reviving that neglected event.

The problem, however, is Europe wide and it is not just athletes that need targeting but coaches as well, for fear begets fear. New attitudes are required and psychological assistance to attain positivism. If we are to bring about a renaissance in events that once thrilled crowds across the continent the best European coaching talent and sports psychologists must combine their expertise.

Former European Council member Luciano Barra argued in IAAF New Studies in Athletics that dramatic falls in viewing figures for athletics events in major European countries are mainly due to the decrease in European endurance standards.

"The less the audiences see athletes from their own countries," Barra wrote, "doing well in the showcase running events, the less likely they will be to tune in again."

The fear is endemic,the problem acute. The longer we prevaricate the worse it will be.

2008-12-02T05:00:00.000-08:00

Who should run the Asylum?

2008-11-20T03:26:00.000-08:00

(A very brief history of British athletics administration)

As the short-lived British Athletics Federation (BAF) staggered, in the mid-nineties, towards bankruptcy and oblivion in a maelstrom of bitter dispute and recrimination with the AAA of England, I discovered that the composition of both governing councils was, with one exception, made up of one and the same people. In other words they were battling with themselves.

After so many years in the sport this did not come as any great surprise. What was slightly surprising (but only slightly) was that most of the said council members did not see anything awry with such a situation. Figuratively you wore one hat to an AAA meeting and another at a BAF. All perfectly normal; “you see, it’s always been this way”, a top official of 30 years standing patiently told me.

To me this story encapsulates in a nutshell the previous 117 years of rancorous, sometimes splenetic, voluntary administration that came to a close in 1997 when the administrators were called in. The whole history of UK athletics administration begs the question: who is best suited to run our sport?

It could be that British Athletics has a collective DNA for self-destruction. From the very beginning of organised administration there has been suspicion, distrust and a tendency to militancy. To tell the history of athletics administration in Britain would require a Tolstoy and so I’m confining myself to look at three tendencies that have dominated prejudices down the years: the retention of the Amateur Athletic Association (AAA) as a dominant political force; a determination (until 1997) to keep professional staff firmly in their place and a serious case of collective male chauvinism.

The AAA was set up in 1880 and there was suspicion from the start from the North of England that the Varsity toffs wanted the sport confined to ‘gentlemen amateurs’ who would, in deference to cricket, compete in championships held in the early spring. Definitions and dates were ironed out and the oldest national association in the world came into being.

The initial battles over the first few decades were fought over professionalism and betting, resulting in one London stadium being burnt down by an angry mob. Many famous athletes were banned for life from the sport for racing against pro athletes (Walter George), accepting money (Alfred Shrubb) and of “roping” – not trying (William Snook). The AAA hierarchy took a very hard line indeed in order to preserve pristine amateurism.

It was the AAA that affiliated to the International Amateur Athletic Association (IAAF) when it was founded in 1913 and it chose athletes for internationals and Olympic Games. The first serious challenge to its hegemony came in 1930 when the Scots, increasingly miffed by AAA high handedness, applied for separate affiliation to the international body. This was disallowed but it led to the setting up of an International Board later to become the British Amateur Athletic Board representing at the IAAF the four home countries. However by sheer weight of numbers (95% of the sport) the AAA was to continue to dominate for the next half century.

For many, many years there had been rumblings for the setting up of a British federation but there was always some faction that vociferously opposed it. In the late 80s and early 90s a long, sometime very tedious, process took place that resulted in a British Athletic Federation (BAF) being proposed. Clubs were asked to vote on its composition and shock! horror!, they voted for a regional structure that did away with the AAA entirely. The ruling England hierarchy rushed behind closed doors and emerged with a compromise: yes, there would be a regional structure but there would also be an AAA presence. The newborn BAF was, as it turned out, doomed from that moment.

Internal battles soon commenced with AAA diehards vigorously opposing BAF. It all came to a head in 1997 when the BAF Chief Executive and its Finance Director, seeing the writing on the wall, left within a few weeks of each other. In September it was discovered that the federation was bust and administrators were called in. It was the nadir of British athletics.

Now Sport England had control thanks to its new status of being paymaster to those sports who could not (in the case of athletics would not) fund themselves. UK Athletics was formed with little or no democracy. The AAA of England (and the internal strife) continued together with its over-blown territories. All had been formed into limited companies and could therefore continue ad infinitum. In 2003 Sir Andrew Foster, at Sport England’s request, initiated a review that came up, a year later, with nine English regions instead of three, “taking the sport nearer to the coalface”. In 2008, in a scramble for further lottery funding, the professional headquarters of the nine regions were scrapped by an England elite and power reverted to central control. The merry-go-round concocted by confused, inexperienced minds continues unabated.

One of the legacies of the early days of the AAA has been an aversion to professional administration and coaching. Various recommendations for a Chief Executive of British Athletics had been made in the past, mainly through such luminaries as Lord Wolfenden (indirectly) and Lord Byers (directly). All were politely (publicly) and impolitely (privately) rejected.

The BAAB finally got around to appointing its first Chief Executive in 1978. This was David Shaw, who became highly regarded for his work both nationally and internationally but not where it mattered most, with the upper voluntary hierarchy of the sport. Frustrated in his attempts to move British Athletics forward he left after a few years. It was the only enlightened administrative appointment that the governing bodies have made in the interim 25 or more years. Why it is that most of our sport’s professional appointments have proved unequal to the tasks facing them it is difficult to say. There has never been the mutual respect that was and is needed. Why those endowed with making the appointments so frequently got it wrong is equally difficult to understand. Maybe it was a disastrous brew where those who didn’t know what they wanted chose those who didn’t understand either.

Professional coaching became an imperative after the Berlin Olympics but any implementation of it was postponed because of the war. In 1948 Geoffrey Dyson was appointed Chief Coach and had under him a team of national coaches whose terms of reference were, basically, to “teach the teachers and coach the coaches.”

To many of the top officers of the AAA/BAAB coaching was merely “bloody kidology” and so it was inevitable that fiery clashes took place between the often apoplectic Dyson, determined to bring status to coaches and the honorary officers equally determined that he should know his place. The battle was the inevitable irrestible force versus an immovable object and the latter won. First the highly respected Jim Alford resigned, followed by Dyson and then Lionel Pugh. The internationally, highly envied coaching scheme stagnated and remained that way for another sixteen years.

Over the years many internationally top rated coaches came and left in sheer frustration men like Ron Pickering, Wilf Paish, John Anderson, Tom McNab, Frank Dick and Malcolm Arnold. What the voluntary hierarchy never appreciated was that British athletics was the poorer for their going. And the battle for respect for coaching and its wider professionalisation, dreamed of by Dyson, still hasn’t been won at any level. Lip service but little action is paid to it and in Britain over the last decade the coaching scheme has almost become a parody of its former self.

The emancipation of women after the First World War led to a great upsurge in women’s athletics, both nationally and internationally. In 1922 a letter was sent to the AAA requesting that it take control of women’s athletics. This was agreed in principle but there was a suggestion made that a women’s association be formed that would then affiliate to the AAA. This duly happened and application was made but the AAA had changed its mind and suggested a ‘working agreement’. As Peter Lovesey wrote in his excellent History of the AAA, “What prompted this volte-face we may never know. Whether male chauvinism won the day or the AAA simply took fright at controlling what was regarded in some quarters as at best risqué and at worst dangerous to health, the WAAA went its own way and the working arrangement took 10 years to emerge.”

Six years later at the Amsterdam Olympics, in extremely hot weather, slightly distressed women finishing the 800 metres led to a horror of women’s athletics by the male dominated IOC and IAAF. The worry about athletics physically harming women would delay parity with men’s events by almost 80 years.

The WAAA had some formidable characters, no nonsense women that stood up for their side of the sport. Other home countries and regions of Britain followed suit as did various disciplines and at its peak this led to over 40 organisations controlling the whole sport in Britain. The WAAA had its own officials and its own Head Coach. Only one other country in the world had separate organisations for men and women and that was Australia that transferred to an amalgamated federation in 1978.

Ten years later moves towards BAF commenced and the then WAAA secretary, Dame Marea Hartman, was inveigled (by dint of offering her the Presidency of the new organisation) into persuading her colleagues into abandoning their segregation and integrating into one federation. Almost overnight women disappeared from the councils and committees of the combined organisations. Because of the small number of women involved with clubs and counties and because of a system of Buggins Turn, men voted for their own. That hasn’t changed. Women make up just 12.5% of the elected members to the nine England Regional Councils, five of which have no elected women members at all. The number of women Level 4 coaches in Britain is an indictment of the system; male heads are nodded at the injustices but those in charge seem to equate gender issues alongside or even behind those of much lesser significance. Apparent parity in officiating is a delusion, men officials outnumber women by 2:1.

The IAAF recommends that each of its federations has a Women’s Committee, a recommendation studiously ignored by both UKA and England. The cold fact is that it is not in the self-interest of the men who run British athletics to be proactive in this area. Our sport is the poorer for it.

The sorry state of affairs of 1997 led Sport England to believe that the sport would be better run by professionals and UKA was set up to ensure this.

What epitomises the ten years or so of professional autarchy that we have had since? Two things. Firstly, the structural mania that has gripped those employed by UK Athletics and England. Building structures is the haven of those who just don’t know what they don’t know. Secondly, the recent England AGM attended by a mere handful of Board members (no one seemed certain as to who could attend). Our structures are becoming pure Kafkaesque.

Both the voluntary and professional sectors must take some responsibility for the confused mess that we are in now. By opposing any form of self-funding the volunteers have ensured complete subservience to the paymasters of Sport England and UK Sport. By believing that their individual appointments made them athletics experts overnight the professionals have led us into a bureaucratic nightmare. Is it that British athletics has long been ungovernable?

“If men could learn from history,” said Samuel Coleridge, “what lessons it might teach us.” Indeed, but only if we are humble enough to want to.

Yet Another Brave New World

2008-11-04T07:03:00.000-08:00

It could be said that British athletics over the past fifteen years has behaved like an unruly volcano, erupting with a regularity that is now embarrassing. The latest eruption, created by the new establishment at England Athletics, will cast another set of dedicated people into the cauldron of the job market.

It is just four years since Sir Andrew Foster’s report on the future of English athletics was published. It too was to supposedly herald in a new era for the sport: nine regions instead of the overblown three, professional staff nearer to the clubs (the supposed cutting edge of the sport), nine volunteer regional councils to provide supervision. There have been teething problems, there always are, but generally speaking progress has been made. So the question has to be asked: why yet another dramatic u-turn?

And, of course it’s only a year or so since UK Athletics also indulged itself in a bout of job shedding, though in that particular instant slimming down the organisation was urgently required. But it surely cannot do the reputation of our sport any good to see redundancies being frequently used to clear up the inadequacies of higher management or to implement the changes in policy of the increasingly chameleonic Sport England.

British athletics has always been governed by an inner circle of power that is notoriously closed. The present administrations are no exception. I am told that the regional councils were kept in ignorance (on the advice of the sport’s Human Resource unit) of these changes for fear of leakage to the professional staff. Not much faith there then. These recent events have exposed the convoluted, supposedly democratic election system for the sham that it is. It ensures the vast majority of the sport plays no part in decision making processes including consultation.

Though we know, from the document issued by England AA, the how and the when of this dramatic change we are not clear as to the why and it is probable that we never will be.

My own suspicions, as always, lie with the sport’s paymasters. Sport England (at the moment a rudderless organisation requiring a new Chairman and Vice Chairman) is just entering a new funding phase and has been told by the government's Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to change direction and give more autonomy to governing bodies of sport. This is the very same Sport England who, a decade ago, following BAF’s bankruptcy, decreed that athletics was incapable of organising itself.

Our sport surely deserves to know why the decentralisation of Foster should, in the space of just three or four years, regress to the centralisation that it felt was detrimental to the future development of grass-root athletics.

The constant dramatic twists and turns of policy are demoralising for the sport, whose support for new stratagems has been severely dented by the failures of recent years. The nobility of intent has always been undermined by a failure of application. Schemes planned by the regions have now to be abandoned. Athletes will be let down. The unseemly rush to dismantle the existing structures will lead to the abandonment of proposals and ideas that were going to benefit athletes and the sport in the nine England regions.

We can glean from the statement issued by England AA Chairman, John Graves and CEO, Mike Summers some of the effects their actions will have. Gender equality in administration will suffer even more The paucity of women on regional councils has, so far, been partly counterbalanced by the appointment of some fine professional staff that have made excellent contributions in their regions. There is no guarantee that they will continue in the sport. Ethnic representation is almost non-existent both professionally and voluntarily so there is a danger that the administration of British athletics will continue to be run by middle- and not so middle-aged Caucasian, grey-suited males, once called the blazerarti. If the history of gender inequality in athletics administration is not known to the present incumbency, I would be delighted to enlighten them.

Believing that “established competition providers” can “best deliver a revitalised competition structure” is naïve and flies in the face of recent history. League athletics in Britain has failed to develop at least over the last couple of decades and attempts to change the structures have met with stubborn resistance. Travelling long distances for inadequate competition has become de rigeur for thousands of youngsters competing in the more junior leagues and is partly responsible for the alarming drop-out rates that concern us all. David Jeacock, secretary of the British Athletics League recently visited some French league meetings and underwent a road to Damascus moment. He found the meetings “fun” and recently referred in his annual report to “that po-faced puritan approach to sport that so often seems to infect us.” He has hit the nail of our current competition structures right on the head.

Two of the new core objectives of England AA are to “increase participation across a wider cross-section of the community” and “to improve the quality of experience of every participant.” If these objectives are to be met then it is the governing bodies who need to tackle a re-invigoration of our competition structures. It is a task they have studiously avoided for decades.

Coach development now appears to be a part-time role for 19 newly appointed “field-based club and coach support officers” working under “three team leaders.” For such a vital section of our sport that has been disgracefully neglected over the past decade or more this seems poor recompense. Frankly, it is difficult to reconcile the roles of club support and coach development in just one person; they will have expertise in either one or the other but it will be a rare animal indeed that will have sufficient expertise in both to be effective. I suspect that in many cases support will consist of alerting coaches to courses that are available to them and be left at that.

Coaching needs urgent, full-time attention. It is unfortunate that we have had to wait so long (over six months and counting) for the appointment of a UKA Strategic Head of Coaching Development and it seems probable that the England AA Board may have jumped the gun in swiftly looking to appoint these “support officers” before a coaching strategy is in place.

At first glance (and we still await the detail) all these significant changes appear to be structurally based, which follows the pattern of the past ten years. Presumably the “intensive consultation” has found that coaches and clubs are all eager to be developed. The opposite has been my experience and, it seems, that of a lot of equally experienced people around the country. There are, at a liberal estimate, about one hundred properly functioning track and field clubs in Britain. This leaves about four hundred who are probably content with their lot, whose voluntary officials have no more time to give and who are in despair at the Brave New Worlds being conjured up by bewilderingly changing administrations.

What incentives are to be offered to voluntary coaches to develop? Most Level 2 coaches I have met are also content with their lot and cannot see any point in expensively (in time and money) leaving their comfort zones and qualifying for Levels 3 and 4.

All this probably sounds curmudgeonly but there is undoubtedly a certain naivety about this restructuring. It assumes much including the fact that retention of the nine regional councils without professional support will be welcomed by them. The council members might conclude that it is but a sop to the voluntary sector.

It would be interesting to know who were intensively consulted across the sport about this umpteenth change in policy and structure and one hopes that England AA will publish a list in the not too distance future. Meanwhile, we await the detailed plans with interest.

Super Radcliffe (on two counts)

All praise to Paula Radcliffe for two achievements: one, a stunning third win in the New York Marathon and two, insisting that the 2012 Olympic stadium retains an athletics legacy when the curtains come down on the quadrennial bonanza in just under four years time. Black marks to Jacques Rogge, IOC President for saying that a hand over to King Soccer would be acceptable, thus effectively pulling the rug from under Sen Coe's feet.

Just when it should be backing Radcliffe’s remarks UK Athletics remains stolidly silent on the matter. Not a public peep on the legacy has emerged from Solihull’s Athletics House; nor from England Athletics. Both bodies, but especially the former, would have a responsibility for organising a programme of meetings there in the aftermath of the Olympics and so an indication of their intentions would be useful. Indeed British Athletics intentions regarding the stadium will, very shortly, become an imperative.

The ageing Crystal Palace is no longer a suitable stadium for Big Time athletics, yet it is the only stadium in our capital city worthy of the name. It attracts sell-out crowds for the Grand Prix meetings staged there. Yet UK Athletics or Fast Track or whoever dictates policy on these matters insist on carting Grand Prix and international meetings around the country to make do and mend stadia in order, presumably to "take athletics to the people". For decades the only venue for major athletics meetings in Britain was the old White City and travelling there to compete was often a highlight in many athletes’ careers. It seems to have escaped the notice of those in charge that football takes its major internationals to Wembley; that England Rugby has its base at Twickenham and Tennis stages its major tournament annually at Wimbledon.

Does the Trappist silence on this matter augur badly for our sport? Does it mean that the coterie that runs British athletics have no faith in their ability to stage athletics that will attract the public? Do they mean to bend their knee to soccer and quietly give up? Has no one learnt the lesson of the 2002 Commonwealth Stadium? Are there no exciting plans for staging top class international athletics in Britain once the Olympics is over?

One way that both UK and England Athletics could support a post-Olympic athletics legacy for the stadium would be to announce that they are moving their administration there, lock, stock and barrel, immediately after the Games.

(Next time: a potted history of the woeful administration of athletics in Britain).

Listening to Wisdom

2008-10-14T04:44:00.000-07:00

When two of Britain’s former Directors of Coaching and highly respected international coaches are expressing the same opinion about the treatment of coaching by UK Athletics over the last decade its time that the federation started to listen.

Frank Dick and Malcolm Arnold are unanimous in their opinion that coach education has been severely neglected. “What was developed in the 1980s and early 1990s has been decimated,” Arnold recently wrote. “Syllabuses, where they exist (I think there is still no syllabus for Level 4 after 10 years) mimic second-rate coach education degree courses in third rate universities.”

And the results of one of the Moorcroft regime’s more toxic policies are there for all to see. Level 1 and 2 syllabuses have produced armies of bewildered souls unable to cope with the actual business of one to one coaching and thus stay in a safety zone of running crèches for youngsters who spend most of their time doing warm-up exercises. The drive has not been towards coaching competence but towards fulfilling Sport England’s KPI (Key Performance Indicators) targets.

This has resulted up here in Cumbria (and I’m sure elsewhere) of having 74% of qualified coaches at Level 1; another 17% at Level 2, making a total of 91% qualified at the lowest two levels. 8% are Level 3; 1% Level 4. And these are just qualified and absolutely not necessarily practising. Furthermore I have yet to meet anyone who feels that they have learnt anything worthwhile on either of the lower two courses.

It now seems to be realised that athletics coaching in Britain is in crisis. “It is a wonder,” Malcolm additionally wrote,” that we are doing as well as we are on the world stage.” The widely expected appointment of Charles Van Commenee as Head Coach has shown that coaching is back at the helm of performance. Van Commenee recognises where the problems lie: “What I can say is that there will be a much greater emphasis on coach development and coach education,” he recently said. “It has been undervalued and even ignored in recent years and it must be our emphasis.”

It is now six months since the services of Callum Orr were dispensed with and there is still no sign of the appointment of a Strategic Head of Coaching Development and so that area continues to remain in a vacuum. The problem of the new hierarchies at both UKA and England level is that we seem to be in a continuous state of flux of either waiting for someone to be appointed or for them to "settle in". As the weeks go by the greater the chances that many other coaches will give up in sheer frustration.

Going Round in Circles
UK No 1 Discus thrower Philippa Roles’ recent criticism of Lottery funding for athletes, whilst perfectly understandable, rather misses the point. It is because of Lottery funding that our women track athletes have done so well in relation to the men over the last couple of Olympics. Prior to its introduction women were very much the poor relation when it came to trying to earn a living from competing on the Grand Prix circuit, where the IAAF and EAA competitive network is heavily loaded in favour of men’s events. And as for women’s throwing events – forget it.

Where Roles is absolutely right and where she is echoing her predecessors from past decades is in her condemnation of the treatment of throwers, especially the heavy throwers. Three throwers represented Britain in Beijing, all women. Two of them, Roles and Hammer thrower Zoë Derham did not receive lottery support and Philippa spends her days driving trains around the south-east of England in order to support her athletics.

It is an excellent sign that Charles Van Commenee has appointed Bob Weir to take charge of the heavy throws up until 2012 (and hopefully beyond). Bob has been there, done most everything and sent innumerable postcards. He last represented Britain at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney; in his sojourn in the States he coached Olympic shot put champion Adam Nelson and has been head coach to an American World Junior championships team. But what Van Commenee and Weir need to emphasize strongly to those that govern these things, is that without financial support for our throwers, no matter what technical expertise is available, we will still be bereft of competitors, let alone finalists, in throwing events in 2012.

On his appointment Weir made a most significant comment. He pointed out that Stephanie Brown-Trafton, the American winner of the Discus title in Beijing, was of British parentage, which negates talk of Britain having a genetic fault line that does not produce big enough athletic specimens. Brown-Trafton is 6’ 4” and weighs 225lbs. She went to Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo and throughout the early years of this century competed in the highly competitive NACA meetings. In the USA she belongs to the Nike club, has an agent and only 2.07 metres separates her 2008 US best performance from the third ranked. As we keep repeating such competition lies at the root of USA success.

What would have been the prospects for Brown-Trafton if her parents had remained in Britain? If she had gone to a college or university there would have been the dreary annual BUSA championships usually held on a very unseasonable date in equally unseasonable weather at Bedford. There would then follow the usual parade of county, territorial and national championships with the extraordinary excitement of the UK Women’s League to look forward to; she’d have won all her competitions by a large margin. International competition? Roles this year went to a European Winter throws competition in Croatia in March, a meeting in Cyprus in April, a meeting in Germany in May, the European Cup in Annecy. Wow! Great preparation for meeting the world’s best in Beijing.

What would Brown-Trafton have done? Taken up Rugby.

The truth is that, so far, the small successes that our heavy throwers have attained down the decades have been despite of rather than because of the system.. Britain has won just one Olympic or World Championship medal in the heavy throws. That was achieved in 1924 by Hammer thrower Malcolm Nokes who won bronze. Nokes, incidentally, was one of the early pioneers of coaching in Britain in the 1930s. There has been only one finalist (Lorraine Shaw in the Hammer) in global championships since 1984. There have been only eleven finalists (six men and five women) since the Great War.

If Bob is to make an impact some significant spending needs to be done. Let’s begin by ensuring that Philippa Roles doesn’t have to rise at some unearthly hour of the day to transport commuters into London before she trains for her true love, the discus.

European Woes

2008-09-23T01:37:00.000-07:00

In Beijing, Europe’s male runners put in their worst global performance since the dawn of the modern Olympics. A silver medal in the steeplechase by a Frenchman of Algerian origin and a relay bronze by a Russian quartet in the 4 x 400 metres relay was all that the cream of European men had to offer in the face of the American, Jamaican and East African running juggernauts. It is clearly time for those running athletics across Europe (including the promoters) to collectively search their consciences to wonder if they have settled into a complacently comfortable and now damaging rut.

European pride was again saved by its jumpers and throwers and its women athletes, mostly from the Eastern European countries. It is ironic that the man in charge of a British team that obtained an equal number of medals (4) to Italy, Germany, France and Spain combined should have been unceremoniously shown the door on his return. But that’s another story.

It is in Western Europe where the malaise really lies. Of the 24 medals available in the men’s jumps and throws Europe won 18. But of those 18 medals Western Europe won only 4 (two by Britain, one each by Portugal and Norway). Western Europe contributed just 5 (21%) to the continent’s overall male collection of Olympic medals of 24. Europe’s women incidentally won 30 medals overall, the West’s contribution here totalled 8 (26.6%).

The worrying aspect, as former European Athletics Council member John Lister noted back in 2005, is that the five most important economic nations are the above mentioned Britain, Germany, Spain, Italy and France. Between them they provide the foundation for 80 per cent of the contract with the European Broadcasting Union, which feeds the sport its biggest income. “For television interest to be maintained,” John said then, “successful European athletes are essential…without them stability is at risk”.

As the above figures show it isn’t happening. Prior to the World Championships in Helsinki Europe’s medal haul had averaged for a number of years around the 50% mark. In Helsinki it reduced to 46%. In Beijing it dropped even more dramatically to 38%. Those five most important economic nations are struggling: in 1999 in Seville they won 21% of the medals, by Helsinki they had dropped to 12%, in Beijing they sank to 5.6%.

Former European Council member Luciano Barra produced figures in the IAAF New Studies in Athletics 2007 that showed an alarming decline in television viewing figures for the Big Five for the major championships staged in Europe this century. In 2002 they totalled 245.5 million; by 2006 they had dropped to 197.5 million, a decline of 43.5 million (18%). Worst hit was the BBC, showing a decline of 51.2%.

Conventional wisdoms as to the reasons for the athletic decline and fall of Europe abound. We are now a sedentary continent; more and more countries are winning medals; there’s no way our sprinters can beat the Jamaicans and Americans and the endurance running Africans are also unbeatable and so on. All reasons, you’ll notice, outside the control of those running athletics in Europe and the various countries of the continent. Everyone, it seems, is in denial about our deficiencies.

A sedentary continent? I think not. Sport across the whole of Europe is still a major leisure activity. Mass marathons and lesser known road races attract hundred of thousands of runners across the continent.

More countries winning medals? The numbers of countries winning medals rose quite suddenly from 36 at the World Championships in Stuttgart in 1993 to 43 at the next world championships in Göteburg in 2005. Since then it has plateaued between 40 and 46 countries. The reason for the sudden upsurge in medal-winning countries was nothing to do with the development of athletics and everything to do with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which produced 15 new states. Indeed it could be said that with the reunification of Germany and new states also emerging in the Balkans the percentage of countries winning medals has in fact fallen since 1993

It is true that European men’s standards have declined in both sprints and distance running events. The first European to run under 10 seconds was Linford Christie (9.97) twenty years ago; only two European men, Francis Obikwelu and Ronald Pognon have achieved that feat this century. It is 27 years since Seb Coe broke 1:42 for 800 metres; only two Europeans, Yuriy Borzakovskiy and Andre Bucher, have broken 1:43this century. It is 26 years since David Moorcroft set his European 5000m record (13:00.41). Only three Europeans have broken 13 minutes since that time, the last 8 years ago. Two of them were born in Morocco.

So what is the underlying reason behind Europe’s dismal track showing in Olympic and World Championship stadia? Is it that athletes are not as talented as their forebears? There is no reason to suppose that the flow of track talent across a whole continent, as opposed to field, is drying up. Is it that standards of coaching have dropped dramatically? The same applies. To me the problem lies squarely with the competitive network established across Europe by the IAAF and the European AA which is not serving the continent’s athletes well. The 50 or so IAAF and EAA meetings staged this year and in previous years are an uncoordinated mish-mash that often has more commercial interests than athletic ones. Our best track athletes are not obtaining the frequent and right level of competition that they require.

I and others said all this early in 2005 at an IAAF Competition Workshop held in Monaco. I had been invited by the late István Gyulai to make a presentation because I had written that I had chosen to watch the final day of golf’s Ryder Cup rather than the IAAF World Athletics final and that when I had watched the latter the next day I knew I had made the right choice. The one was exciting and competitive, the other turgid and boring. Dave Gordon of the BBC gave a similar message. Heads nodded sagely but it has been ignored as a survey of this year’s Golden League meetings shows.

Only 29% of male track athletes at this year’s six Golden League meetings came from Europe, which staged them. Of the 44 men’s track events across the six meetings European athletes won only 3. Only 6 other athletes figured in the first three. The litany goes on. Running against opposition that is in a higher, different class is not good for the soul. Many of those competing must have been demoralised by their experience and knew that it did not augur well for their chances in Beijing’s Birds Nest Stadium. Many, I am sure, were mentally defeated before they even arrived in the Chinese capital. What we have here is a crisis of confidence for both athletes and administrators.

It may be said that the purpose of this collection of Golden League, Super Grand Prix, Grand Prix and European Permit meetings (whose pecking order the public does not understand let alone care about) is not to develop athletics or athletes but to provide a shop window for the sport and its sponsors (and provide paydays for the competitors). In Britain anyway it has failed in this also for the big European meetings, once regulars of terrestrial television, now languish on pay-to-view.

The European AA cannot change individual coaching or what happens in individual countries but it can make radical changes to competition across the continent. It should look across the Atlantic and study the competition structures, fiercely competitive in nature, which breeds and hardens its athletes and turns them into international champions year after year. Is there something we can learn? Surely it is not beyond the wit of man to create similar competitions that frequently pitch Europe’s best against each other? .

The EAA is aware of the bleak state of the sport but seems rather intent to turning athletics and in particular the European Cup into a version of Jeux Sans Frontiers (It’s a Knock Out) as well as staging a European Championships every two years, which dubiously means just months prior to the London Olympics in 2012. At IAAF level there seems to be an awful complacency, based not on athletes and athletics but on commercial viability. As long as the sponsors and television are there and the money is rolling in, everything must be rosy. But if Europe dies, athletics dies.

The world’s best athletes took their weary limbs to Stuttgart for a lucrative World Athletics final. The standards were far from great. It was more like a beauty contest. There was no redemption for Europe’s runners. The best they could muster were second places in the 200 metres and 110 metres Hurdles respectively. No big paydays this year then.

It was the last athletics to be staged at the newly named Mercedes-Benz Arena which is now to be re-developed into a football-only stadium. For those who believe in omens it could be appropriate.

Beijing: Where the Buck stops

2008-08-28T07:53:00.000-07:00

Midst the euphoria following the excellent overall performance of the Great Britain team at the Beijing Olympics, we have to consider why it is that British athletics performed so very moderately, especially considering that it had received more lottery funding than any other sport in the preceding four years (£26.5 million). Athletics failed to attain its modest target of five medals

That the team did perform very unexceptionally (to say the least) is clearly shown by the statistics. Britain finished eighth equal (with Australia) in the athletics medal table and sixth in the final placings table, its worst Olympic position since 1976; athletics was the fifth best British sport in terms of medals.

The facts make grim reading:

Britain gained only 16 finalists from 47 events, just over 34%.

Only 2 individual male track runners reached their finals

It did not enter athletes in 12 events

There were no male throwers in Beijing

In the men’s middle- and long-distance events Britain failed to produce a finalist (top eight)

Only 4 out of 26 (15.4%) individual male competitors set personal bests. In
contrast 9 women out of 30 (30%) did likewise including 2 national records.

Although half a million pounds was expended on the relay teams only two reached the final (botched sprint take-overs in the others). Neither of these reached the podium.

One of the four medallists (Germaine Mason) did not receive lottery funding and lives most of the time in Jamaica; another (Tasha Danvers) spends a considerable time in the USA (though she wisely flew back to Britain for funded medical treatment to an injury).

In the ten years immediately prior to lottery funding (1987-97) British athletics averaged 17.4 finalists in global championships; in the ten years following the introduction of lottery funding (1999-2008) it averaged 13.2.

Under the present Performance management covering 2005-08 in three global meetings Britain produced 35 finalists, an average of 11.6.

In terms of medals in the same period Britain won just 11 medals in three championships.

That’s the statistics. What’s the story?

The overall poor performance of the British Olympic team in Atlanta in 1996 prompted the introduction of lottery funding, although athletics actually didn’t do too badly that year with six medals and thirteen finalists. Beijing has highlighted the stark contrast between those sports federations who have successfully used lottery funding to boost their medal tally and UK Athletics (UKA), which hasn’t. Although it has received probably around £50 million in lottery funding over the past decade or so our athletes have shown little or no improvement over that period.

The question is whether UK Sport’s requirements for lottery funding are suitable for such a diverse sport as athletics, or whether UK Athletics has had the competence to apply the funding wisely. Put more succinctly, are those who run UK Athletics, especially its performance sector, up to the job? The signs I have to say, with just four years to go to 2012, are not propitious.

Since the formation of UK Athletics, after the insolvency of the previous federation (BAF), coaching has degenerated significantly. As is now well known, the separation of Coaching from Performance in David Moorcroft’s tenure as CEO was a monumental disaster that led to years of neglect for this most vital aspect of our sport. Coaching became Coach Education and the development of existing coaches stagnated, causing considerable disillusionment.

There is a close correlation between our throws performances (only two places filled out of a possible twenty-four in Beijing) and the historical lack of good quality throws coaches (and indeed lack of throws coaches per se). Middle and long distance running presents a different but equally troubling story, especially on the men’s side. Only six of the eighteen places available to men were filled and none got a top eight position – indeed only Baddeley reached the final. The women filled fourteen of the eighteen places available but only two reached the top eight. There was a sad all-round lack of tactical awareness from both sets of runners. You have to go back twenty years to discover a male British middle-distance medal. Maybe our endurance running coaching ain’t what it used to be.

On the BBC Brendan Foster angrily lamented our running decline. “The whole basis of British athletics used to be middle and long distance running,” he said, “and the people who run the sport have allowed it to evaporate completely. They’ve lost control of it, let it go. We know who is responsible.”

With only four men setting or equalling personal bests in Beijing you also have to question the physical and, more importantly, mental preparation for what was the most significant event of the team members’ lives. Quite a number of British athletes peaked at the Trials in Birmingham only to be a pale shadow of their former selves in the Bird’s Nest stadium. The cyclist and rowers collectively looked as if they expected to win medals; our athletes, with obvious exceptions, looked as if getting to Beijing was enough. This, considering that there is a sports psychologist in charge of Performance, is surprising.

Moorcroft’s farewell poisoned chalice to the sport was his failure to appoint a coach as Director of Performance. The now almost forgotten Foster Review recommended scouring the world for the best available candidate. Top coaches like Keith Connor flew in from Australia to undergo psychometric testing only to fall by the wayside; Charles van Commenee from Holland was actually in-situ at UK Athletics but rejected. In the end they found their man in Edinburgh, sports psychologist Dave Collins. In a recent interview he angrily noted that people weren’t exactly queuing up for the job.

It was Collins who actually took hold of the chalice, for he inherited a failing structure. In Athens, Britain was lucky. Three golds were won thanks to Kelly Holmes (who had trained and was coached overseas) and the sprint relay team. Too much euphoria and UKA failed to see the warning signs – terrible performances at the two previous world championships and 33% fewer finalists than in Sydney.

But Collins hasn’t understood coaching and some believe that he hasn’t understood athletes either (remember his publicly scoring athletes out of ten for their efforts in Gothenburg in 2006?). More recently, the insistence that Kate Read, the 10,000 metre runner, run a fitness trial the night before her Beijing race has astounded many knowledgeable coaches. What would Paula Radcliffe’s reaction have been to a similar edict? What was the advice of Collins’ endurance coach?

Like his predecessor, Max Jones, Collins has always insisted that his brief has been top performance and that the development of the sport is not his concern. Like Jones (who should have known better) he has not appreciated that poor standards throughout the sport have a direct affect on the number of athletes in his Podium group.

It’s no good citing bad luck. Good luck and bad plays a part in life and in sport. Bad luck is so often matched by someone else’s good - Kelly Sotherton was below par; Sanya Richards did not run her usual race, and so on.

Beijing has been yet another wake-up call for UK Athletics. For years it has cancelled the alarm and gone back to a complacent sleep. Now is the time, regretfully, for a clean up of the Augean Stables as far as the Performance sector is concerned. It is time for accountability to kick in for the professional staff.

To recover from years of mediocre performance in the span of one Olympiad is a Herculean task and one does not envy whosoever takes it on. The performances of our athletes at this year’s World Junior Championships (with the exception of Stephanie Twell) are discouraging but this year’s Olympics has shown that there is talent out there in every sport and you can be sure that athletics is not an exception. The questions are: do we have the right coaches and are we able to support them with the right structures?

Steve Cram, BBC athletics commentator and Chairman of the English Institute of Sport, was critical of Collins’ reaction to our performances in Beijing. He hoped that UK Athletics would be “honest about things.” We all say Amen to that.

(Next time: Europeans Woes)

Engineering Greatness: Peter Coe

2008-08-11T05:46:00.000-07:00

In 1980 I was queuing at Gatwick Airport to book in for the Aeroflot flight to Moscow for the Olympics. Behind me I suddenly heard a voice that I thought I knew. I turned round and instantly recognised Peter Coe, who was flying out to coach and support his son Seb in his memorable races, the 800 and 1500 metres, at the Games. We knew each other by reputation (his far greater than mine as we shall see) and so teamed up for the flight to the Soviet capital.

Peter and Seb formed one of the great all-time coach-athlete partnerships and in Moscow they would face another team, Harry Wilson and Steve Ovett. The recent death of Peter, aged 88, begins to close a chapter on a great era when British coaching, especially endurance coaching, was the envy of the world.

We sat and talked athletics and coaching on the long flight sipping glass after glass of orange juice which appeared to be the only beverage available. Peter, naturally, was on a confident high and entertained me well into Russian air space. The plane came into land and we got ready to disembark at what turned out to be, not Moscow, but Leningrad (now St Petersburg) airport. No one satisfactorily explained this sudden switch of destination. We disembarked and went through the rigmarole of immigration and customs, communist style, had further (non alcoholic) drinks and got ready to embark again.

I had noticed a flurry of interest when Peter presented his passport (by this time Seb had broken four world records, one at 1000 metres as recently as July) and when it came to re-boarding the flight the rest of us (including the venerable Baron Noel Baker, iconic Olympian, one-time government minister and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize) were held back so that Peter could majestically (and embarrassedly) board the plane on his own.

When we landed at Moscow the media circus surrounding the clash of these two titans of the middle-distance running world was building to a frenzied climax. Independent Television (ITV) was covering top international athletics in those days and they tried to bring Gay Ovett, Steve’s mother (also on that extraordinary flight from Gatwick) and Peter together in what seemed to be a vain attempt to re-enact the family feuding of TV series The Beverley Hillbillies.

We were transported to one of those colossal, 1000 bedroom hotels, so beloved by the Soviet Union, where the most successful workers on the latest 5 Year Plan were rewarded by a stay in the capital. Peter and I elected to share. We also decided to get some fresh air with a brief walk. We handed in our two sets of keys. On our return we asked for our keys and three sets were handed to us. No, no we said, only two sets. Consternation and widespread whispered discussion took place with a growing group of individuals, including a porter, obviously a war hero, with a wooden leg. “Would you mind,” said the concierge sweetly, “if we went to your room?” Peter and I agreeably concurred. The whole party, including the war hero with one leg, crammed into a lift which took us to our lofty perch, where we were joined by a formidable crone in charge of the floor. We flung open the door and Peter triumphantly demonstrated that there were just two beds. Further urgent, whispered consultation was followed by the concierge again sweetly asking: “Would you mind if you changed rooms?” Flexibility was never a Soviet bureaucratic strong point.

I decided to try and bring Peter down from his high. Frequently on the phone he would refer to himself as “Seb Coe’s coach.”
“What do you mean,” I challenged him, “Seb Coe’s coach? You’re his father for God’s sake.”

Peter contemplated this remark. “Well,” he finally said grinning broadly, “it took me much longer to make the athlete than the son.”

He left for a more central hotel a couple of days later. The days that followed were dramatic and, for both Peter and Seb, traumatic. As world record holder, Seb was confidently expected to cruise the 800 metres but the man who actually did that was Ovett, with Coe coming second. But Seb struck back to win gold in the 1500 metres, after, it was rumoured, team management’s attempts to keep Seb and Peter apart after Peter’s forthright statements about the 800m tactics employed by his son. With Ovett finishing third in the 1500m, honours between the two great runners had ended up even.

*

When Peter realised that his young son could be a world beater he set about the task of becoming a coach with the precision of an engineer which was his profession. He read and consulted widely and surrounded himself with those whose knowledge he respected. He and Seb used the British Milers Club for both coaching knowledge and, early on, fast races. As Seb became a world class athlete so Peter’s reputation as a coach grew.

He always emphasized that the training methods that he advocated were only “what seems to be correct for Sebastian Coe.”

In January, 1983 I was at the 12th Congress of the European Athletics Coaches Association held at Aldeia Das Açotteias in Portugal. The main speakers were John Anderson (coach to world 5000m record holder David Moorcroft), Harry Wilson (Steve Ovett) and Peter. He said this:

“Coaching is an art. Although it is science based it is still an art. Whereas in science one can fall back on formulae and repeatable experiments, art relies on sensitivity of feelings. The athlete is a unique individual and cannot be seen in the same way as a piece of matter where the predictability of the whole embraces the behaviour of the individual molecule.”

Peter also said this: “…the programme must be tailored to the individual; what improves one athlete can destroy another. It is self evident that in modern middle distance running speed is essential for an athlete, but there is more than one kind of speed. There are not any “secrets” in athletic training: as in any activity the most important thing is to identify the goal. If a coach is looking for speed, he must define what kind of speed is required.”

Almost twenty years later, Abdelkader Kada, the coach to the great Hicham El Guerrouj, was invited to explain the ‘secrets’ of El Guerrouj’s success at a British Milers Club gathering. He chuckled. “It is ironic that the British invite me here,” he told the assembled coaches, “because I learned my training techniques from the great British coaches and runners of the Eighties.”

Seb took 800 metre running in particular into a new era. His 1:41.73 lasted as a world record for 16 years and was testimony to Peter’s emphasis on speed, the particular speed-endurance of a 400 metre runner. Seb, remember, represented UK in 4 x 400 metre relays. After 27 years he remains second on the world all-time list, behind Wilson Kipketer. Only Steve Cram and Peter Elliott really followed him into the new era and are the only other Brits in the world all-time top fifty. The emphasis on speed seems to have gone. Currently British two-lap runners are running four seconds or so slower than Seb at his peak.

Some felt that Peter was a maverick but this was incorrect. He was an individualist, unique in British coaching, a man who did not suffer fools gladly, which often put him at odds with the athletics establishment of the time. In fact all three of the men who spoke that early spring afternoon in Portugal were individualists, men whose ideas were carved from reading, learning and their experience with runners.

He has lived to see his son achieve further greatness in his winning of the 2012 Olympic Games for London. He must have passed away an extremely proud man.

In a Sea of Confuaion

2008-08-06T03:43:00.000-07:00

One telling phrase sums up the attitude of those, at the very highest levels of international sport, who are trying to circumvent the law and even their own rules as far as doping is concerned. It came from the one-time Queen of Anti-Doping, Michelle Verroken, who speaking of the IOC trying not to award Ekaterina Thanou the gold medal forfeited by Marion Jones in the 100m at the Sydney Olympics, said: “I have huge sympathy for the fact that they want to do it, but this is when the legal side gets in the way (my italics).”

“…the legal side gets in the way”. Verroken, some will remember, was suddenly removed from her position as UK head of anti-doping for reasons that have never been revealed. It is a remark that has been echoed down the ages by those who have been prevented by legal safeguards from punishing those they believe are guilty of an offence.

This has been an extraordinary year for such activity by sporting authorities. It began when a very naïve new CEO of UK Athletics tried to ban Dwain Chambers from competing in the UK Indoor Trials notwithstanding that Chambers had duly served his 2 year sentence for a doping offence. It was followed by a cabal of European promoters uniting to ban Chambers from their events thus flouting restraint of trade law. Chambers, meanwhile, following the headless chicken route went to Castleford Rugby League club, who obviously know a good publicity stunt when they see one, for a trial period that duly ended in rejection. Far too late in the day he then proceeded to challenge the British Olympic Association (BOA) lifetime Olympic ban. The injunction failed not on the grounds that the by-law was legally sound but that the challenge was made far too late. So Britain's fastest man is blackballed even though he has long since served his time for a drug offence and can run under IOC and IAAF laws.

And now Thanou is back. She was involved, with her training partner Konstadinos Kederis, in a curious incident of a motor cycle crash in the night time on the eve of the Athens Olympics which precluded their participation in drugs tests; the “accident” is an issue still unresolved in the Greek courts. Meanwhile she served a two year ban for failing to take a drug test.

Thanou, unsurprisingly a pale shadow of her former self, is in the Greek team that has arrived in China much to the annoyance of the IOC President, Jacques Rogge. She is causing, as they see it, the International Olympic Committee considerable embarrassment. With Marion Jones stripped of her 2000 100 metre gold medal the next in line is due to receive it with either due ceremony or in the post. That person is Thanou. But apparently against legal advice Rogge is searching for loopholes to prevent such an occurrence. What he is in fact doing is retrospectively trying to stop Thanou receiving her due from 2000 by citing what she did in 2004. Additionally, according to press reports he is trying to prevent her from competing in Beijing by resurrecting an enquiry into the Athens incident.

Lord Coe has suggested that no medal is awarded from Sydney, which, if seen as a precedent, would eventually lead to many blank pages in the record books. Seb, although a member of the IAAF Council, seems to have forgotten that that body has already awarded Thanou the 100m silver medal because of Jones’ World Championships disqualification in Edmonton.

What a mess, what a sea of confusion. The problem lies, as I have said before, in the fact that so many of those who govern sport get themselves into an emotional lather over doping. Not only that but they seem to be proud of the fact. It is the belief of vigilantes the world over that the law “gets in the way” of due retribution. Aided by some propagandists in the media sport has convinced gullible politicians into funding millions of pounds into fighting a so called massive menace that may be illusory.

But now some of the most vigorous anti-doping campaigners are beginning to realise that the more vociferous crusaders are going too far. The former head of the World Anti Doping Agency, Dick Pound, and the great 400 metre hurdler Ed Moses have both condemned the BOA by-law that imposes a lifetime Olympic ban on a drug offender. Polls show that the general public feel that Chambers had been punished and should have been allowed to compete. With the IOC introducing a change in their doping law that prevents offenders from competing at the next Olympics it would make the BOA appear more vindictive than it does now for them to persist with it.

So what’s the message? A simple one. Cool down, get your acts together, take the legal advice offered and stand by your own rules and regulations.

The Future of Coaching (2)

2008-07-24T03:15:00.000-07:00

What, in the eyes of the rest of athletics, is the worthiness of a coach? Not much it seems if a couple of recent events are anything to go by. Olympic 400m champion Jeremy Wariner and coach Clyde Hart (to speak by the way at the forthcoming European Coaches Conference in Glasgow) split at the beginning of the year in dispute over Warriner’s proposed 50% cut in Hart’s pay. The athlete’s agent’s fees were to remain untouched. And the IAAF has given scant and so far negative attention to a proposal to set up a Year of the Coach.

Half a century ago Harold Abrahams, a doyen of the IAAF and British athletics establishment, caustically referred to coaching as “bloody kidology.” He had no respect for the English professional team of national coaches for the simple reason that they were paid. It seemed to have slipped his memory that his 1924 Olympic sprint gold was the result of the work of a great professional coach, Sam Mussabini. The prodigious culture clash between Abrahams and Geoffrey Dyson, the first Director of Coaching, titans of amateurism and professionalism respectively in athletics, inevitably led to the latter leaving this country, a disillusioned and embittered man. He went to Canada and successfully replicated the coaching scheme that he had set up in Britain. There he received the respect, for his dynamism and professionalism, which was his due.

In America coaching has always been professional; it’s part of their sporting culture. In Britain the exact opposite pertains for the same reason. To accept money for coaching in athletics is still considered, somehow, infra dig, beyond the pale. Paula Radcliffe’s former coaches, Alex and Rosemary Stanton were genuinely horrified at the idea of receiving remuneration for their services and there are many of the same opinion. At club level paid coaching is unknown.

If athletics’ coaching is to move forward it needs to shed itself of this albatross around its neck. As we said in the previous Blog the lead in the sanctioning of payments to coaches and their subsequent professionalisation must come from governing bodies.

When the Minister for Sport says that behind every great athlete is a great coach he flies in the face of sport council strategy that tends to negate the influence of the individual coach in favour of squad systems with strict central control.

One of the great success stories of the old coaching scheme were the instructional booklets produced by the national coaches. These were excellent and had a worldwide reputation; they were a must for every coach’s bookshelf. No more. The coming of UK Athletics saw them banished to the outer reaches of Amazon’s used book lists, never to be replaced.

A discus thrower arrives at your club but there is no discus coach and you scroll the web looking for help. Nothing official is available. You wonder if CDs or DVDs are obtainable, either nationally or internationally and you wonder in vain. Where can we learn about the latest research in the events that we coach? Apart from the IAAF’s excellent but highly advanced New Studies in Athletics there is, in Britain anyway, nothing.

Unless this highly neglected area is addressed coaching will continue to stagnate or regress.

The imbalance between track and field successes in British athletics is reflected in coaching. There is a real lack of quality coaches in most of our jumping and throwing events and the sad news is that the governing body has never been pro-active in this area. We seem to believe that poor results are the consequence of acts of God. I’m sure this applies globally. Does the genetic make up of East Africans really preclude them from events other than distance running?

In Britain the recent history of women’s high jumping is a classic example of an event in apparent permanent decline as far as international participation is concerned.

Britain has been represented only once at global championship level this century (Susan Moncrieff in 2001). No women high jumper will compete in Beijing
Since 1990 no British woman has jumped higher than 1.91m in a major competition (Debbi Marti in 1992). .
Britain last had a competitor in the top eight in any global or European competition twenty years ago (Diana Davies in the Seoul Olympics).
This century in the nine junior (global and European) championships held, Britain has had only two finalists, Aileen Wilson (2001) and Vikki Hubbard (2007). Wilson cleared 1.87m but her performances have steadily declined since.

What has caused such deterioration in an event? Is it that raw material is not available? Possibly, there were only two competitors in the Under 19 high jump at the recent English Schools. Is it through a lack of quality coaches? Is it that our coaches lack the technical knowledge to take jumpers above a certain level? Or is it because our women high jumpers are not “podium material” so the event is neglected in the scramble of the gold rush? These are questions that UK Athletics should have been asking itself years ago.

And women’s high jumping is just an example; in the men’s shot, discus and hammer Britain has had just one finalist at global level in the last twenty years (Bob Weir; World discus; 1997). In the women’s throws you have to return to the mid-eighties to find finalists. The above questions surely also appertain here.

A review of coaching is apparently underway. How extensive the consultation process will be remains to be seen. It was a lack of consultation with experienced coaches ten years ago that led UK Athletics down its disastrous coaching pathway.
As long as those conducting the review and those who will sit in judgement on it know what they don’t know there may still be hope.

The Future of Coaching (1)

2008-07-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

The announcement that a UK centre of excellence for coaching is to be set up at Leeds Met Carnegie is welcome. As usual with such launch announcements we are short of receiving the detail: we know the where, now we need to know the how, when and who. It is generally recognised that the quality of coaching in Britain falls far short of world standards across a whole range of sports (although many British coaches stubbornly refuse to recognise the fact). It is to be hoped that staff recruitment at the proposed centre will take in the whole world.

One statement by the Minster for Sport, Gerry Sutcliffe, intrigued me. “Behind every great athlete is a great coach,” he said “and we want to ensure that we have the best sports coaches and coaching system in the world both at the elite end and grass roots.” Does he know what’s been going on in British athletics, under Sport England’s last regimen, for a decade or so, where many believe that the emphasis has been on systems, squads and academies and not on supporting the individual coach?

For fifty years Britain’s athletics’ coaching scheme was the envy of the world, its pattern being copied by many countries. It was a simple one: regional professional coaches, under a Director of Coaching, entrusted with a bread and butter task of ‘teaching the teachers and coaching the coaches’. Men such as Geoff Dyson, Jim Alford, John Le Masurier, Denis Watts, Ron Pickering, Wilf Paish, Tom McNab, Frank Dick and John Anderson et al, became highly respected figures, both nationally and internationally. And, although it was not part of their remit they produced some of our really outstanding athletes, whose performances have stood the rigorous test of time.

Sutcliffe highlighted the vital importance of coach-athlete partnerships and again we can reel off a roll of honour that is well known to those with a sense of history of British athletics: Coe and Coe; Ovett and Wilson; Christie and Roddan; Jackson and Arnold; Sanderson and Paish; Backley and Trower; Davies and Pickering; Rand and Le Masurier, Moorcroft and Anderson – the list goes back into the mists of time and on and on. Across the world the kernel of individual athletics success has always been the individual coach.

The advent of UK Athletics in 1998 changed all that and looking back over the ten years it is difficult to know why such a dramatic and disastrous change was made. Yes, the scheme needed tweaking but it didn’t need destroying. Separating Performance and Coaching was, as the past decade has shown, a cataclysmic act. Coach Development became Coach Education and the results of the latter can be sadly seen through the technical incompetence of young athletes at any meeting, right up to regional standard.

Meanwhile many millions have been spent on our elite athletes in an almost avaricious quest for gold. This has involved the setting up of squad systems and control from the centre which has sometimes meant the moving of an athlete away from a successful partnership. It hasn’t worked. In the ten years prior to 1997 GB won 42 medals at global championships; in the ten years since it has won 25. The final blow to coaching and a reflection of its worth by David Moorcroft and his cohorts, before they fled the ruin they had created, was the failure to appoint a coach as director of performance.

It will be interesting to see how many other countries have abandoned having an experienced coach at the helm of their Olympic team in Beijing. I think very few. Being selected as head coach and indeed to be part of an Olympic coaching team gave international recognition to the very best. No longer. It doesn’t matter if you’re a world class exponent of your particular coaching art; if you’re not employed by UK Athletics you’ll not get any such recognition.

Disillusioned coaches have either retired or retreated into their coaching cocoons. One of the key foundations of athletics success has been allowed to wither on the vine. And now we’re back to the hoary old question I first asked five or six years ago: who’s in charge of coaching?

At the moment, after UKA’s night of the long knives, no one is but a review is apparently taking place. Whether a widespread survey of coaches’ views is contemplated is not known (as far as I know rank and file coaches were not consulted in 1998) but if they are not it seems to me that we’re in danger of repeating recent history.

First of all questions need to be asked. The government promised a few years ago to pump millions into the professionalisation of coaching. As far as athletics is concerned not much seems to have arrived in its coffers since that announcement was made. Or if some money has arrived what has it been spent on? Why has no pathway for a career in athletics coaching ever been developed? And if it has why does no one know about it?

What must happen in Britain is urgent planning for the professionalisation of athletics coaching. For too long we have relied on outmoded, time-consuming voluntary effort in this most important field. Parents of talented young athletes are amazed that they have to pay for ballet, violin, swimming, tennis et al tuition for their other offspring but that athletics coaching is free at the point of delivery. Not one of the many federations that have governed British athletics over the decades has ever suggested that paying for coaching is acceptable, let alone desirable. What is urgently required is a working group of coaches (probably Level 3 and above) to come up with a universally acceptable scheme for coaches to be recompensed for their work which, of course, must be regularly evaluated.

It has been suggested that any development of coaching must come through the clubs. This is arrant nonsense. Our clubs have, for too long, been the holy, untouchable cows of our sport. As a result of strident, sometimes abusive, voices raised in protest at any sign of evolutionary grassroots change none has taken place. There are a number of reasons why developing coaching, even through the 15% or so of our clubs that are viable entities, would not work.

Firstly, the priority of club administrators is the club; the priority of most coaches is the athletes. This leads to an acrimonious clash of interest when these priorities differ. Secondly, the development of coaching through clubs assumes that a full complement of events is being covered when we all know that in the majority of cases field events in particular, are neglected. A survey of clubs undertaken in the 90s indicated that in hurdles, jumps and throws almost 80% of clubs believed that they did not have enough coaches. The decline of the past decade can lead us to reasonably suppose that the situation has worsened rather than improved. There maybe a few concerning clubs at this state of affairs but I know of no initiative by any club to take positive steps to correct it, nor indeed of promoting coaching in any way.

Coaches should be linked to tracks and training venues rather than to clubs. In order to maximise our fast diminishing coaching resources each track should have a dedicated coaching team, ideally funded by the local authority. Where there are deficiencies coaches should be encouraged (probably through financial incentives) to expand their repertoire of events. The drive for new coaches should be via parents, employing good marketing techniques.

Recovery would certainly be aided by the appointment of nine regional coaches in England, similar in nature to the former National Coaches, men and women who would become the focal point of coaching in the area, who would know the region and know where particular problems lay.

What we urgently need is an audit of practising coaches. Then personal contact beginning with Levels 4 and 3, can be achieved via e-mail.. After ten years of neglect it is important that the governing body begins moves to make coaches feel an integral and important part of the sport. Dyson did this many years ago with a Coaching Newsletter sent free to every qualified coach. Today’s modern and swift means of communication would enable a two way dialogue between individual coaches and whoever will be running coaching, especially in a region.

This is not rocket science and there are obviously many other ideas out there to help coaching back to where it was, at the forefront of British athletics.

The former US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld once famously said:

“…as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know.”

The trick is in ensuring that the way forward in coaching is not directed by those who don’t know what they don’t know. Unfortunately, with the sport’s propensity for operating behind closed doors, that probably includes most of us.

(We’ll continue to look at coaching, including international development, is next week’s Blog)

Who is the fastest man?

Tyson Gay’s winning time for 100 metres of 9.68 (aided by a 4.1 mps wind) at the US Olympic Trials in Eugene has prompted reader Brian Burdick from Pennsylvania to re-open that hoary old debate around since the professional sprinters of the 19th century strutted their stuff: who is the world’s fastest man? “Officials are now claiming that Tyson Gay has now been labelled as the fastest human ever,” Brian writes, “regardless of wind-aided-ness. Who would be faster, Tyson Gay with 100 meters or Bob Hayes and his 110 yards? And furthermore with Bob Hayes would the acceleration / transition zone be figured in or not?”

What Brian is referring to is Hayes’ run on the last leg of the sprint relay at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 that has long been considered the fastest timed run by a human being. Taking the baton in fifth place Hayes was 3 metres behind the French anchor man, Jocelyn Delecour. He finished 3 metres ahead. He was unofficially clocked at times varying between 8.5 and 8.9 seconds as he stormed past four teams to win gold for the USA. Neil Allen, the Times athletics correspondent at the time wrote that he’d never seen any sprinting that impressed him as much as Hayes’ final leg. “The man just exploded,” Neil wrote, “he was absolutely fantastic, just like a clenched fist travelling along the track…it was the greatest explosion of speed I had ever seen.”

I think we can assume that the timings would have been carried out by athletics statisticians and that they would have carefully timed Hayes from the 100 metre mark in the final take-over zone. Whether the wind-speed on the final leg of the relay in Tokyo matched that of the 100 metre final in Eugene we shall never know but it is anyway an incidental point.

It should also be remembered that Hayes’ run took place on cinders whereas Gay ran on an advantageous synthetic surface in Oregon (synthetic tracks arrived circa 1966). However Hayes would have arrived at the commencement of his 100 metres at speed, whereas Gay would have started normally.

If my maths is correct (doubtful) Gay ran an average of 37.18 kph (23.10 mph) whilst Hayes ran, taking the slowest of the times taken 40.44 kph (25.12mph). Contest over then?

Cool It

2008-06-02T09:26:00.002-07:00

It is unfortunate for the new 100 metre record holder Usain Bolt and track and field generally that the latter has contrived to get itself into such a mess over doping that the general public, having been regularly and monotonously assured that there is a huge menace out there, will not believe that his performance was “clean.”

The conviction of coach Trevor Graham in a San Francisco courtroom last week and a possible re-trial on other charges has added to the list of those, including Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery, who have been found guilty not by the multi-million dollar testing systems but by lying to US federal agents investigating the BALCO drugs affair.

It is the height of irony that it was Graham who allegedly sent a syringe containing a hitherto unknown designer drug Tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) to US testing agencies thus exposing the sordid activities of Victor Conte and his unseemly crew at the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative. Among those involved was the former Ukrainian sprint coach, 76 year old Remi Korchemny to whom British sprinter Dwain Chambers was successfully urged to submit his undoubted talent.

At a conservative estimate one hundred million dollars is spent annually on drug testing in sport, including 20 million on the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) based in prestigious offices in Montreal. WADA is mainly funded by governments world wide and when cases like BALCO arise surely questions should be asked about the efficacy of the much vaunted testing programmes.

One of the major problems facing sport is that those involved with its governance are, when it comes to dealing with performing enhancing drugs, like the cowhand in a western saloon finding himself cheated at cards. The reaction, in both cases, is dramatically over emotional.

A classic case of this over-emotional response came in Britain earlier this year when Dwain Chambers decided to return to athletics after trying out at other sports. The relatively new CEO of the British federation, Neils de Vos, tried, despite the fact that Chambers had duly served a two year ban, to prevent him from competing in the UK World Indoor Trials thus contravening the existing IAAF and WADA laws. Promoters around Europe joined the bandwagon, jointly affirming that they would not invite “drug cheats” to their meetings. It is as if they had never heard of restraint of trade laws. Mr de Vos, who made many pronouncements, was made to look very silly indeed; Chambers ran and won, had to be selected for the World Indoor Championships and in Valencia duly won a silver medal.

It is emotional frustration surely that leads individuals and federations to flaunt their own rules when they feel they are inadequate. The British Olympic Association (BOA) has a sanctimonious by-law that bans anyone who has committed a drug offence from ever being selected for an Olympic Games. It not only flouts universal WADA laws but natural justice as well for it means sportsmen and women being tried twice for the same offence. It is the only such by-law in the world of sport (even condemned by the former head of WADA, Dick Pound, who found it unjust).

Then there are the cases when the testing systems have failed, most notably those of Diane Modahl, a case that not only made her bankrupt but was a major contributory factor in the British federation suffering a similar fate and that of Bernard Legat one of the world’s leading middle-distance runners plus many others in a number of sports.

There are also the Greek sprinters, Konstadinos Kederis and Ekaterini Thánou who became almost legendary in athletics through their evasions of random tests. Justice was finally achieved not by testing procedures finding them drug positive but by a test evasion too far in Athens on the eve of the 2004 Olympic Games.

Sport has also felt justified in bending its testing procedures in order to make sure that those it feels must be guilty do not escape sanction. In 1998 British shot putter Paul Edwards was found guilty of failing a test for a second time and was duly banned for life. His out of competition test was deeply flawed by shoddy procedures from the moment it was taken. Ten years on the case rumbles on with Edwards and his team constantly frustrated by prevarication and obfuscation by a government quango, UK Sport and its laboratory, including the flouting of Data Protection Laws. Again it is a feeling prevalent in sport that as far as drug testing goes the end justifies the means.

Sport has long felt that it so special, so precious that it should be considered above the law. It uses emotional language like “the war on drugs” in order to persuade politicians (to cough up more funding) and the public at large that it is involved in a massive fight against widespread drug abuse, when in fact its test figures show otherwise. Certainly in terms of test results the setting up of WADA in 1999 has not been justified; the results have stubbornly remained at around one percent positive.

Independent minds and cool judgments are needed in order to further promulgate dealing with doping in sport. Hair shirt type pronouncements must be abandoned; lessons must be learnt from the wider, social crusade against drug misuse; world wide rules and sanctions must be agreed and obeyed by all; there must be greater prominence given to campaigning and education; finally more emphasis must be placed on unearthing those who are encouraging drug taking and on those who supply them.

In Praise of…The BMC

A quarter of a century ago, when British miling was at a low ebb British coach Frank Horwill, a flamboyant and controversial character if ever there was one in athletics, suggested the formation of a specialist club to revive British middle-distance running. Today that organisation, the British Milers Club, through the work of many dedicated, voluntary running cognoscenti, stages literally hundreds of races, usually with a pacemaker, throughout the length and breadth of the land. Athletes have literally travelled hundreds of miles in order benefit from the races on its programme.

Though the club also organises coaching and training weekends it is in the field of competition where its greatest impact has lain. Those great middle-distance runners, Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett, benefited from the BMC and their coaches, Peter Coe and the late Harry Wilson, were activists within the organisation.

There are, inevitably, criticisms of the club, some believing that its paced races lead to a general lack of tactical nous when it comes to major competition. But it is not the fault of the BMC if some coaches and athletes over indulge themselves with its races. A judicious mix of competition is what is required.

The amazing thing is that it is only in recent years that the UK federation has properly recognised the work of the BMC; even more amazing is the fact that other events or event groups have not followed suit.

The British Milers Club still remains a beacon of hope for British middle-distance running and long may it continue its great work.

Just William

2008-05-07T06:17:00.001-07:00

The Olympic Games, by its very nature, has always been a magnet for controversy. The Nazi Olympics of 1936; the shooting of protesting students in Mexico City and the Black Power protests of 1968; the killing of kidnapped Israeli athletes in 1972; the boycotts of 1976, 1980 and 1984; the Ben Johnson doping scandal of 1988 and this year the protests over Tibet have all made news’, as opposed to just sporting, headlines.

Add to these the fact that the spiralling costs of building for and staging the Olympics has always been good copy and it is no wonder that the media in Britain, because they are aware of the Olympics’ propensity for disputation, have been metaphorically sharpening their pencils with glee ever since the awarding ceremony.

You have to go back exactly a hundred years to find the first glimmerings of such wrangling. The Games were held in London for the first time when the original host city Rome withdrew, some said through an eruption of Vesuvius causing the Italians economic difficulties. London volunteered and the IOC gratefully accepted.

The ‘story’ of these Games has always been that of Dorando, the diminutive Italian marathon runner, who staggered into the White City stadium in a state of total disorientated exhaustion, was helped over the finishing line by sympathetic officials to the tremendous cheering of the crowd and was promptly disqualified. It was rumoured that the taking of strychnine (common for distance runners in those days) had been a contributory factor to his fatigue. Another view, less charitable, was that the amount of alcohol offered to him (and accepted) from admiring pub owners as he journeyed through west London from Windsor explained his condition. Whatever, an admiring Queen Alexandra presented him with a cup almost as big as he was for his “sportsmanship.” Subsequently the English have always admired a good loser over a worthy winner.

But this was not the real controversy of 1908; this concerns what became known as the “Halswelle Affair” and it caused an enormous, acrimonious rift between the sporting authorities of Britain and those of the USA.

William Halswelle, born of Scottish parents in Mayfair, was a fine athlete. A product of Charterhouse School and of Sandhurst College this commissioned Army officer had won the AAA 440 yards title three times and had a respectable personal best of 48.4 seconds. On one memorable afternoon he won four running events at the Scottish Championships. In 1906 he won a silver medal in the “Interim Games” in Athens at 400 and a bronze at 800 metres and was undoubtedly the favourite for the gold medal in London.

The 25 year old sailed through the heats to the final and there he met three Americans, John Carpenter, William Corbett and John Baxter Taylor. In those far off days 400 metres was not run in lanes which often led, to say the least, to interesting racing. In the early stages of the Olympic final the Americans led, closely shadowed by Halswelle. As the field entered the home straight it was a battle between Halswelle and Carpenter. The Scotsman takes up the story.

“I did not attempt to pass Carpenter until the last corner,” he said, “reserving my efforts for the finishing straight. Here I attempted to pass Carpenter on the outside…Carpenter’s elbow undoubtedly touched my chest and as I moved outwards he did likewise keeping his right arm in front of me. In this way he bored me across two thirds of the track.”

Carpenter crossed the finish line first but just before he did the British officials lowered the tape and immediately declared the final “no race.”

To the Americans it was the final straw of a frustrating Olympics. They had been suspicious of the motives of the host nation ever since the opening ceremony when an American flag for the stadium could not be found. At the march past the US team did not dip their flag to King Edward. Friction was already in the air and they complained to the New York Herald: “The British ridiculed our flag; they fixed the lane draws in favour of local athletes and favoured their own Tug of War team.” They appealed the Carpenter disqualification.

The Jury of Appeal (all British) met and studied the evidence well into the night. The trackside officials were adamant that Halswelle had been fouled. One of them, Dr Roscoe Badger, said that Halswelle made a big effort down the finishing straight “but the faster he went the wider Carpenter went.”

The problem was that ‘blocking’ was allowed under USA rules, but not under those of either the AAA or the Olympics. The American case was not helped when a Harvard rower said that “Carpenter ran Halswelle off the track” and representatives of Belgium noted that the Scotsman was “bored in the most odious way possible.”

The Jury announced that Carpenter should be disqualified and the final re-run “in strings” so that athletes could not stray from their lanes. There was outrage in the American team and the remaining two American runners refused to take part in the re-run race.

Halswelle reluctantly went to his marks by himself. The Times recorded that he had expressed the wish, “in the best public school spirit not to run unless the Americans took part,” but he was persuaded to run solo in the interest of the Olympic Games.

The controversy went on long after the Games were over. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that the “American Athletic Union will break off relations with the British because of the spirit shown by them towards American athletes.” An American official, Gustavus T. Kirby produced a pamphlet that included a so called reconstruction of the Jury of Appeal’s deliberations which showed the errors of their conclusions. The British responded with a booklet of their own which, point by point, rebutted the American allegations.

Time healed these so called affronteries and by 1912 when the Games were held in Stockholm all was sweetness and light between the two countries. It was the year that the International Amateur Athletics Federation (IAAF) was founded and from then on judges and officials were recruited from around the world and a standardised set of competition rules evolved at a Congress in 1914.

Halswelle was tragically not able to enjoy his Olympic triumph for too long. Like millions of other men of his generation he perished in the mud of northern France, shot by a sniper’s bullet in 1915. He is remembered as a great Scotsman and a great Olympian.

Missing the Millions

2008-04-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

Why are no billionaires attracted to track and field athletics? Where are the Roman Abramovich’s, Thaksin Shinawatra’s, Tom Hick’s et al who could at a stroke transform international and domestic athletics into something commercially attractive and truly professional?

Two billionaires, one Indian (Subhash Chandra) and one American, (Antigua-based American Allen Stanford) are investing tens of millions of dollars in cricket, especially in the relatively new concept of Twenty20, exciting, colourful and full of razzamatazz, which will, in most pundits’ estimation, transform the game over the next few years. Two tournaments offering unheard of (in cricket terms) appearance and prize money will start the process off. Those who thought that cricket, with its staple diet of three-day county or state games played in front of a few aged, retired colonels snoozing in deckchairs on hot summer afternoons, presented no challenge to athletics better think again. Commercially viable Twenty20 cricket could swiftly spread to countries where no one thought it could reach; it could swiftly revive the sport in schools. Even the dyed-in-the-wool English Cricket Board is waking up to the gauntlet being thrown down by the current ISL tournament in India and the projected one in the West Indies. It knows that unless it responds positively it could, like the old soldiers in their deckchairs, simply fade away.

Track and field has always had problems with the tribal nature of team sports as the only time tribalism (in our case nationalism) comes to the fore is at the major championships, Olympic, World and European, but even these meetings, as was shown in a recent Blog, are becoming less compelling to television viewers and if that trend continues, will be equally less compelling to television companies.

The truth is that the sort of sums needed to revolutionize (I use the word deliberately) athletics aren’t available to it because, frankly, it is mostly commercially unattractive, boring (Americans sprinters beating American sprinters etc), without purpose and far too spasmodic. At too high a competitive level athletics just isn’t entertaining. Its biggest problem though is that the IAAF and its constituent associations are seemingly content for it to be that way. It doesn’t help itself either by it being so publicly and loudly self righteous about “fighting a war against doping”; in view of recent revelations about junkie sprinters the public are slowly beginning to wonder if this protesting too much is hiding severe deficiencies in the testing systems.

In Britain two former Olympic medallists Alan Pascoe and Brendan Foster have become entrepreneurial millionaires thanks to athletics. They have and do run unashamedly profitable but very successful companies. Pascoe deals with televised events for UK Athletics, Foster concentrates on road running, his showpiece event being the internationally renowned Great North Run. Both keep the public profile of the sport in Britain higher than it deserves and so you would think that athletics would be duly grateful. Not a bit of it. There is general resentment, especially at club level, about large sums of money being made from athletics; money that those slaving away at the grassroots believe should come to them. What they would do with it is unspecified, however.

Perhaps this ambivalence towards professionalism is at the heart of athletics’ problem, accounting of its love- hate relationship with its full-time executives down the years. In the mid-nineties, when Andy Norman and honorary treasurer John Lister left the old British Athletics Federation (BAF), there was much delight in the hearts of the “voluntary” sector. It was a pyrrhic victory. The latter took over the asylum and what had been a highly successful commercial enterprise soon went down the pan. Within a couple of years BAF was shamefully bankrupt.

A new federation rose from the ashes of disgrace. But, given this and the visceral antipathy to fundraising membership schemes from the voluntary sector die-hards, UKA had no choice but to forge a Faustian pact with government quangoes. But, sadly, selling its soul has not brought forth the glory that was anticipated or indeed promised. It has failed because the apparatchiks of both government quangoes, in imposing a one-size-fits-all policy on all the sports they fund, have failed to comprehend the uniqueness of athletics in that it is almost twenty sports in one. Britain’s performances internationally over the decade since UKA was formed have been the poorest since the Olympics of 1936.

These thoughts went through my mind as I travelled north from attending Andy Norman’s Memorial Service. To many present in St Giles church in central London, Andy was a flawed athletics genius who, back in the eighties, single-handedly transformed not only athletics in Britain but throughout Europe also.

Jonathan Edwards and Sebastian Coe gave fulsome tributes, acknowledging the tremendous debt that each owed to him. Jonathan told the story of his attending a press conference at Gateshead, well before his stunning world records, when Andy introduced him as “the man to jump over 18 metres”, which not only nonplussed the audience but Jonathan as well. But part of Andy’s genius was this intuitive ability to spot real talent; the story of his letter to Linford Christie in 1985 urging him to train hard to become European champion (Linford’s best at the time was 10.42) is well known and Ron Roddan, the man who guided Linford to his Olympic and World golds, told me that he thought that Andy had had “great intuition based on great knowledge.”

It will come as something of a surprise to those that knew him and were guided by him when I say that, in a way and compared with today, Andy came from a chivalrous age of athletics, a golden era of exacting and very exciting sporting combat between athletes of extraordinary talent. He transformed athletics meetings, as European vice-president Sven Arne Hansen said, both in Britain and across Europe but all that he did he did for athletes.

Although, in recent years, he worked behind the scenes for England, European athletics and the IAAF, he was scornful of the present tick-a-box bureaucracy and those who have no sense of the history of the sport. “The age of chivalry is gone,” said Edmund Burke in another context, “that of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded…” It was a pity that the hierarchy of UK and England athletics were not present at St Giles church to pay official tribute to a man that steered British athletics through its golden decade. One top official is purported to have said that he was “not impressed” when he met the man. Sadly that says more about those who presently govern us than it does about Andy.

Ain’t no mountain high enough

2008-04-11T08:36:00.000-07:00

It was 1936, Olympic year and Brutus Hamilton, track coach to the University of California, took it upon himself to record what he thought would be ultimate performances in track and field; times, heights and distances which, he believed, no man or woman would ever exceed.

Most of his projections have, in the 72 years since he made them, been surpassed by very large margins but two of them stand out: he could not conceive of a 4 minute mile, nor could he contemplate anyone putting the shot further than had the current world record holder, Jack Torrance, known as “Elephant Baby” on account of his enormous stature and weight..

Men had dreamed of the 4 minute mile for decades, ever since Walter George ran 4:12¾ in 1886. What was significant about that run was that he reached the halfway mark in 2:02 so already, in the infancy of the modern sporting era, the dream mile seemed a possibility; it was a target with such beautiful symmetry: four laps in 60 seconds.

In 1936 the world record, by American Glenn Cunningham, stood at 4:06.8; Torrance’s best in the shot putt was 17.40 metres. What Hamilton, an Olympic silver medallist in decathlon in 1920, would have made of today’s records, of Bannister’s achievement, of Steve Scott running below 4 minutes 136 times and of two men having put over 23 metres we can only guess. Record breaking has continued inexorably. But for how long?

Records of all kinds, from world best’s to personal bests, represent a challenge. We always believe, sometimes secretly, that we can attain greater heights. The poet Robert Browning put it the most tidily: “…a man’s reach,” he wrote “must exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?”

But Andrew Berry who teaches evolutionary biology at Harvard has pointed out, for instance, the obvious fact that no one “will run the mile at the same speed that we run the 100 metres. The laws of oxygen exchange will not allow it.” He went on: “Human improvement must eventually bow to the basic constraints of biomechanics.”

So, Brutus Hamilton was right on one thing: record breaking is not infinite; there is a barrier out there in every event. The question is, where is it?

We may surmise (no more than that) that Man will never run a 100 metres in 9 seconds (about 25½ mph) though I instantly remind myself that Bob Hayes ran 8.7-8.9 seconds (times vary) on the sprint relay anchor leg, on cinders, at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964. But it is likely that the mile will not be run in 3:30, certainly not in 3 minutes (four laps of 45 seconds); it seems impossible that the high jump record will ever reach 3 metres. So finite performances lie somewhere between current world records and those improbable (I hedge my bets here) performances.

The graph shows the numbers of world records set in the last five decades. In the men’ events there has been a sharp decline in this first decade of the 21st century and unless there is an explosion of record breaking in the next two seasons the total, using a most liberal estimate, will be about a fifth of that of the 1960s.

The women’s events, although they show a similar pattern to the men’s, are distorted by two elements. Firstly, male administrators, once they assumed control of women’s events, took almost eighty years to concede parity, so that for most of the 60s women competed in only half of the events that they do today and the introduction of “new” events in latter decades created distortions. For instance the introduction of women’s pole vault (they had actually been vaulting since 1911) into international programmes in the 90s meant that almost half of the records set in the last two decades have come in vaulting.

Secondly, in the 70s and 80s, women’s athletics was dominated by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with its institutionalised doping programme. You have to sympathise with today’s German women’s athletes when 13 of their records were set during those two decades.

Nevertheless the pattern of a sharp decline in the rate of world record breaking remains true for both sexes.

There are a number of events that make one wonder if the ultimate performance is near at hand. In the triple jump there have been only three world record holders in 33 years, Joäo Carlos de Oliveira of Brazil, Willie Banks of the USA and Britain’s Jonathan Edwards. The current world record (18.29m) has stood for thirteen years and only two men, Edwards and Kenny Harrison, have ever exceeded 18 metres, though Willie Banks achieved it wind-assisted in 1988. Before we start trying to evaluate the ultimate here, however, we should note that Jonathan leapt 18.43m at Villanueva D’Ascq aided by 2.4 mps wind in 1995.

There is a similar pattern in the long jump. There have been only two world record holders in forty years, Bob Beamon and Mike Powell and the latter’s best (8.95m) has stood for seventeen years. Powell jumped a very windy 8.99m at altitude at Sestriere in 1992 so you have to surmise that 9 metres is a definite possibility; but 10 metres? I don’t think so.

The most likely men’s track event to be nearing the ultimate is the 800 metres and the question is will we ever see 1:39 man? Again only two men have held the world record in the last twenty-nine years, Sebastian Coe and Wilson Kipketer and the latter’s record (1:41.11) was set in 1997. Coe and Kipketer have been the only two record holders to run below 50 seconds for their opening laps and in both cases they were running six seconds slower than the 400m record. Do Berry’s “laws of oxygen exchange” apply here? Is it physically impossible to run, say, a 47/50 two lap race to achieve 1:37?

The distortions caused by doping scandals are more prevalent in women’s events. The top eleven performances in the 100 metres were achieved by Florence Griffiths-Joyner and Marion Jones. Griffiths-Joyner, who many suspected of doping, died at the age of 38 of an epileptic seizure and Jones was sentenced to a prison term last year for committing perjury in denying that she had ever taken drugs. Neither had ever tested positive.

Nine of the top ten all-time world performances in the women’s 400 metres were set in the 1980’s, half of them by the East German world record holder, Marita Koch; in the shot put the top 39 all-time performances were set in the 70’s and 80’s; there is a similar top twenty pattern in all the power events excluding those that have been introduced since 1989.

What is all this to do with ultimate performances? Because it seems likely to me that drug induced performances must quite obviously be closer to the ultimate. In the 400 metres great runners like Marie-José Peréc, Cathy Freeman and Sanya Richards are many metres away from Koch’s running. The latter ran the first 200 of her race in 22.4, a time that would have ranked her seventh at that event in 2007. Such a time would mean 400 metre specialists coming perilously close to their personal bests; could the basic biomechanical restraints in women runners allow them to attach 24 seconds and achieve 46.4?

All of this deeply affects the world of competition, the raison d’etre of our sport. The problem that we have mentioned before is that the basic ingredient of the international programme is the Golden League and Grand Prix events. In the early days the crowds were drawn by world record attempts, with pace-makers, which, to a certain extent, gave the meetings some purpose and some credibility. Unfortunately it also built up a culture of expectation that if a record wasn’t broken the event (and often the meeting) had been disappointing. This culture seems to have persisted and with the tempo of record breaking dramatically slowing the once great meetings at Oslo, Zurich and Brussels et al are fast losing their sheen.

As European standards decline so do the Golden League meetings, a round robin of Americans beating Americans, Africans beating Africans with Europeans mostly in their wake on the track. Where athletes from Europe could shine, in the field events, promoters shun them like the plague. 104 events were staged on the Golden League circus in 2007 and 72% of them were on the track. Of the remainder only just over 7% were throwing events including just one for women. So the great throwers that thrilled spectators (and television viewers) in Osaka were mostly ignored.

The Golden League produced one world record, in the women’s 5000 metres in Oslo. The rest tried hard enough inviting Yelena Isinbaeva to all six meetings. Unfortunately the once prolific (last world record in 2005) Russian record breaker failed the avaricious promoters, though she lucratively won every event.

The best analogy I can think of is with friendly matches in team games. It wasn’t until the once true blue amateur rugby union went professional in 1995 with the formation of professional leagues a year later that the sport started to come alive. Prior to those quite momentous events most club matches were friendlies with little or no purpose, apart from a pint in the bar afterwards. Athletics seems unable to extricate itself from a similar predicament, from its straitjacket of meaningless competition outside of its major championships. Our sport from top to bottom seems afraid of adopting the radical change that is so urgently necessary.

Telling it how it isn't

2008-03-31T11:35:00.000-07:00

The philosopher and secularist Bertrand Russell once gave a hypothetical answer to a hypothetical question (as philosophers do). The question was: what will you say if you die and are confronted by your Maker? His response was:”I should say, oh God, you did not give us enough evidence.”

I’ll remember his reply in case I arrive at the Pearly Gates to be met by the former President of the European AA and anti-drugs campaigner, Sir Arthur Gold to be accused of being soft on drugs and then handed irrefutable proof of widespread doping in sport. But Arthur, I would say, over a glass of our favourite malt, why aren’t these figures available down below?

The IAAF drug testing figures for 2007 indicate the problem. They tell us the number of tests carried out (3277), they tell us the number of positives (10) and they even name the athletes tested. What they don’t tell us is what the figures really mean.

You will have worked out that the percentage of positives of those tested is 0.3%. The IAAF says that the results of a number of cases are still pending so that the number of positives may well rise. But even if there were 100 positives they would only comprise 3% of the total. In Britain, in 2006-07, 7143 tests were carried out in all sports; 27 proved positive - 0.38% of the total.

What we do not get from the various bodies are their thoughts on what their testing figures indicate. They indicate, in actuality, one of two things: either the level of doping in athletics (and sport) is miniscule or the much vaunted testing programmes aren’t working. Either way the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) has a problem in justifying the hundreds of millions of dollars globally being spent on testing in sport.

We’ve been here before, of course, and undoubtedly will be back again but it is the backdrop to some of the latest pronouncements on the subject. “It has been a long time since Dwain [I love the familiarity] was caught and there has been no effort by him to actually share information…there has not been a willingness to point fingers at those who helped him or to be honest about the drugs he was on.” The speaker is John Scott of UK Sport. Is this the same UK Sport that swiftly jumped on the bandwagon of the demonisation of Chambers through its CEO Liz Nichol? She made public a letter she had sent to UK Athletics, reminding them not to support its future World Indoor silver medallist. I’m afraid so. Some of you will recall that similar appeals were made to the accused in the witchcraft trials of Salem with one notable exception: the appeals in Salem came with an offer of redemption as were, incidentally, similar entreaties in the McCarthy political witch hunts of the 1950’s. Scott also urged athletes to grass on those they thought were into doping which may give an indication of establishment uncertainty about the efficacy of the drug testing programmes. It must rankle that Marion Jones was not caught cheating by USADA testing but by the fact that she committed perjury.

British sport and in particular UK Athletics (UKA) has come out of the last couple of months looking very silly indeed. Lamine Diack, the President of the IAAF, said as much in an interview he gave to the Observer this last weekend. He indicated that the actions of UKA’s Niels de Vos and others in attempting to stop Chambers running in the UK Indoor Championships and qualifying for Valencia were always doomed to failure because Chambers had served his time and had indeed previously been selected by UK Athletics, in 2006, after his two year ban was over.

Perhaps, most importantly of all for British athletics, was Diack’s anger that UKA's crass and unlawful stance on Chambers took away the limelight from other athletes in the British team. “The one who came back from suspension became the star,” Diack said. “Why was there all this fuss on Dwain Chambers?”

The UK Athletics board needs to seriously consider this question and its answer. It is because Niels de Vos lit the fire that is still, weeks later, still smouldering. The fact that those in the offices in Solihull clearly did not anticipate the consequences of the actions they were to undertake indicates an alarming lack of media savvy in the heart of the organisation.

Thirteen – unlucky for some

I don’t know if anyone in Team Chambers has a sight of this Blog but they should pass on the information that if history is anything to go by he should avoid Castleford and Rugby League like the plague.

Two well known British international athletes (also with no previous footballing experience) have, some time in the past, made such a move and neither lasted very long in their new sport.

In 1953 Emmanuel McDonald Bailey, Olympic bronze medallist (1952) and winner of fourteen AAA sprint titles decided that a very generous financial offer from Leigh was one he could not refuse. He had just one extremely petrifying game, was tackled, injured and taken off. In 1961 a somewhat more robust figure tried his hand at 13-aside rugby with Oldham. This was the European Shot Put champion Arthur Rowe, a man particularly fed up with lack of support from the athletics establishment. His career lasted only a little longer than McDonald Bailey's.
Meanwhile as reported in Inside the Games there is a growing feeling in the higher echelons of world sport that the BOA lifetime Olympic ban would be overturned under international law. The BOA is looking more and more isolated, despite the posturing of its Chairman, former Conservative Sports Minister Colin Moynihan. The BOA is now the only Olympic association or indeed national bodyin the world to have a byelaw that contravenes the charters of both WADA and the IAAF.

Have we the Vision?

2008-03-24T04:33:00.000-07:00

In the days before the 1982 European Championships in Athens the IAAF called a special Congress to discuss the future of the sport. Britain was to spearhead the drive for open athletics and the man chosen to make the crucial speech was the late Andy Norman, the hard-talking British entrepreneurial promoter already a dominant figure in what was becoming known as the European circuit.

Andy knew how important this speech was. He knew that if the Congress failed to accept the concept of open athletics and of payments to athletes then the world of “shamateurism” involving the world’s best runners could well destroy the sport that he loved. What Andy wanted was help in moulding his thoughts into a cohesive, telling speech. He turned to John Rodda of the Guardian, one of the most respected of sports writers.

The two men sat on Rodda’s room balcony at the Hotel Olympic in very warm sunshine. It was early morning and Rodda had had an ultra convivial evening with colleagues the night before; he had forgotten about the arrangement with Norman. The shrill ringing of his bedside phone therefore came as something of a shock. Now as he sipped orange juice to help his dehydration John listened and took notes as Andy hammered home his crucial points. He converted them and typed them into tough, cogent, convincing words and handed the script over. Rodda went back to bed and Norman was ready to conquer the Congress.

Two other factors were in his favour. The year before the new President, Primo Nebiolo, had powered (some say elbowed) his way to the most important post in world athletics. Nebiolo realised that, to survive, athletics had to come into the twentieth century, had to accept some form of professionalism. Secondly, many of those sitting in the Congress hall were former athletes who knew that Andy knew that they had enjoyed financial fruits from their athletic labours. It would be an intelligent guess to think that some arm twisting had gone on.

It is important to remember that athletics had fiercely fought professionalism for a century with some of the great names of track left strewn around the battlefield; men like Walter George, Alfred Shrubb, William Snook (see earlier Blog), Paavo Nurmi, Gunder Hägg, Arne Anderson and finally in the mid-1950’s the American miler, Wes Santee - all banished for succumbing to the temptations of Mammon in brown envelopes.

The federations, including the IAAF had, after Santee, turned a blind eye to “illegal” payments and by the time Congress met in Athens it was an open secret that hundreds of thousands of dollars from the promoters of major European meetings had entered the pockets of star athletes; unless action was taken the IAAF could lose control of the sport.

In the end Congress accepted the majority of the proposals but there were crucial caveats: it baulked at prize money, it hid payments to athletes behind words like ‘subventions’ and ‘trust funds’. It took just the minimum measures required to save itself. The spirit of de Coubertin was (and is) still embedded in the collective psyche of the sport.

The reason for re-telling this episode is to not only show how important the moment was for athletics but also to indicate how the moment was lost. By not biting the bullet and opting for a dynamic professional sport at levels lower than the glitzy, razzmatazz projected world championships and grand prix meetings, the delegates at the Athens congress stifled all competitive development for twenty-six years.

If an athletics supremo from some far off planet visited Earth every twenty years or so to see what progress had been made he or she would gain a distinct sense of déjá-vu and disappointment. They would note the continuing tremendous enthusiasm and excitement engendered in stadia and on television by the major championships and in some rare cases by the grand prix events but they would also note that in each country it was but a fleeting annual glimpse of the very best that track and field had to offer.. The difference between what is served up on the IAAF World Athletics Tour and what is provided in domestic competition is as stark as it can be.

In 2002 the Commonwealth Games came to Manchester; it was a glorious week of competition that thrilled stadium and television audiences. Everybody wanted more; they didn’t get it. The stadium was handed over to a major football club because everyone realised that British athletics was incapable of providing regular, sustainable, exciting competition for public enjoyment. It is the same story in London, host city for the 2012 Olympics remember, where the only meeting to rouse the public is a Super Grand Prix meeting every August. All other meetings (from which international athletes are conspicuous by their absence) are so long, tedious and self-indulgent that the general public never attends, indeed is rarely notified of them. Nothing has changed in four decades.

Internationally the sport has tried to review competition but not so you’d notice. Early in 2005 I spoke at an IAAF conference on one-day meetings and the World Athletics Final where representatives of the IAAF, promoters, managers, athletes and coaches all contributed. We all said that the sport was failing the athletes, television and the public; we said that the grand prix meetings were too repetitive and becoming old hat; we urged the re-introduction of international matches and much more. Television representatives were particularly scathing.

The world governing body nodded sagely and said that it had listened and would cogitate. It has proved to be not only a dialogue with the deaf but with the blind as well, for the only real change has been to move the World Athletics Final from Monaco to Stuttgart. Meanwhile television viewing figures are plunging world wide. In a recent contest for coverage on the BBC (a staunch supporter of athletics) with the FA Cup and Six Nations Rugby, the World Indoor Championships from Valencia lost out badly gaining just half an hour of terrestrial coverage on the Friday night; the rest was confined to satellite inter-active. The Golden League, as it is now named, was once a given on terrestrial television, then it moved to satellite and, in Britain, is now only available on pay-per-view.

Britain too decided that a review of competition was needed. Former European 5000m champion Jack Buckner was assigned the task. He produced two preliminary reports with dire warnings that if the sport didn’t change it was doomed to mediocrity. We waited and waited for more concrete proposals; they never came. The umpteenth set of administrators to be set the task of putting British athletics to rights have obviously added the unfinished review to those collecting dust on the federation’s shelves.

Only the very best athletes can guarantee themselves a reasonable income from the sport. In Britain it is only a handful of top stars that can make a living. As I write James McIlroy, an up-and-down journeyman runner, ranked third in Britain at 800 metres last year, announces his immediate retirement, citing financial worries. “I wasn’t prepared to lose my house for Beijing,” he said. The sport does not engender enough sponsorship to make it truly professional; it needs to ask itself the reasons why.

Other sports, both domestically and internationally, have realised the need for radical change and moved on. In Britain you would not recognise professional soccer, rugby and cricket from what they were a few decades ago. But you would athletics. Our sport is stagnating and unable to have the vision to combat the professional team sports that are, more and more, dominating the media.

Athletics needs to create more meaningful competitions. It is no coincidence that what really excites people is the major international championships where the crucible of combat is at its most intensive. It is here that tribal nationalism, so prevalent in team sports, takes over. It is completely absent from the World Athletics Tour.

So here’s an idea. Let’s have a European City Cup – Paris v London; Berlin v Barcelona; Rome v Moscow et al., meetings of 3 hours or so in length full of international stars fighting it out for their domiciliary cities. You’d need massive sponsorship and television coverage but it is about time that our sport, the major Olympic sport, started to think big in terms of sponsorship instead of being satisfied with sums that Tiger Woods would consider pin money.

And such a competition could generate national competitions of a similar nature. In Britain (and I suspect elsewhere) the clubs are considered by the grassroots as the be-all and end-all of the sport; they are holy cows whose sanctity is vigorously and at times venomously guarded. But if you are to occasion public interest in competitions below international level then you have to widen that interest into teams that it can associate with. Having inter-city and town competitions would do that and also, with good marketing, could generate sufficient local sponsorship for the competition to be viable.

To continue to survive as a credible international and national sport athletics must begin thinking radically; begin thinking the unthinkable in terms of its present competitive structures. The question is: does it have the vision and the cojones to do so?

Golden Moment and Moments of Madness

2008-03-14T06:58:00.000-07:00

Those of you who followed the World Indoor Championships in Valencia on BBC Interactive will have witnessed one of those human moments in track and field epitomised by the facial expressions of Kelly Holmes after her run in the Olympic 800metres in 2004, expressions of triumph, doubt and then total joy beamed around the global village by television.

This time it was in the triple jump and featured the new World Indoor Champion, Philips Idowu. It was the last jump of the competition which he had already won with a superlative, lifetime best leap of 17.75 metres, an effort of seeming ease, rhythm and grace that reminded me so much of Jonathan Edwards’ world records in Gothenburg thirteen years previously.

Philips struggled to regain his concentration. The world indoor record of 17.83 metres was within his grasp but the enormity of what he had achieved, a first global title, had obviously infiltrated his concentration. He moved around, he put his face in his hands, desperate to regain composure and the cameras followed him. Often at moments like these athletes, shed of the anxieties of the competition, can produce wonders; not this time. Philips finally sped down the runway and produced a no jump.

But he had won gold. After an up and down career spanning 13 years, with more than a fair share of injuries, the 29 year old with the distinctive dyed red hair and headband had taken three steps to an athletic heaven. Well, not quite, for real heaven, I suppose, comes in just a few months time in Beijing.

It is eight years now since Britain won an individual global gold in the men’s events (also in the triple jump with Jonathan Edwards) and, in all honesty, Philips is our only male hope for a golden moment in the Chinese capital. Wisely though, in after competition interviews, he played it cool about his prospects, for he and his coach John Herbert carry enough experience between them to know of the vagaries of Olympic competition.

And Olsson awaits. The Swedish Olympic champion, also with a career severely blighted with injuries, will be anxious to defend the title he won in Athens. His best, that world indoor record, is now just eight centimetres ahead of Philips. It will be a great battle. Interesting to note too that it is twelve years since anyone (American Kenny Harrison) jumped over 18 metres. Surely another leap of that magnitude is overdue.

Moments of Madness

That great, Anglo-Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift would surely, if he had been born into this modern age, be running a Blog to entertain us all. And should he have been interested in sport what a wonderful time he would have been having with the recent machinations and contradictions surrounding drug testing and its punishments.

Jacques Rogge, President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is the latest to give forth on the clearly pernicious British Olympic Association (BOA) by-law that bans British drug miscreants from ever competing or indeed coaching at an Olympic Games.

His spokesman, Emmanuel Moreau, said: “We confirm that the president would be supportive of the lifetime ban of the BOA.”

Rogge, however, finds himself in direct contradiction with the former President of the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA), Dick Pound who had earlier reiterated his belief that sprinter Dwain Chambers should go to court to challenge the ban which, in Pound’s view, contravenes the WADA code (to which the British government and the BOA are signatories) which specifies a two year ban for a first-time offence.

At the present time I can find no comment from the new WADA president John Fahey on either the BOA by-law or the move by the European athletics promoters to retrospectively ban for all time drug miscreants from their meetings thus also contravening WADA rules and, probably, European commercial law concerning restraint of trade.

Swift would have loved all this as sport and in particular the IOC and WADA and international governing bodies tie themselves in knots in trying to fulfil their impossible dream of all countries, governments and sporting associations working in harmony implementing WADA laws.

The problem is that individual sports bodies and associations who do not like certain aspects of the laws (mostly finding the punishments too lenient) feel free to add by-laws to please themselves. They feel free because WADA has no direct jurisdiction over them and the IOC is happy to let any of its 205 organisations set whatever punishments they like with regard to participation in the Olympics. And when you get the two men who were instrumental in setting up WADA, Rogge and Pound, at loggerheads then you have to ask what chance the rest of sport stands in harmonising. One would relish their appearing as opposing witnesses in any future action that might be brought.

Meanwhile Colin Moynihan, Chairman of the BOA, has moved to join the ranks of those who are macho-posturizing over Chambers. You would think, listening to him, that sport faces some Armageddon if Dwain is not banished from its Olympian shores, becomes as Orwell put it “abolished, a non person”. In Churchillian tones Moynihan vows that the new World Indoor silver medallist will not reach China, “"We will pay whatever is necessary,” he trumpeted, “to have top lawyers represent us and put the strongest case in support of that ban.”

The question is, has he the right to spend public money in such a cavalier fashion especially when recent polls suggest that only a third of the public favour lifetime bans, the majority finding them I suspect, somewhat repugnant, repressive and unduly un-Christian. Rogge, instead of congratulating the BOA on its stance should ask himself why the other 204 global Olympic associations have elected not to have such banishments for their sportsmen and women.

It really is faintly ridiculous when those in authority lose their faculties of discernment, as Moynihan and others have done. It is more serious, however, when almost all the media, written and electronic follow suit and do not challenge the judgemental pronouncements being made. Writers and broadcasters whom I respect seem to have lost all sense of natural justice in this ongoing saga, seem to have joined the ranks of those revelling in the zealotry that vilifies Dwain Chambers, a man, after all, who confessed his sporting crime and was duly punished for it. I have espied no cool media analysis of the can of worms opened by Niels de Vos of UKA some weeks ago and certainly have read no call for WADA rules to prevail. One expects the tabloids to behave in the way that they have but I expected the broadsheets, radio and television to at least have reasonable debate on the issues involved.

The similarity with the witch hunts and trials of Salem three centuries ago unfortunately grows. The only apparent difference is that, tragically, as we now know, there were no witches whereas today there are clearly doping miscreants. There is, however, great similarity between the puritan ethics that fired the good people of Massachusetts to do what they did and of those who quixotically fight to eradicate doping in sport today by whatever means they deem necessary, injust or no.

And news comes through, as I write, of further madness. The Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (ASADA)is secretly assessing the Medicare records of athletes, without their consent, surely in direct contravention of their human rights.

“Justice or injustice of the cause,” said Samuel Johnson “[should] be decided by a judge.” He was and is right. As drug testing spins out of control it must be challenged both politically and legally. In both spheres the actions of the BOA, the European promoters and far across the world of the Australian testers must be challenged. This issue is about much more than Dwain Chambers; it is about natural justice, human rights and above all about teaching sport that it is not above the law.

How to Lose a War

2008-03-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

Bad laws are the worst of tyranny – Edmund Burke

Many will remember Susan Chepkemei, if not from the streets of London, where she ran third in 2006, then from the wonderful 2004 ING New York marathon when she battled to the finish with Paula Radcliffe, who won.

Last summer the 32 year old Kenyan, who was pregnant, was rushed into a Nairobi hospital where she was treated for pneumonia. Suffering from breathing difficulties the doctors administered salbutamol to aid her. It is not recorded whether she was conscious at the time. In September she tested positive for the salbutamol which is a World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) banned substance.

In February Athletics Kenya magnanimously handed her a one year ban, accepting her mitigating circumstances.

Now I cannot imagine that anyone, other than the most fundamental apologists (of which there are many) for the strict liability clause in dope testing rules, would in any way defend or even start to understand this action taken in the so called War on Doping. The IAAF, so swift to go to arbitration if they feel a sentence is too lenient, has never appealed a sentence for being too harsh and so it is in this case. It has been silent. Chepkemei is now officially a drug cheat.

If the many that have been over vocal about the Chambers affair are true to their principles then Chepkemei will not grace the London Marathon again. And even if she were allowed to run those who were urging public demonstrations against Chambers must surely once more try to rally rabble rousers to boo and hiss along the route. And if he were to stage a 10,000 metres in his prestigious Ivo Van Damme meeting Wilfred Meert would surely decline to invite her. He like many others, has suffered a conversion on the road from BALCO

I heard him on my car radio some days ago talking on BBC Radio 5 Live about the legal threat posed by Christy Gaines suing the Euromeetings Group of 54 promoters who have taken a unilateral and retrospective decision not to invite former drug cheats to their meetings. We’re okay, Wilfred seemed to saying, “because these are invitational meetings and we can invite or not invite who we like.”

Not quite. The six Golden League meetings are part of the IAAF/TDK programme where one million dollars is at stake for those who win all six meetings. Any legal action by any former banned athlete (who could afford it) taken against their prohibition from the Golden League would surely have to incorporate the IAAF as well. The promoters seem to have forgotten, or have never heard of, the Meca-Medina/Malcen case that went before the European Court of Justice. It determined that sporting cases (including doping cases) do fall within the scope of Article 81 of the European Community Treaty.

Promoters and managers, Niels de Vos and Dame Tanni (I want an eight year ban) Grey Thompson should note carefully that Dick Pound, former head of WADA and a lawyer has, as I write, reiterated to BBC Sport his belief that the British Olympic Association bye law banning drug miscreants for life from the Olympics contravenes WADA legislation. “As a matter of law,” Pound said, “I think the BOA would be on shaky ground. The BOA is a signatory to Wada's code - those are the rules that govern doping infractions - and the sanction for a first offence is a two-year suspension.
"Chambers has served his ban and I think, depending on your view of criminal justice, if you serve the penalty that was deemed appropriate - for whatever the offence was - you are entitled to be reintegrated into society.”

The European promoters could be looked upon as an organised cabal promoting restraint of trade with the express purpose of subverting the laws of WADA and in athletics’ case, the IAAF.

Much of this is based on a visceral feeling among many in authority that, despite global and national tests showing a 99% negative return, most elite athletes are, or want to be, on performance enhancing drugs. It is a belief, held but rarely uttered, that goes back a long way.

On a windy summer’s evening in 1990 at the Gateshead International Stadium Dr Martin Lucking, then a prominent figure in UK drug testing, was supervising procedures in an international match with Canada and East Germany. A group of athletes were waiting to be tested. The delay was causing irritation, complaint and friction. Lucking (who was later to chair the panel that erroneously found Diane Modahl guilty) suddenly snapped, whirled round and pointing a finger in turn at each of the athletes present, shouted each time: “I think you’re on drugs and I think you’re on drugs, until you’ve proved otherwise.”

This was an extraordinary incident that indicated the suspicion by sporting administrators of universal guilt. It is clearly still prevalent. They believe it with the religious conviction of a fundamentalist, unwittingly confirming what the gullible Ben Johnson and Dwain Chambers and others were told by their mentors.

And if you are solemnly looked in the eye and told that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on testing is to act as a deterrent then you know that sport and in particular athletics has completely lost its way on this important issue and that through its own laws as well as the subverting of them and, in particular, through the Chepkemei case, it is slowly bringing itself into disrepute.

Good times at the NIA

On to more congenial affairs. In recent years when I have visited meetings of all grades around the country I’ve usually done it with a personal interest in just one athlete. The rest of the competition normally goes by in some sort of a blur unless there is an athlete of particular standing taking part. When I went to Birmingham’s NIA for the England age group championships ten days or so ago I expected to find myself in a similar position. That I didn’t was down to two reasons.

The first was that the competition was intense and exciting and belied the theory that our relative lack of international success is because of a dearth of talent – talent was present at the NIA in droves. Carefully nurtured, some of those present will grace future British teams with considerable distinction. Secondly, it was great to meet up again with some former top stars who were now back in the sport successfully coaching young talent. After such an invigorating weekend one could easily be led into thinking that the future of our sport and in particular success in 2012 was pretty well assured.

The operative phrase though is “carefully nurtured”, which conveniently leads us to the coaching scheme still trying hard to survive under burdensome coach education, which has for almost a decade slowly choked coaching to death. Coach education has been an unmitigated disaster. Its main aim seems to have been to satisfy the insatiable Sport England demand for more and more coaches with little or no thought as to the quality being produced; witness Sport England’s frankly ludicrous demand for 2000 more Level 1 coaches between 2007 and 2009.

What has been sadly neglected is coach development. Where is pro-active encouragement of coaches to increase their knowledge? Where has UKA published the latest track and field research? After the sad demise of the highly acclaimed AAA/BAAB coaching booklets (sold around the world) where are the replacement booklets and DVDs? Why doesn’t UKA attempt to keep in regular contact with its Level 3 and Level 4 coaches using the internet? Some months ago a semi-autonomous Coaches Guild, that would have incorporated all of the above, was mooted to top management at UKA. Their response, as reported to me, was “we don’t want to fund a trade union.”

But there was hope at the NIA. In the warm-up area were former international athletes Geoff Capes, Clarence Callender, Mike McFarlane, Tony Jarrett, Lloyd Cowan and Lorna Boothe (as well as a number of other very well qualified coaches) all bringing their knowledge and experience to our most promising young stars. It was great to meet up again, however transitorily. Sprinting, as you can see, is well catered for in coaching terms; now the trick for whoever will be driving coaching forward in the coming years, will be to muster such talent in all the other events.

Theatre of the Absurd

2008-02-27T04:47:00.000-08:00

Dear British Athletics Supporters Club member,

We have learnt from MI 6 that you are travelling to Valencia to support the British team at the World Indoor Championships. I am writing to tell you what is expected of you in order that UK Athletics may retain the considerable funding that it obtains from UK Sport.

You will know that despite considerable opposition Dwain Chambers has been selected to compete in the 60 metres at the championships. Mr Chambers is a well known drug cheat and has had a fleeting acquaintance with convicted felons Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery. It is vital that no embarrassment accrues to UK Athletics and especially UK Sport by Mr Chambers winning a medal at these championships. You will share, I know, our embarrassment in the fact that Miss Ohuruogu won a gold medal last year without recourse to UK Sport funding. To have such a thing happen a second time would be unthinkable.

As part of the War on Doping we therefore will expect you to loudly barrack Mr Chambers at every opportunity by following the excellent advice given by the editor of Athletics Weekly to boo and hiss every time he appears in the arena. Placards bearing suitable messages as DRUG CHEATS GO HOME and LET’S GET DWAIN would also have the desired effect of unsettling his performance. He should also be harried at the team hotel and on the team coach. We have done our bit, thanks to the support of Fast Track, by ensuring that, although he is representing his country, he will not be able to compete anywhere before Valencia. We are determined that Mr Chambers will not win a medal. Be assured that we feel no personal animosity to Mr Chambers.

You may have doubts about the legality of these actions. Cast them aside. Ignore the fact that both UK Athletics and UK Sport signed up to the WADA code; forget that UK Athletics selected Mr Chambers to compete in major events in 2006; take no notice that UK Athletics has shown considerable support to Carl Myerscough since he returned from a two year ban. These are irrelevant because you will now be joining in the great crusade, part of the War on Doping, launched a few weeks ago by Mr Nils de Vos to ensure that Mr Chambers is driven from the sport. Mr de Vos has assured everyone that he feels no personal animosity towards Mr Chambers.

You may feel that you are risking arrest and incarceration in a Spanish prison by taking such actions. Fear not. UK Sport has made sure that you will have the services of the British consul in Valencia who will make every effort to ensure that you receive a minimal sentence. Surely it would be a minor sacrifice to make in support of the War on Doping?

Failure to carry out these actions will, regrettably, result in your being banned from travelling to future major athletics events abroad. Your passport will be confiscated for the whole of the track season and you will be required to report to a police station on a daily basis during the period of major championships.

Forget terrorism and climate change, Doping in Sport is the major threat to the world in the 21st Century and we are taking tough measures to combat it. These are:

(1) As far as Mr Chambers is concerned we are trying to ensure that not only does he pay his own travel and hotel expenses but he receives no help from team management in Spain and, should he injure himself in the event, we have requested that he receive no medical attention. We are endeavouring to ensure that he will have difficulty booking flights to Valencia. We must again reiterate that we feel no personal animosity to Mr Chambers.
(2) We are endeavouring to make sure that Mr Chambers will receive no expert coaching. His previous coach has been instructed by the UKA Performance Director not to assist Mr Chambers during UK Athletics time. Nor can Mr Chambers avail himself of the use of Picketts Lock during UKA time.
(3) We intend to dispense with drug hearings. If an athlete is tested positive he or she will automatically be banned for life. If the innocent are wrongly punished so be it for the greater good.
(4) We are asking for an additional £1 billion per annum to enhance the War on Doping. This will enable us to extend testing into all areas of athletics including young athletes’ leagues and school championships.
(5) We will employ an additional 30,000 testers to carry out ten million tests a year.
(6) It is our aim by 2012 to have every athlete over the age of 11 tagged to ensure they are available to testers at any time of the day or night.
(7) Every toilet facility at every stadium will be covered by CTV cameras to ensure that athletes are not injecting themselves with banned substances.
(8) With the enthusiastic support of Fast Track and sponsored by Athletics Weekly we are hoping to institute additional penalties for doping offences including the use of Stocks and Ducking Stools at televised events where the public can vent their fury at drug cheats.
(9) All athletes and officials will be required to attend Hate Sessions once a month where they must shout violent abuse at pictures of Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Dwain Chambers et al.

The War on Doping must be won or it is the end of civilization as we know it. Statistics showing that less than 1% of athletes test positive doesn’t, as some believe, indicate a low level of doping; what it indicates is that we aren’t testing enough athletes.

Athletics is the first sport to enthusiastically support these measures. You should cast from your mind any subversive idea that UKA will use them to divert attention from their poor performances at major championships.

Many thanks for your support in the War on Doping. Can I once more reiterate that nobody at UK Sport or UK Athletics or indeed the media feels any personal animosity to Mr Dwain Chambers. He just happens to be a convenient fall guy providing good copy.

GEORGE W BUSHEL

Doping Czar

Immoral Imperatives

2008-02-20T10:16:00.000-08:00

Diane Modahl

In 1991 I wrote a book, Athletics: The Golden Decade (still available from Amazon!) which was well received critically. In a chapter Sporting Salem I wrote at the unease I felt at some of the hysteria being induced by undue zealotry in drug testing which had followed the sensational dope positive of Ben Johnson at the Seoul Olympics of 1988. Three years after publication all those worst fears were justified by the case of Diane Modahl who, in 1994, went through two subsequent years of emotional and financial hell to clear her name after highly dubious drug testing procedures at a laboratory in Portugal, sanctioned by the then British federation.

Seventeen years on from The Golden Decade we seem no further forward. Last year Christine Ohuruogu underwent unpardonable tabloid abuse for her forgetfulness in missing three tests. Now, following the BALCO scandal and the subsequent jailing of Marion Jones, we find ourselves gripped by a similar hysteria and worry. It has caused witch hunting of the kind experienced in the Massachusetts village of Salem in 1692, an hysteria compellingly dramatised by the late Arthur Miller in his play (and later film) The Crucible.

In the Golden Decade I wrote:

“…drug cheating strikes at the very core of a lifetime’s belief for so many people; belief in the ethos of fair play, in the purity of equal competition. If Britain was the mother of modern sport and its Olympian ideals it was felt right that we should impose the most Draconian penalties upon those who abuse the concepts that we invented. The danger in our approach would come – and there were some so passionate about the issue that they could take us there – when, as Miller had written ‘the repressions of order were heavier than seemed warranted by the dangers against which the order was organised.’ “

Drug taking in sport is a highly emotional issue, it stirs visceral and understandable anger, it goes against almost every reason to take part in sport at all. For those who have been denied Olympic fame and fortune by drug cheats the anguish must be great. It is why, for so many, the punishment is clear and simple: banishment from sport for life.

But there are many problems. Drug testing procedures are far from watertight; the whole concept of strict liability goes against natural justice; the quasi-courts seem loaded against the alleged transgressor who, guilty or no, is forced into very expensive legal representation in order to face the “prosecution.” And if cleared there is no compensation as Modahl would angrily verify; quasi drug courts cannot offer costs.

And there is the million dollar question: just how serious, how widespread is the problem in actuality? Do a handful of high profile cases really warrant Miller’s “heavy repressions of order”? Are we, by listening to some, in danger of wandering, with our eyes wide shut, into an Orwellian world, where tagging (as seriously suggested by some) is a portent of quite absurd ideas of repression and where athletes’ human rights would be far more abused than they are now?

This year is the 20th anniversary of the year that the Olympic movement suffered, through Ben Johnson, an almost mortal blow. You would think that two decades is long enough for sport to get its act together but that is far from the case. Combating doping in sport is still a mess. There have been fluctuating periods of banishment from four to two years and now in some cases back to four again; sports and countries vary in their attitudes and implementation of the rules; there is uncertainty about some of the prohibited substances; the World Anti Doping Agency was set up in 1999 and literally tens of millions of dollars have been spent on its work with little or no change in the overall picture in nine years and now UKA, a signatory to WADA laws, is contemplating subverting the ethos of them by introducing bylaws.

All this is caused by anger that legal restrictions and human rights frustrate the most zealous in their attempts to eradicate sport doping. Their problem is that repression is the name of their game; no mention by UKA of educating young athletes against doping; no attempts, as UK Sport’s former head of anti-doping Michelle Verroken has pointed out, at our federation rehabilitating the very few offenders that we have had, back into the sport. .

I am also angered by those who pervert sport by taking drugs; they must be severely but legally punished. But I am angered as well by slackness or even deliberate manipulation of testing procedures to obtain “the right result”. I am angered too by the smug sanctimony of the British Olympic Association and its infringement of sportsmen’s human rights by injustly trying them twice for the same offence.

According to the Gospel of Luke “joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth over ninety and nine just persons who have no need of repentance.” I have not seen over the past two weeks any Christian redemption offered by UK Sport or UK Athletics or the BOA to the battered but still in there punching Dwain Chambers.

Now we have an “independent” review headed by Dame Tanni Grey Thompson who has already supported UKA in its recent endeavours and indicated that she thinks eight years is a suitable punishment for serious drug offences. What is actually needed is a truly independent international review of doping in sport, similar to the Dubin enquiry in Canada after the Johnson affair.

So I am also angered (as you may have read) by UK Athletics’ new CEO, Nils de Vos, who through naivety and lack of background in the sport, opened a Pandora’s Box of hysteria, of verbal and media lynching of an athlete, Dwain Chambers, who under WADA and IAAF rules is eligible to compete both in Britain and Valencia. de Vos has also failed to acknowledge UKA’s very serious blunder in not testing Chambers for fifteen months because the organisation assumed that he had retired.

The American writer Joan Didion wrote:

“…When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking…that it is a moral imperative that we have [something] then is when we join the fashionable madmen and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble.”

Dwaine Chambers

But we must be thankful for small mercies. Congratulations must be in order to UK Athletics, under its present management, for surely being the first ever federation in the world to select an eligible athlete for a championship and then, with the connivance of UK Sport and Fast Track, do all it conceivably can to impede his chances of success.

Bring in the clowns? Don’t worry they’re here.

Mob Rule

2008-02-15T02:53:00.000-08:00

Nils de Vos is in grave danger of making British Athletics (and himself) look vindictive as UKA make moves to freeze out Dwain Chambers, who is legally free to run, from the sport of athletics. What is happening, as people (mostly employed in some capacity or other by UK Sport or UK Athletics) can’t wait to line up on television and radio to condemn his return, is mob rule, plain and simple, something I never thought I would see in our sport.

UK Athletics is being utterly two-faced towards Dwain Chambers. Why? Performance Director, Dave Collins picked Chambers for the European Cup in 2006 and the European Championships of the same year. It therefore ill behoves him to appear on television to say why he now thinks Chambers should not compete, even though Dwain is cleared to do so under WADA and IAAF rules, without his indicating what has changed. What has changed, of course, is the arrival of his new boss de Vos full of evangelical fervour of extraordinary naivety.

UKA made the assumption that Chambers had retired because he tried American football and so had not tested him since November 2006. Chambers never announced his retirement from athletics and when his football venture didn’t work out came back to the track and this great furore. It is UKA that have broken the rules by not testing him and it is de Vos who has to take responsibility for that serious lapse. The buck stops with him though he seems to be carefully avoiding it.

There is more hypocrisy. Once Carl Myerscough had served his two year ban, earlier this decade, he was welcomed back and picked by Collins and his team of professional selectors to compete in the World Championships in Helsinki in 2005 and the European Championships in 2006 as well as sundry Spar European Cups, including the 2007 event when de Vos was already installed at UKA. Indeed UK Athletics made strenuous efforts to support Myerscough in his appeal to avoid the BOA ban and compete in the Olympics (which failed).

Chambers also ran in a Fast Track promotion at Gateshead in June 2006. That organisation is now hypocritically forbidding him entry to their promotion in Birmingham this weekend accompanied by some pious statements about “protecting the image of the sport”. It also seems to be orchestrating, with the encouragement of UKA, his being banned across Europe.

It was shameful of the sport’s only magazine Athletics Weekly to urge the verbal lynching of Chambers as he went to his blocks in Sheffield by booing him. Luckily, either not many of the crowd read the magazine or those few that do treated the advice with the contempt it deserved.

In his first real utterances since he entered the sport almost eleven months ago de Vos has done more to confirm, by his statements to the media, the perception that athletics is a drug ridden sport. News (not sport) headlines and lead-in television stories have ensured that many parents now feel that athletics is not a sport they would wish their children to take part in. I have not heard de Vos tell the world that since the year 2000 only five UK athletes (roughly 0.1%) from a few thousand out-of-competition tests have served bans for drug offences and one of those, Ohuruogu, is recognised as not having taken drugs. Hardly the epidemic that his utterances would suggest.

The vilification of Dwain Chambers by UKA and Fast Track executives, joyfully soaked up by the media, has also come about through those who have leapt on the case to bray (yet again) for a lifetime ban. It will never happen and the IAAF and European AA must act swiftly to stop individual federations and the European promoters, led by Rajne Soderburg, from taking unilateral action to bring such a ban in through the back door.

The European Promoters are not above the law and they should be reminded of the case of two little known swimmers, David Meca-Medina of Spain and Igor Majcen of Slovenia, who both tested positive for nandrolone at a World Cup event in 1999 and were banned.

They claimed that the anti-doping rules contravened Article 81 of the European Community Treaty, which bans anti-competitive agreements and practices and they took their case to the European Court of Justice, which recently determined that sporting cases do fall within the scope of Article 81. Put another way, the court decreed that the rules on doping in sport are not exempt from EU laws on competition and freedom to provide services.

These are sad days for a once great sport and a once great federation. The inmates have taken over the asylum.

Behind Closed Doors

Some people might well also ask why Nils de Vos is being so vocal about the return of Dwain Chambers and so silent about two of the essential planks for the future success of British athletics, coaching and competition, both of which are in a total mess and have been so for over a decade.

In order to gain some enlightenment I e-mailed various Establishment figures a fortnight ago asking for insight as to whether coaching would continue to function under UKA or whether it would be transferred to England; likewise for domestic competition. I also asked, in both cases, who would be driving forward the necessary changes vital to the future success and welfare of British athletics. As I write there have been no replies.

There is a line in one of Charlie Rich’s more famous songs that goes “Oh no one knows what goes on behind closed doors” and there are many frustrated people in British athletics who would agree with that. Either the hierarchy think this modest Blog is beneath their contempt or they just don’t know the answers to my questions.

Not withstanding the deafening silence it is time to look at the current state of coaching and competition in Britain.

For many years I asked the question “Who’s in charge of coaching?” The answer was that nobody was. UKA had separated the roles of performance and coaching, deciding that the latter could survive as coach education, staging quasi-academic courses that for a decade produced coaches with little or no practical experience and more importantly no means of obtaining it. Why? Because coach development has been virtually non-existent hence the appalling quality of coaching that I see and all too frequently hear about today.

Enter Callum Orr. Finally Moorcroft decided to act and UKA advertised for a Head of Coaching and Teaching (not, you will notice, for a Director of Coaching, a role that had been successfully fulfilled, from Dyson to Dick, for half a century or more). Orr’s entry into UKA came at a time when Moorcroft’s disastrous era was drawing to a close and a new one was about to begin. Orr has been becalmed by the seeming inability of his new bosses to produce a wind of change for the sport.

Orr recently learnt that as part of de Vos’s weeks of the long knives his services were no longer required. Indeed he had to interview for his own job along with one other applicant. The post has been left vacant. There have been strong rumours of one former well-known coach lobbying Sport England for his removal.

“Callum has lots of ideas,” a top international coach said to me. “It’s tragic that he’s going.” This is echoed by many. The tragedy is that because of total inertia in terms of setting any vision and strategy by the hierarchy he will not have the opportunity to carry them out. All this begs the question: what influence do Sport England and UK Sport have in the internal affairs of British athletics?

This leaves coaching in a vacuum and it looks to remain so for many years to come. It also poses another question: who is left in executive positions at UKA who knows anything about track and field, let alone coaching?

A few weeks ago I spoke to Jack Buckner about the Competition Review and was staggered to find that it was considered finished, even though the last report held no concrete proposals. You may remember that the lately departed Zara Hyde Peters (to a new job I hasten to add) said, “The sport may end up deciding what its preferred competitions are and this consumer driven approach may be the best solution.” The best solution to enable UK Athletics to cop out maybe, but not a good one for the so called consumers.

UK domestic competition, particularly league athletics, is Byzantine in nature, a veritable mess of pottage. It needs drastic streamlining. It needs financial incentives. It needs to attract the public to support local teams. Buckner stressed the dangers that face athletics domestically from other more attractive sports if nothing is done. UKA and England Athletics need to be aware of these dangers. If we shelve his ideas and shamble on in the same old, comfortable way we’ll arrive at 2012 in the same disastrous state that we’re in now.

Dwain...yet again (and again)

2008-02-08T08:02:00.000-08:00

“It is better that ten guilty persons escape than one innocent suffer,” said the 18th century eminent jurist William Blackstone. He was repeating a universal doctrine that is in enshrined in law, a doctrine that has existed since the book of Genesis and been endorsed down the centuries by many eminent men including Socrates, Benjamin Franklin and more recently by the eminent English former Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf.

What does the Chief Executive of UK Athletics, Niels de Vos think? “[Life suspensions]…would mean,” he has reportedly said,” one or two people who accidentally get themselves into difficulty might be caught but I’d rather have that than allowing the guilty to get off.”

It is small wonder then that de Vos is arguing that “there is a problem of the law versus sport.” Is this a suggestion that sport should be above the law? It sounds like it and we have to suppose that he has the support of the UKA Board and his Chairman in making these quite extraordinary and ridiculous pronouncements. Who is advising this man?

Now he is to try and set up a bylaw that would preclude all athletics drug cheats from gaining international selection. He is clearly mesmerised by the sanctimonious British Olympic Association’s bylaw that bans those guilty of drug misuse from ever competing for Britain in the Olympic Games but before he follows that organisation’s path he should heed the words of the hard-line former President of WADA, Dick Pound. Pound opined that he felt a legal challenge to the BOA bylaw would succeed in the courts.

All this has been sparked by Dwain Chambers wishing to return to athletics. He was of course part of the BALCO scandal and, in 2004, received a two year ban for testing positive for the designer drug tetrahydrogestrinone (THG). He served his ban and came back to the sport in 2006, coming second in the European Cup and reaching the final of the European Championship. Probably disillusioned with his form he decided to try his luck at American football but it did not work out. He has decided to return to athletics. It is unfortunate for him that the cases of Marion Jones and Justin Gatlin have hit the headlines in the interim so stirring up fierce moral indignation in the heart of some, most particularly Nils de Vos.

They tried to cite the fact that Chambers had not been tested since November 2006 as a reason to prevent him running but have kept singularly quiet about the fact that that was clearly the fault of UKA. The point really is that in picking Chambers to run in major international events in 2006 they set a precedent and so any non-selection following this weekend’s Trials in Sheffield would be retrospective as well as vindictive. Presumably if de Vos has his way Carl Myerscough would also be dropped from international teams and Christine Ohuruogu may well also be in line for the chop.

A number of cases in the past like Modahl and Hylton and the evidence in the Paul Edwards’ case as well as internationally that of Bernard Lagat show that drug testing in sport is far from perfect. In the Modahl case the panel decided that she was guilty without their hardly looking at the evidence. But that, according to de Vos, is unfortunate; the end must justify the means.

Come Sunday all will be revealed.

Dwain ...yet again?

2008-02-06T04:30:00.000-08:00

It is a pity that Niels de Vos chose such a dodgy issue to try and prove his sport’s machismo over the rest as far as drug abuse goes. Once it became clear that Dwain Chambers had never announced or notified anyone of his retirement (which the IAAF confirmed) it was to say the least a display of worrying naiveté to start issuing statements about UK Athletics refusing to select drug cheats for international competitions at the expense of defying the world governing body.

What de Vos didn’t seem to grasp was that far more experienced minds in this area reside at the IAAF and WADA, people who understand what you can and cannot do under the law. Now Chambers is cleared to run at the weekend and de Vos, who frankly has had to eat humble pie, must pray that Craig Pickering does his stuff and wins the title. De Vos may take some comfort in the sundry boos that might greet Chambers as he goes to his blocks.

Steve Cram writing in his column in The Guardian suggests that a way out is to let Chambers run but just not select him for the World Indoors. Such a move would undoubtedly trigger further legal action but you have to ask on what grounds the move could be taken? Chambers was selected by UKA for international competitions in 2006 after he returned from his drug ban and he has not tested positive since. So what has changed? You cannot suddenly alter rules and regulations at the whim of one person.

Chambers was last tested fifteen months ago. Until this recent farce it was because someone at UKA had assumed that he had retired. UKA boobed so perhaps a lot of the bluster is to try and disguise that fact. Surely it is not beyond the wit, even of those at UKA, to devise a written procedure for the retirement of athletes?

Why does sport believe that its rules and regulations need not comply with natural justice or indeed the law? Why do our top administrators feel the necessity to prove that they have more cojones than their peers when it comes to fighting the “drug menace” that is inflicting sport?

Drug taking in sport is such a highly emotive issue that it needs objective judgements and cool heads to deal with it. At the moment these appear to be in very short supply.

With threats of legal action in the air it seems that the lessons of history are, once again, not being heeded by the hierarchy at our governing body who perhaps have decided that they are irrelevant. “What’s past is prologue,” wrote Shakespeare and it would be the end for British athletics if the Modahl saga of almost 14 years ago were to be repeated with similar dire consequences for both parties.

If Chambers had committed a major criminal offence and served his time he would have resumed his place in society and society would, in the main, consider that he had served his due punishment. But certainly not in sport and most certainly not in British sport. The Ohuruogu affair, when the athlete was tried twice for the same offence (itself an injustice), outlined quite clearly that our executive officers believe that the present punishments for doping are inadequate, that the Christian ethic of redemption has no place in athletics (or at the BOA). If that is their belief they should make their case through the agreed channels to the IAAF and to WADA instead of insidiously trying to circumvent the rules by adding their own adjuncts and byelaws as the BOA have done.

Our whole approach is succinctly summed up in a recent British Medical Association (BMA) Ethics Committee report that states: “Current anti-doping strategy is aimed at the eradication of doping in elite sports by means of all-out repression, buttressed by a war-like ideology”

In the months following the BALCO scandal, I’ve been asking people not involved with athletics what they think about our sport. It’s only a small straw poll but the vast percentage said they believed athletics was drug ridden. Yet, as we constantly reiterate, the vastly expensive testing systems reveal only an infinitesimal percentage of positive tests. When they’re told these figures they express considerable surprise. Why is that? Two reasons. Firstly, we have a media that is avaricious for drug stories (and as far as athletics is concerned they’ve been considered the only stories worth writing about in recent years) and secondly, our officials are trumpeting almost weekly their moral credentials in this area. Is it any wonder that the public have this unfortunate and deleterious impression?

What with extraordinary totalitarian ideas like tagging athletes on the drug register being seriously considered in some quarters, top athletes popping up to declare that they missed two tests and the Paul Edwards’ case quietly bubbling away on the back burner you have to say that there is a distinct impression of headless chickens. Writing in Athletics Weekly de Vos, said “Words mean nothing in the fight against drugs in sport, action is everything.” He is absolutely right so can he persuade his colleagues and himself to quieten down and stop giving the erroneous impression of a massive problem in our sport and to take action through the appropriate channels. It could be that this perception of athletics is partly to blame for our current low recruitment.

De Vos also wrote: “We must grasp the opportunity at every level of the sport – nationally and internationally – to show the cheats that we shall do all we can to test you, trace you and throw you out.” This is the emotive, warlike language to which the BMA committee refers but of the 100,000 or so athletes in Britain less than one percent are out of competition tested. The BMA Ethics Committee also stated:

“… costly anti- doping efforts in elite competitive sports concern only a small fraction of the population. From a public health perspective this is problematic since the high prevalence of uncontrolled, medically unsupervised doping practiced in amateur sports…exposes greater numbers of people to potential harm.”

What this means is that athletes outside those on the drug register can dope themselves with impunity for there is no out of competition testing for them and very little or no competition testing either.

De Vos is reported to have favoured the criminalisation of drug use in sport but what he has not grasped is that the levels of proof required in criminal proceedings far exceed those required by sporting authorities where athletes still have to prove their innocence rather then the prosecutors having to prove their guilt. What would stymie drug cases under criminal law are those magic words, beyond all reasonable doubt.

The truth is that drug testing in sport is deeply flawed; it has a quixotic air about it. Marion Jones and Tim Montgomery et al were not caught by the testing authorities but by federal investigation. WADA and the IOC live in a dream world where universal laws against drug abuse are possible. They are not and the sooner sport comes to terms with that fact the sooner we can devise a sensible method of detection and arraignment.

Is drug taking the most vital issue facing UK Athletics? No it is not. I was amazed in telephoning Jack Buckner a couple of weeks ago to find that his Competition Review was considered complete even though it had made no concrete proposals. Coaching too appears in limbo after recent events at UKA and you have to ask where the expertise in this area is going to come from. Coaching and Competition are the two main planks of any successful sport and both have suffered and are suffering in the ten years since the creation of UKA. More on this next week but it seems to me that the honeymoon is over.

Iron Man Pirie

2008-01-21T10:24:00.000-08:00

Gordon Pirie, as well as setting five world records, was a pioneer in British distance running. He was the first British runner to understand that in order to take on the greats of his events (the 5000 and 10000 metres) you had to match their training methods. He felt that the schedules of the modern athlete “must be fantastic time and distance devouring affairs which would produce a machine – not an ordinary machine but one capable of sustained plateau performance.” It is a lesson that, with the very obvious exceptions of Mo Farah and Paula Radcliffe, the fraternal order of British endurance runners and coaches seem to have completely forgotten today.

Though his world record of 13:36.8 for 5000m, set over half a century ago, is now outside the UK top fifty it is a time that would have placed him third in the 2007 rankings (and indeed would have put him in the top five any year this century). And as we are talking of an era that pre-dated synthetic tracks by some twelve years his achievements, set on the loose cinder tracks of the day, seem even more remarkable.

His other metric records were set at 3000 metres. His fastest ever time of 7:52.7 would also have seen him posted in the top five in Britain this century (and in one or two cases in the top three) and his 29:15.2 for 10,000 metres (in his day running 6 miles was more the vogue) would have placed him in the top ten. But this is not a lament about current British distance running but a tribute to one of its greatest ever exponents, a man of determination, talent, sheer guts and bloody mindedness.

When Pirie (nicknamed “Puff-Puff” for his habit of blowing out his cheeks as he ran) came to the fore in Britain it was the East Europeans that were now setting the pace in endurance running. Prior to the Second World War it had been the Finns that had dominated but then the Czech runner, Emil Zatopek amazed the world with his competitive and training exploits. His training sessions became legendary: 20 x 200m followed by 60 x 400m followed by 20 x 200m. When it came to the 1952 Helsinki Olympics his mastery was complete. He won the 5000m, 10000m and marathon in the space of a week.

British running at the time was dominated by Oxbridge. This was the era of Bannister, Brasher and Chataway and though their training (partly under Franz Stampfl) could not be described as light it certainly came nowhere near the intensity of Zatopek or of the emerging Russian, Vladimir Kuts. Pirie (a South London Harrier all his life) knew that the only way to successfully compete against Zatopek, Kuts and a little later the Hungarian trio of Iharos, Tabori and Rozsavolgyi was to match their training. The man he turned to was the progenitor of interval training, the German coach, Woldemar Gerschler.

In a manner of speaking interval training had been in vogue for some time. Nurmi had employed a form of it in the 20’s with metronomic precision on the track and the Swedes, in the 30’s, with their Fartlek (“speed play”) in their pine forests but Gerschler, with the physiologist Professor Herbert Reindell, took it to more scientific heights. He coached the phenomenal 400/800 runner Rudolf Harbig whose 1:46.6 world record stood for sixteen years. He also coached the surprise 1500m winner of the Helsinki Olympics, the Luxembourgian Josy Barthel.

Pirie went to see Gerschler at his base at Freiberg University. He was an ideal pupil – ambitious, hard working and determined to be the best in the world. His world records were not set in paced races but in competitive ones. In his 3000 metres record at Malmö in 1956 he beat the three great Hungarians mentioned above; in his 5000 metres that same year he beat Kuts. 1956 should have been his annus mirabilis but in Melbourne, at the Olympics, he finally succumbed to Kuts in what many believe is one of the greatest 10,000 races of all-time. Many also believe it was Pirie’s greatest ever run.

Track and Field News put the race (in typical flowering fashion) in a nutshell: “…a blond Ukrainian killer in the blood-red shirt of Russia impassively murdered Gordon Pirie and twenty-two other hapless victims before 100,000 horrified witnesses. The figurative slayer was Vladimir Kuts, a twenty-nine year old sailor with an instinct for pogrom.”

Kuts did indeed set a killer pace with an opening lap of 61.2 seconds (just 0.1 secs slower than Snell in his world record mile of six years later). The only man to go with him was Pirie and there then ensued a great cat and mouse contest with Kuts putting in murderous bursts and the Englishman inexorably drawing him back. It was mesmerising stuff. On and on the contest went until in the twentieth lap Kuts swung out and slowed dramatically. Pirie was forced to lead. Kuts, with the roles reversed, eyed Pirie carefully and satisfied with what he saw he jumped his opponent and sped away. Pirie lost contact, his spirit broken, dropping back further and further in the race. He finished eighth. Later in the Games he gained silver, again behind Kuts, in the 5000 metres. Many years later Kuts confirmed that if Pirie had stayed with him after he resumed the lead the Englishman would have won.

There is no doubt that Pirie, perhaps over-confident after his two world records, gambled by running in the 10,000, a distance at which the Ukrainian was 50 seconds faster, giving him a tremendous psychological advantage. Had Pirie confined his bid for Olympic glory to the 5000 metres then the advantage would have been his to a certain extent having beaten Kuts with a 1:55.0 last 800m a few months earlier.

Gordon never won a major international track championship and perhaps it was that he lacked the divine spark necessary to become an Olympic, or latterly, World champion.

I last met Gordon, in December 1991, just a few days before he died of stomach cancer in Christchurch in Hampshire. Since his running days he had successfully taken up coaching in New Zealand training amongst others Anne Audain, a New Zealand record holder and Anne Smith, a Commonwealth medallist. Now, obviously he was physically something of a tragic figure. He asked if we could drive him to the cliff tops, a mile or two away. As we stared at a sunlit Channel we found that Gordon hadn’t changed one iota being as dogmatic as ever and still ranting about the British Board and Crump and Abrahams with whom he had had many a vociferous battle.

Although just 60 years of age he well outlived his great rival who had died from a fourth heart attack some 16 years previously, aged 48. In 1991 British distance running was in sharp decline and he was, inevitably, withering about those who had followed him. He was a great cross country runner, winning two English titles and he was the second BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 1955.

Will we ever see his like again? Probably not with the current African domination of the distance running events. Of one thing you can be sure though: if he was competing today Gordon Pirie would be up at the front of championships races battling it out with the Kenyans and Ethiopians – and giving them a hard time.

On the Right Track?

2008-01-02T13:12:00.000-08:00

As we enter this all important last year of the 29th Olympiad and Beijing approaches all too swiftly there seems to be change in the air presaging a new dawn for British Athletics. We’ve had these dawns before over the past few decades of course and each one has, unfortunately, proved totally false. So the question this time round is with what frame of mind should we appraise this possible renaissance? Should we look at our history as a sport and vent our cynicism on the current efforts of UK Athletics and England or can we detect a genuine desire for change? There are certain straws in the wind to indicate that we should be cautiously optimistic.

When Ed Warner and Nils de Vos entered Athletics House they were appalled by what they found: UKA had become, under David Moorcroft and most particularly Adam Walker, a grossly overblown, dysfunctional organisation that had been unfit for purpose for years. Though it is proving a tense time for the employees de Vos is carrying out a most necessary drastic pruning of the organisation.

After a decade or so UKA has finally recognised that its role in the domestic athletics firmament is purely one of setting policy. Its chequered history has shown that it has been almost totally incapable of delivering the policies that its seemingly endless deliberations have conjured up. It became an ultra tick-a-box organisation. Now, streamlined and led by two men who carry no baggage from the past it can, with due consultation with the implementers, set policies that can revive our ailing sport.

To be fair to UKA the AAA of England showed, in its seventeen years of history, the truism of Lear’s observation that nothing will come of nothing. In its desperate attempts to retain the ancient order it spent all of its time and energy spilling more metaphorical blood than Macbeth. It did nothing, so it achieved nothing. Now it and its satellite territories, still crazily in existence, hope that history will repeat itself so that they can reassume what they consider to be their rightful mantle.

Luckily for the sport new England, after a very hesitant start, is moving forward. There is fresh blood (hopefully to be unspilt this time round) and new ideas as was witnessed at a recent gathering of council members of the nine regions along with England Board representatives. Few, if any, of the old order were present, which means that fresh thinking will at last flood into the sport. As England Chairman, John Graves, recently observed it is vital to grasp the opportunities that this realignment of responsibilities has presented.

Selecting the right person for the post of England Chief Executive now becomes crucial. Again our past history has shown that the appointing of the right people for top executive jobs has not been British athletics’ strongest forte. Frankly there have been some awful choices. The new England CEO has to be able to successfully ensure that the policies arrived at are the culmination of consultation with those that have to implement them and not, as has been the tendency in recent times, to be edicts handed down from on high. He or she, whilst giving the nine regions some independence and flexibility, must also ensure that England athletics as an entity moves forward with a cohesion of purpose. The worst that could happen is that opportunity for athletes depends on their postcode.

It is also vital that faith in the voluntary sector is restored. The multiplicity of activities that comprises athletics requires a large army of volunteers; up until now the devotions of such people have been ignored and even despised. England and its regions need to urgently retain and then recruit; people need to be wooed into the sport and their efforts need to be understood and recognised.

This does not mean kowtowing to the vociferous malcontents whose only modus operandi is to abuse those who run athletics in Britain. In the main they represent no one but themselves and to have no agenda except that of “leave it to the clubs”. A look at the only structures that the clubs are actively involved in, the malfunctioning leagues, gives, if such a course were ever to be embarked upon, a glimpse of a future ten times worse than that we have been through.

Savings of well over £1 million are likely to accrue from the reduction in staff planned by de Vos and it will be interesting to see where those savings will be invested. As mentioned in a previous Track Chat there is serious professional understaffing in the English regions and this situation will worsen if more and more implementation is given to them.

As well as boosting staff in the regions money must also be found to fund a new competitive structure for the sport and UKA and the home countries must also begin the process for the professionalisation of coaching.

What’s past is prologue, writes Shakespeare and in our instance it is that we acknowledge and learn from our mistakes. We stood at a crossroads and embarked on the wrong road. Now we have the opportunity to take the right path. We cannot afford to err again.

Bums on Seats

2007-12-16T14:33:00.000-08:00

“You,” said the late Andy Norman, in that often mimicked, slightly rasping, fruity voice to the tall, majestic black man, who had just asked a favour, “you couldn’t fill a telephone box.” The recipient of this remark was the man who would become Britain’s greatest ever sprinter, Linford Christie and it delighted him to quite frequently remind Andy of his absolutely false prognosis.

“Bums on seats” though was an imperative of Norman and he mostly succeeded at various televised meetings around the country throughout the eighties. The most difficult to sell was the AAA’s with its interminable heats structure and a look at the 2007 meeting (now sadly renamed the UK Championships) at Manchester’s Sports City showed that things haven’t changed much.

It has recently been announced that the Olympic Trials and UK Championships will move to the piecemeal Alexander Stadium in Birmingham and memories have been stirred of some great championships there in the past. 1988 was a particularly vintage year: a baking hot weekend, large crowds, a star-studded cast and intense drama – all the ingredients that have made British athletics great in the past.

But it doesn’t matter where the venue is, if the structure isn’t right then the crowds won’t come. Indeed, if they become bored and restless they’ll not return and the numbers will swiftly fall away as they have done in Manchester. With nostalgia now dispensed with for expediency’s sake, it is the right time to look at the format of this 128 year old meeting.

The biggest mistake, in my judgement, has been to try and entice the public in over all three days by spreading a number of finals. What should be done is to run during the whole of Friday and Saturday an entire programme of track heats and semi-finals with field event pools/finals. Sunday can be then be a star studded affair displaying, within a 3 hour or so programme, the very best of our athletes competing in finals and for places in a major championships. Small adjustments could be made to the programme (perhaps semi-finals and finals for 100 metres on the Sunday) but that should be the general format. Such a programme would simulate, to a certain extent, a major championship with every track event except the longer distances having heats and semi-finals. It would encourage a greater entry.

The aficionados – coaches, relatives, officials – will attend on the first two days anyway but on the third day the publicity should be concentrated on attracting the general public, of selling the sport and filling the stadium. Even at this level of competition the emphasis is still insular: of pleasing ourselves, of doing everything as we’ve always done it and frankly of being somewhat smug about it. We have ignored the Hemingway dictum that as soon as a sport becomes enjoyable enough to the spectator for the charging of admission to be profitable, it becomes entertainment.

That great panjandrum of Performance, Dave Collins, should be persuaded that places at the Olympics et al are not solely his and his team’s patronage but are prizes to be won in combat. Athletes and coaches need to know well in advance exactly what they have to do to make teams; they should not to have to wait for the puff of smoke to emanate from Athletics House, accompanied by some tedious, clichéd homily. The paying public too deserve to know that if athletes achieve a qualifying standard and finish first or second in an event they will be going to Beijing or Berlin or Barcelona. It’s no good calling a trial a Trial if it appears to have no bearing on selection. In the past this cut throat part of the championships was a major selling point for the public.

And what about the two track walks that take up an inordinate amount of time in the programme? They have been there, in one form or another, since 1880 and when you saw such great world class exponents and Olympic medallists as Stan Vickers, Ken Matthews and Paul Nihill strut their stuff, they were tolerable. But their milieu was the open road over 20 and 50 kilometres and sitting for almost an hour watching even these men walking twenty-five laps around a track tested the patience and even the soul of spectators many of whom would decide it was the moment for a cuppa.

Today these events are pure tedium; the great days of great British competitive walking having long gone. Last year at 20 kilometres our top walker Dan King ranked sixth in the world; our second ranked walker, Andy Penn, came 73rd. This sounds great until you realise that I am talking about the women’s ranking lists. Penn was, at 20K, only a fraction under 2 minutes faster than our top woman, Jo Jackson. It seems to me that the various governing bodies should either get behind walking in a big way or put it out of its misery. It is a disgrace that these events are still on the programme and the 10,000 metres, once a great highlight, is relegated to some far flung outpost of the sport. If we must have walks then make them road walks with finishes in the stadium.

The argument against running the 10,000 metres in the main championships is that by omitting it you enable runners to compete at both 5 and 10K (not something that any current British runner would contemplate at World or European level). But British athletes, like Gordon Pirie and David Bedford, have achieved the double in the past, when the championships were run over just two days. The neglect of the 10,000 metres Europe wide is appalling and to paraphrase one of our greatest ever coaches, where there are no 10K races there are no 10K runners. Only ten British runners beat 30 minutes (and Paula’s record) last season. This event badly needs a showcase and it should be restored to the championship weekend.

None of this is rocket science. But, as with competition generally, there is a great lethargy about the national championships. Our sport has been in a deep slumber and woken to find it’s no longer as great as we thought it was. Hey guys (regretfully few gals) its 1670 days, as I write, and counting.

Don’t Mention Christine

Could we now have moratorium on Christine Ohuruogu? Can we all – athletes, coaches and administrators – adopt a Trappist vow on her drug case? It has raised more hackles and more debate than if she had actually failed a drug test. The problems have lain, not with the athlete but with those who have a visceral belief that anybody failing to abide by the rules is a drug cheat and should be banned for life. In Christine’s case (and with many others who are now admitting to missing tests) it is, as well as her own carelessness, the sheer inflexibility of the system that is also at fault.

It does not seemed to have dawned on those at UK Sport who administer anti-doping that if an athlete is into imbibing performance enhancing drugs he or she and whoever is monitoring their intake is going to be damned careful that they do not get caught evading tests. It is, to say the least, self-defeating as Konstadinos Kederis and Ekaterina Thanou found out in 2004. So the Independent Sampling Officers (ISOs) catch the careless and the great hullabaloo that has accompanied Christine over the past eighteen months ensues. More flexible arrangements of these matters would not ensure that those into steroids would get away with it.

The problem is that so many in our sport believe that there should be a lifetime ban for those guilty of a doping offence (not necessarily of doping). However when it comes down to the legalities and a little word called justice wiser heads prevail over emotions and over the decades the maximum sentences for doping have fluctuated between two and four years, with a lifetime ban for a second offence.

Many over-zealous administrators and sections of the media are, however, very unhappy with this situation and are constantly looking for ways and means to circumvent it. The British Olympic Association’s (BOA) pernicious bylaw that hands down a lifetime Olympic ban for doping is a classic example and, it appears, is also a means of subverting accepted sporting law.

Both the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) rules do not go nearly as far and the former president of the latter, Dick Pound, went so far as to recently criticise the BOA (globally almost on its own with such a rule) for its sanctimonious insistence of continuing with it. He went so far as to suggest that if tested in a court of law the bylaw may well be found to be unlawful as well as unjust.

But arguments about all of this are for another day. I understand from a spokesperson for UK Athletics that Christine will shortly begin to receive the benefits she deserves from World Class Podium and will be travelling to South Africa next month on the excellent UKA preparation camp in South Africa. Good news at last for this most beleaguered of athletes.

The Cautionary Tale of William Snook

2007-12-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

William Snook

In 1887 a 25 year old Birchfield Harrier named William Snook, who was the greatest English distance runner at the time, lost his final appeal against a lifetime ban for “roping” (not trying). He notoriously became the first athlete to ever receive a lifetime ban from amateur athletics.

Snook was the sacrificial lamb in a harsh campaign conducted by the fledgling Amateur Athletic Association against what it considered to be the scourge of the sport, professionalism. Their thinking was haunted by a challenge match between two professional runners staged at London’s Lillie Bridge track during that same year. Thirty thousand people turned up to see the two fastest men of the day, Harry Gent and Harry Hutchens, battle it out over 100 yards. Bookmakers thronged the arena, but neither athlete started because each of their rival gangs wanted to arrange for their man to lose, and so the crowd set the stadium ablaze in their anger.

The major problem that the AAA faced was betting. Pedestrianism, where cheating was rife, had dominated the decades leading up to the AAA’s formation in 1880 and it continued to blight amateur athletics. Athletes were persuaded to lose races they could have won; professionals posed as amateurs; amateurs posed as other amateurs especially in the popular handicap races of the time. It was disorganised chaos and the AAA determined that if it was to have any credibility as an organisation it would have to severely implement the second of its Objects of Association: “to deal repressively with any abuse of athletic sports.” It also seemed determined that its repressions of order would not be sidetracked by any miscarriage of justice.

Lillee Bridge ablaze

It was a cold, bleak day in March 1886 with a hint of snow in the air when the runners gathered in Croydon for the National Cross-Country Championships. Snook, the defending champion, was odds on favourite to win by the numerous bookies that were present. Originally he had been a team mate of the great W.G. George at Moseley Harriers where their celebrated rivalry was intense. Walter, however, had moved over to the professional ranks to challenge its best miler William Cummings and Snook now ruled the roost. In 1885 he won four AAA titles in the championships at Southport, three on a Saturday and one, the 10 miles, in a record time on the Monday.

Snook did not win in Croydon though. He was overtaken in the closing stages of the race by J E Hickman of Godiva Harriers and finished second. A month later came a sensational announcement: Snook was disqualified for life from the amateur ranks by the Southern Committee of the AAA for “roping”. What had prompted this extraordinary move by the governing body to banish its leading runner?

Snook’s major problem was that this was not his first offence. In 1881 he was suspended for a year by the Northern AA for conniving at the entry of a professional at an amateur meeting at Southport. Snook continued to compete at meetings not affiliated to the AAA. The AAA then threatened any athletes who competed with Snook with suspension. The organisation would remember him when he again appeared before them five years later.

A month after his 1886 suspension Snook appealed. It was clear that, in contravention of English law, he would have to prove his innocence rather than the AAA prove his guilt. He said he was below his usual weight on the day and had suffered from sore feet in the closing stages. The AAA, already suspicious, did not believe him. Rumours had been rife that Snook had deliberately thrown the race to aid the bookies, presumably for some remuneration. His appeal was thrown out by 15 votes to 11. A second appeal, backed by the Midlands AAA, was lost by 13 votes to 12. Finally the matter was raised at the next AGM when, after a long discussion that went well into the night, a motion for reinstatement was lost by 26 votes to 16. Snook was finished as an amateur. The evidence against him had been subjective and circumstantial, but he could not disprove it. He provided the AAA with a major scapegoat to warn other amateur runners of the day.

The AAA continued on its draconian path. In 1882 it had financed the Northern AA to enable it to prosecute for fraud a professional posing as an amateur. He was sentenced to one month’s imprisonment with hard labour. Over the next twenty years there were many similar cases and imprisonment for six months with hard labour was not an uncommon punishment

Payments to athletes was the AAA’s second biggest problem after betting. Many top stars were paid by clubs to appear at their meetings to boost attendance. In order to catch miscreants it adopted the principle of Queens Evidence: indemnifying those willing to provide evidence. This meant that club secretaries who had offered payment to athletes often sat in judgment on them for accepting them. In 1896 six top British athletes were accused of receiving appearance money and five were banned for life. Others followed and by the end of 1897 the leading British runners for each event from 100 yards to 20 miles were disqualified from competing sine die. The next great distance runner Alfred Shrubb became so fed up with the AAA deciding where and when he could run abroad that he defied them by deciding to race in Canada in 1905. He was suspended for life in 1906 after an investigation into his expenses for the trip. Like all the others he turned professional.

Finally, in 1906, the AAA persuaded the government to introduce a clause into the Street Betting Act that would give power to sports promoters to control betting at their meetings, including calling in the police to deal with objectors. After a quarter of a century the battle was over.

Well, not quite. In the ensuing eighty years many fine athletes, including Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn and the Swedes, Arne Andersson and Gunder Hägg, fell foul of the amateur ethos and were suspended. The last great one was Wes Santee, the American miler who was banned in 1955 for abuses of expenses. By 1980, a century after the formation of the AAA, it was obvious that payments to athletes in the celebrated brown envelopes were rife. Two years later the IAAF passed an historic law that enabled athletes to receive payment for competing.

And what of William Snook? He dabbled at professional athletics for a while and then became the licensee of two pubs in Birmingham. Finally he settled in France where he continued running and won a celebrated challenge match in the Bois de Boulogne in 1891. Then he went off the radar until April, 1916 when word reached Birchfield that he was destitute and in bad health in Paris. Athletic supporters raised the funds for hospital fees and to bring him back to England but his health did not improve. He returned to Birmingham in October and was placed in the workhouse at Highcroft Hall where he died two weeks or so before Christmas. He was just 55. He was buried in Wilton Cemetery with few mourners. It was a sad end to a great runner and probably the greatest victim of the AAA’s repressive measures against professionalism.

Bibliography

The Official Centenary History of the AAA by Peter Lovesey, published by Guinness 1979
The History of Birchfield Harriers 1877-1988 by Professor W.O. Alexander and Wilfred Morgan published by Birchfield Harriers 1988 .

Crime and Punishment

2007-11-30T10:00:00.000-08:00

Sporting authorities should not be at all surprised at the negative reaction from some sections of the media (and therefore the public) to Christine Ohuruogu winning her appeal against the BOA lifetime ban. Why? Because they have been crying wolf too often about “the drug menace in sport”.

Christine became the villain and then the heroine of a soap opera that has dragged on for eighteen months, severely damaging the image of athletics (especially as for weeks it was the only story). But with Jacques Rogue, Lamine Diack and other sport’s leaders hardly able to open their mouths on any unrelated topic without feeling the need to emphasise their commitment to fighting drug abuse in sport, the clearance of Ohuruogu tends, in many people’s minds, to actually suggest a lessening of will. Thanks to years of such propaganda the general public believes that athletics is a drug ridden sport.

The problem for everyone is that, from the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) down there is no idea as to how big a problem drug taking in sport is. John Scott, who heads up UK Sport’s drug abuse programme, could not answer that question a few weeks ago on Radio 5 Live. The only data available suggests that the menace is minuscule but that doesn’t fit in, as we noted in a previous Track Chat, with the need to find governmental finance for the over expensive WADA.

Drug testing in sport appears to be in chaos. There are inconsistencies around the world in methodology and punishment with various countries vying with each other to be the most draconian. Different sports have different rules, especially with regard to out-of-competition testing; some sports don’t have testing at all. Politics entered the frame with the European governments trying to postpone the election of Australian John Fahey as the new head of WADA. Of the 200 or more countries affiliated to the IAAF I would suggest that less than a quarter have an efficient drug testing programme.

And, of course, there is the British Olympic Association’s (BOA) bylaw, highlighted by the Ohuruogu case.

The problem with the bylaw is that it flies in the face of (in addition to natural justice) both the International Olympic Committee (IOC) ban and with that of WADA. Jacques Rogue announced in late summer that athletes handed doping bans of more than six months face being barred from only the next Olympic Games. Dick Pound, the outspoken former head of WADA, said that the BOA should fall in line with the WADA code, which would ensure that athletes, guilty or not, have only to face one quasi-trial; Ohuruogu had to face three (at some expense). Ed Warner, Chair of UK Athletics, is right to point out that inconsistencies of punishment lead to confusion in everyone’s mind and do not serve sport well. He’s wrong to say that the BOA bylaw catches drug cheats. It’s merely there to prove that the organisation is more macho about these matters than anybody else.

Some time ago I wrote, very much tongue in cheek, that tagging might be the answer to catching drug cheats. Now people are putting forward the idea that athletes’ whereabouts should be satellite monitored via their mobile phones. Who knows where that could lead? The late Arthur Miller wrote of the Salem witch trials that “the repressions of order were heavier than seemed warranted by the dangers against which the order was organised.”

Or, as Boris Becker more succinctly put it after a Wimbledon loss: “Nobody died out there,” he said. “It’s only sport for God’s sake.”

Paranoia rules okay.

All Change in Coaching?

The lamentations and hand wringing that have followed England’s (and all the home countries) failure to qualify for soccer’s European Championship have, in one instance, a distinct resonance with British athletics.

A poor standard of coaching in “the beautiful game” was frequently put forward as one reason in many for England’s generally poor Euro 2008 qualifying record but poor coaching per se is applicable across a whole range of sports in Britain. In athletics you only have to attend any school or club competition to realise that fundamental techniques in both track and field events are just not being taught. A decade or more of neglect of coaching by UKA has left its mark.

UKA at least recognised that the teaching of athletics in schools had deteriorated sharply over at least a couple of decades. The problem was that its solutions were derisible and swiftly condemned by experienced coaches, especially former national coaches, who had been exiled from the sport by UKA’s Year Zero policy in 1997.

The governing body’s failure to call upon the services of highly experienced former national coaches to design and implement an exciting, modern programme of teaching athletics in schools has had a disastrous impact. Such a programme needs urgent attention now.

The past decade has seen the emergence of two groups of coaches. The first is composed of those who qualified before the Fisher Report advocated a radical change in coach education and the second comprises those who qualified afterwards.

The first group, many of whom qualified some twenty to forty years ago, do not appear to have been given much opportunity to update their knowledge. Those that did either decided not to take up the opportunity or were disillusioned when they attended. Many appear to be implementing only that which they learnt back in the mists of time. And, as we all know, those mists can become hazier as the years go by. UKA has not, up until now and despite the revolution in communication methods, promulgated up to date knowledge to practising coaches. Indeed all the governing bodies that have misruled British athletics since 1960 have failed to communicate with qualified coaches at all. You learn, you qualify, you coach, you die.

The second group has gone through, at some expense, a series of weekend courses with appointed tutors. Some are questioning whether many tutors have the necessary hands on, practical experience to pass on to trainees. In other words has coaching become too much of an academic exercise? The mentoring system of Level 1 coaches which was supposed to provide such practical experience has been a complete failure mainly because it clearly assumed numbers of Level 2 coaches and above that simply were not there.

These may seem wide sweeping statements but what I see on training tracks and competition arenas and hear from a wide range of coaches it is obvious that something is radically wrong with coach education.

At the recent sprint conference held in Bath Tony Hadley told us that Steve Platt, one time coach to Mark Lewis Francis, was extremely ill. Steve (unceremoniously dumped, if you remember, as Mark’s coach by the Collins’ Performance regime) asked Tony to find someone at their training track to take over his group. “I couldn’t,” Tony said, “in all honesty, find anyone.”

The separation of Coaching from Performance has been a disaster. Former Director of Coaching, Frank Dick, also at the Bath conference, stressed how important it was that the individual coach be the lynchpin of the services that can now be provided to an elite athlete. It is the individual coach that in most cases braves all weather conditions, day in and day out, fifty two weeks of the year, who knows the athlete, knows his or her personality quirks and knows the social and family background that is best suited to lead a team that can produce an athlete’s ultimate performance.

Yet when it came to it UKA did not appoint a coach to head up Performance when Max Jones retired and so the dichotomy between Performance and Coaching has widened and the personal coach has been moved ever further to the periphery of preparation. This and the fact that coaches of international or near international athletes can never be sure if their charge will suddenly be whisked away to one of UKA’s team of professional coaches has caused considerable resentment.

You would not mind so much if the new squad system was proving successful but the statistics outlined in previous Track Chats indicate quite clearly that this is not the case. Unless you do what the East Germans did and move athletes permanently to a training school or camp, like the one they had at Brandenburg, you have to accept that training squads have a limited value and that the emphasis must shift to concentration on support of the individual coach.

What is coaching all about if it is not about performance? The experiment of demarcation has failed and must be rescinded. An overall, powerful Head Coach, heading a team of the best coaches in the UK, must be installed if 2012 is to mean anything for the future of our sport in this country.

That Things Might Change or Cease

2007-11-22T02:22:00.000-08:00

Jack Buckner highlighted some crucial points about the future of our sport in the introduction to his excellent work in progress, the Competition Review.

He said that:-
• athletics could easily dwindle and become a minority sport.
• that if change doesn’t happen the post 2012 environment for athletics will be very bleak indeed
• currently we are asking them [young athletes] to compete in a framework that has changed little in the last 30 years
• sports need to capture the imagination of young people.

British athletics has the opportunity to change, to turn itself around with the staging of the XXXth Olympics in London in 2012 but to do so radical reform of its competitive structures is required and the auguries, based on recent history, are not good.

The Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002, with its glamour and excitement also provided such an opportunity. Spectators and television viewers, enthused by what they saw, wanted more and kids wanted to take up athletics. What was presented to them were drab and dreary clubs taking part in drab and dreary competitions. The sport sank back into its comfort zone of not just 30 years but, in some cases, a century.

When Jack had the temerity to speak to young people about their attitudes to athletics he found that not only were we failing to attract young people but were losing them in droves. For today’s youth athletics is highly unfashionable compared with the other major sports.

Where I disagree with Jack is when he says: “The conclusions of this report are not critical of any individual or organisation.” I think he is wrong not to criticise because it is the attitude over recent decades of the many individuals and organisations that provide competition, along with the critical failure of the various governing bodies to address the issue, that have landed us in the dire position that we are today. As a sport we fear change.

So let us be critical (nothing new here then). Take, for example, the 38 year old British Athletics League. The BAL has not changed its format in all that time. In its early days it was sponsored and was, for a short period, actually televised. Its last sponsor was the Guardian Royal Exchange. The method of renewal was somewhat quaint. The League’s chairman of the time sat down annually with a GRE representative (usually in the hospitality tent at the end of the cup competition) and, after a short discussion, a glass of wine and a handshake, a metaphorical puff of smoke would emanate to indicate that all was well for the following season. Then, one year, inevitably, the metaphorical puff did not appear.

Since then the BAL hasn’t had a whiff of a sponsor and so a couple of years ago it announced an overhaul of its format to try and attract sponsorship. With a fanfare of trumpets the results of its deliberations were announced. The first division would become known as the BAL Premiership and the subsequent three divisions would be known as BAL National. That was it, apart from an, apparently, not over popular tweaking of their cup competition.

As you might possibly imagine BAL hasn’t exactly had to stem a stampede of would-be sponsors and you have to wonder how on earth the “hugely committed individuals with incredible energy and enthusiasm who run our sport”, as Buckner calls them, came up with such a crass solution to the League’s problems. What BAL needed, along with the rest of the leagues, and has done for years, is to plan for change with a clean sheet of paper.

As Jack has pointed out, to ignore the accelerating social changes that have taken place over the past couple of decades is a gross failure by administrators. League athletics, based on the false assumption that the sport is thriving is, especially in the lower divisions, not fit for purpose.

The spectacle of very young athletes travelling for hours on coaches to compete in one event and often against just one competitor and then await more hours before the journey home is a classic example of the problems being faced in the leagues’ lower divisions. Clubs delude themselves if they feel these are examples of fun or good practice. How on earth can they be classified as enjoyment?

Jack is right when he says that the majority of the sport wants big changes to the competition structures. It is not so much that I am concerned about his review that addresses those changes, but more about the ability and indeed the will of UK Athletics to deliver it.

When asked the 64 thousand dollar question as to what will be done with regard to competitions that refuse to fall in line with the plans, Zara Hyde Peters said: “Nothing is planned as, so far, all the competition providers have been willing to engage in discussions. The sport may end up deciding what its preferred competitions are and this "consumer driven" approach may be the best solution.” The best solution for whom? Not for athletes, who are never consulted, that’s for sure.

Not good enough and, frankly, a cop out. Why? Because the BAL, UK Women’s League, National Junior League, Young Athletics League and all the other sundry organisations are all examples of this “consumer driven” approach that has led us to the mass of disparate competitions that we have today. Central authority disdained organising club competition so clubs and individuals did it for themselves. As a result clubs have been sucked into a vastly expensive, complex competition vortex, involving thousands of miles of travel, from which, because of a lack of alternatives, they cannot escape.

County and territorial championships are continuing their steady decline. In the 2007 Cumbria county championships 42% of the entries were in the Under 11/13 age group, whilst only 17% were U20/Senior. Only 15% of track events required heats, all in the U11/U13/U15 age groups. 62% of the 16 uncontested events were field events. I suspect that many other counties display similar problems.

In the Northern Under 20 and Senior championships there were less than 5 competitors in 13 events, 11 of which were field events. Just over half were in the Under 20 age group.

Clubs, counties and regions and their representatives are in a strait jacket and only central authority can cut them out of it. UKA and the national federations have to grasp the nettle and recognise that if we are to arrive at 2012 with a modern, attractive sport that can entertain and deal with the massive interest that the Olympics will generate a wholesale reform of domestic competition is needed. They need to organise, drive through and invest heavily in radical competition change. A key question will be: at what level of competition should we be endeavouring to attract the public? Whatever level is chosen UKA has to persuade our top athletes to take part even if it requires financial incentives.

The above criticisms may seem harsh to some but we live, as Shakespeare put it, in “most brisk and giddy-paced times” and before we know it we will suddenly arrive on the eve of the XXXth Olympics in 2012 in London. If we are still appeasing the usual suspects who are still whinging to Athletics Weekly, listening to Luddites crying “back off!” and generally still pussyfooting around then we are as Shakespeare also put it “doomed for a certain term to walk the night.”

The Paula Factor

2007-11-16T06:00:00.000-08:00

The Paula Factor

If Mara Yamauchi and Dan Robinson (with all due respect to both), our two best 2007 marathoners prior to the New York race, had entered and been our main representatives in the Big Apple would the BBC have decided to cover the marathon live and so extensively as they did? I think not. It was the presence of Paula Radcliffe, the only bankable superstar that we have, that did the trick.

Shots of post-race Paula, holding daughter Isla and seemingly swiftly recovered after one of her greatest races, made the front pages of most of the newspapers the next day, supplanting those of the mummified 3000 year old Pharaoh, Tutankhamen. At long last, after a very arid year, British athletics is making good news. Or, at least, one athlete is.

Throughout 2007 one has daily scoured the national press almost in vain to find news of athletics. The international season for us virtually began in late June and ended at the end of the championships in Osaka in late August. The other major sports - football, rugby, tennis and cricket - now have year round competitions but international track and field athletics for us confines itself, if we’re lucky, to eight or nine weeks. Indeed, for the majority of the general public, athletics in 2007 was just the week or so of the world championships.

This declining general interest is reflected by the seriously worrying UK viewing figures* for the major international championships between 2002 and 2006. These are important because all four major meetings were held in Europe and were therefore mostly within evening viewing times. They show a steady decline of total viewers from Munich (where Paula ran on the track) with
52, 530, 000 viewers, to Gothenburg (where she didn’t) with 23,680,000, a decline of 54.8%. The decline in peak viewing figures was even greater at 64.0%. A similar further sharp fall up to 2012 would surely see an appraisal of athletics by television and major sponsors as to whether it is a sport worth supporting any longer.

During its first ten years UK Athletics ignored its public and its fans. Poor appointments in the area of media relations meant that they were virtually non existent. Of course we didn’t have the track stars that made up the Golden Era – Christie, Black, Coe, Cram, Ovett, Budd, Gunnell, Lewis et al but right into the early years of the 21st century we still had mega stars like Holmes, Jackson, Macey, Edwards and Radcliffe, people with personalities that the public could identify with, people who you wanted to know more about, people who could very effectively sell the sport, keep it in the public eye; people we didn’t just ineffectively use but didn’t use at all. The only publicity emanating from athletics during what seemed to be an endless, barren decade of news and information came from Fast Track publicizing its televised meetings. UKA’s Athletic House was like a Trappist Monastery.

But it’s not just about poor communication and public relations; it’s also about image, the image that is presented by the competitions that we provide. Frankly it’s about entertainment or a lack of it.

Across Europe the one-day meetings hold sway. They are long past their sell-by date, churning out the same sort of fare that they have been presenting for the last twenty years – East Africans beating other East Africans; American sprinters beating other American sprinters in a sort of repetitive whistle-stop circus (everybody seemingly in the latest Nike vest) around the continent. Terrestrial television has long had enough and to see the IAAF Golden League meetings in Britain this year you had to switch to the Irish pay-to-view channel Setanta Sports.

Our televised meetings, part of the complicated and grandiosely named IAAF World Athletics Tour, are not immune from criticism. They too are beginning to have a jaded, we’ve-been-here-before look about them. Like the rest of the IAAF circuit these meetings lack a meaningful competitive edge and the relative decline in British standards means that the crowds that, in particular, flock to Crystal Palace once a year look in vain for British success. A sign of the times, if we needed one, is the fact that in the IAAF events staged at Sheffield and Crystal Palace in 2007 there were only three British winners in thirty-five events. Unlike say Switzerland or Belgium, the public here have come to expect more.

In addition there is a shocking neglect of throwing events. At Glasgow, Sheffield and London only three were staged, two for men and one for women. If our throwers can’t get international competition in Britain where else are they to obtain it?

It gets worse. When we go lower down the scale for our track and field competitions we find they are acts of sheer self-indulgence at regional and local level where the general public is deemed surplus to requirements. The word entertainment is not in the vocabulary of the event organisers. This is just as well, given the often day-long, turgid affairs (excluding many hours of travel), exhausting to athlete, official and spectator alike, that are inflicted on them. The good news is that you don’t have to pay to get in; the bad news is that you’d demand your money back if you did.

Buckner’s competition review (of which more next week) only tackles these matters at junior level and again the word entertainment is conspicuous by its absence. The idea, recently mooted, that our competitions should be “consumer driven” would drive us on a pathway to disaster rather than paradise.

Road running has grasped the nettle of social change and declining interest and combines serious competition with fun running to provide entertainment to the crowds who to turn out to run and to spectate. The three most popular athletics events on television this year have been the London Marathon, Great North Run and the New York Marathon. They provided exciting drama along with colourful entertainment from thousands of runners. On a much smaller scale there are hundreds of such races all round Britain. It may well be, if the present trends continue, that road running will overtake track and field in popularity (if it hasn’t already).

It’s not that the general public is tiring of track and field but rather that track and field seems to be tiring of the general public. Five years ago, although British athletics was not inundated with international success, our sport was on a high. The Commonwealth Games in Manchester drew excited capacity crowds every evening, who roared on competitors irrespective of nationality but reserved that extra effort for British athletes. TV mirrored the success with great viewing figures that extended into the European’s in Munich a week or so later. It was a euphoric and dramatic week; athletics went very briefly ahead of football in the popularity stakes, people wanted more. They didn’t get it. They didn’t get it then because British athletics wasn’t geared up to provide anything more than its usual uninspiring fare; they wouldn’t get it now for the same reason.

Unless UK Athletics grasps this nettle of providing, investing in and being responsible for, at every level, entertaining, purposeful athletics and sweeps aside the present mishmash of humdrum, repetitive competition, the sport is indeed in trouble. Paula won’t be running forever.

* - Sources: IFM International Sport Analysis and European Broadcasting Union

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Hooray for Windrush

2007-11-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

June 22 next year will see the 60th anniversary of a significant moment in the history of British athletics. On that day, in 1948, 492 passengers from Jamaica stepped on to our shores from the liner Empire Windrush looking for a better life in this country. It could be said that it was the most significant post-war moment in British athletics, a moment that meant that the sport in Britain would never be the same again. Why? Because future generations of those 492 passengers, and of those who followed them, would transform sprinting in this country beyond all recognition. The Afro-Caribbeans had arrived and unbeknown to them (and to us at the time) they brought with them a genetic legacy from their ancestry in West Africa, now acknowledged as the original home of world sprinting.

Currently the Afro-Caribbean population of Britain is less then 2% of the whole but in the past twenty-five years black athletes have accounted for 43% of medals won by British athletes at global championships. It is a staggering statistic.

It took twenty years for the impact of Windrush to make itself felt. It was not until 1968 that the 18 year old Anita Neil ran in the 1968 Olympics. A year earlier she had gained her first international. She paved the way for the first exciting black sensation when in 1971 Sonia Lannaman, at just 14 years of age, represented Great Britain in two indoor internationals. In 1972 she was at the first of her two Olympic Games in Munich when another milestone was achieved: three black athletes – Neil, Lannaman and Andrea Lynch - represented Britain in the 100 metres. In 1978 Lannaman won Commonwealth gold at 100 metres and in Moscow in 1980 she won an Olympic relay bronze. By this time other outstanding black women sprinters, like Beverly Goddard and Heather Hunte, were making their mark internationally but it is an indication of a tailing away of black influence in British women’s sprinting in subsequent decades that, almost 30 years on, four of the above are still in the UK all-time 100 metres top eight.

It was not until the mid-seventies that the pioneering males, like Mike McFarlane, Ainsley Bennett and Ernest Obeng, began to make an impression. In other events too there was increasing black influence – Aston Moore in the triple jump; Clive Longe and Daley Thompson in the Decathlon; Tessa Sanderson in the javelin; Verona Elder in the 400 metres. There was also a mix; some like Lannaman, Elder and Thompson were born in Britain; other like Sanderson, Goddard and Moore had followed their families in what was now a familiar pattern of arrival: father, then mother, then children.

As the second generation found their feet so the domination of British sprinting began and has continued ever since. Gradually AAA championship finals became all black affairs; nine of the top ten all-time performers at 100 metres have been black athletes; the last white Englishman to win an AAA 100 metre title was Brian Green in 1971; pre-1987 Britain had won only one European Cup 100 metres; post-1987 Britain’s black sprinters annexed 11 out a possible 17 titles – Linford Christie clocking seven consecutive wins. In 1992 Christie became the third British athlete to win the Olympic 100 metres.

However several black sprinters had served Britain well before the arrival of the Empire Windrush. Arthur Wharton set the first British record in 1886 at the AAA Championships by running “evens” for the 100 yards. Born in what is now Ghana he came to Britain to train as a preacher. He was a superb all round sportsman winning the AAA’s again in 1887. He also became Britain’s first black professional footballer playing in goal for Darlington and Preston North End in the FA Cup.

Thirty-three years later Britain gained its first ever Olympic sprint medals when Harry Edward (also born in Ghana) won bronze in both the 100 and 200 metres. This was bettered in 1928 by Jack London, yet another Ghanaian, who won silver in the 100 metres at the Amsterdam Olympics. His running was summed up by W.R. Loader in his celebrated book Testament of a Runner”. “The man’s will,” Loader wrote, “vibrated down the track like the twanging of a great bow-string.” Totally incidentally, Edward, London and the Olympic gold medallist of 1924, Harold Abrahams, were all coached by the Italian born, Sam Mussabini.

In 1945 Aircraftsman Emmanuel McDonald Bailey from Trinidad elected to stay in Britain after the war. A year later he won the first of seven AAA double sprint titles. In the 1948 Olympics at Wembley he finished sixth (being hampered by injury that season) but four years later he won Britain another Olympic medal in Helsinki with bronze in the 100 metres. “Mac” as he was universally known, along with Arthur Wint from Jamaica, ran at meetings all over Britain and did much to popularize the sport.

This phenomenon is worldwide. The domination by black athletes of Olympic and World championship sprinting is almost total. It is now 23 years since there was a white finalist in the Olympic 100 metres and 27 since one took the gold medal (Alan Wells in 1980 in Moscow when the Games were boycotted by the USA and Caribbean countries). There is not one white sprinter in the fifty-two athletes who have bettered 10 seconds for the 100 metres

To write in these terms only a short time ago would have been considered racist by some. To assert black superiority in any sporting event was felt to stigmatise them with the American euphemism of “dumb jock.” Sir Roger Bannister got himself into all sorts of trouble in 1995 when he opined that there were biomechanical and physiological differences between populations.

When I first met the great Lee Evans, some nine years after he had won gold at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and became the first man to run under 44 seconds for 400 metres, he was coaching in Nigeria with a few other former American athletes and á la Alex Haley, was trying to connect with his roots. His theories as to why black athletes were so superior to white in the power events were stark. “We were brought to America as physical specimens to work the plantations,” Lee told me,” the best men were mated with the best women. Our ancestors were bred for strength and speed.”

Today there seems to be an agreed realisation that different populations have varying physical talents. West Africa produced power athletes; East Africa produces endurance runners; Slavic populations produce heavy throwers (74% of the fifty all-time best hammer throwers come from that part of the world). The physical build and stoicism of the Japanese people reflects itself in marathon running. Migration from Africa since the beginning of human existence created this diversity of populations and today, as Lee pointed out, because of the iniquitous slave trade there is a Diaspora of West African athletes throughout North America and the Caribbean. Whatever, the arrival of that pioneering group from Jamaica almost six decades ago is something that British athletics should celebrate next June.