“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.
Sunday, 16 December 2007
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
The Cautionary Tale of William Snook
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.
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 .
Friday, 30 November 2007
Crime and Punishment
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.
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.
Thursday, 22 November 2007
That Things Might Change or Cease
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.”
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.”
Friday, 16 November 2007
The Paula Factor
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
.
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
.
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Hooray for Windrush
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.
Sunday, 21 October 2007
Justice and Injustice
Justice …
The remorseful wailings of Marion Jones following her disclosure that she was heavily into performance-enhancing drugs will cut little ice with the sport at large. Not only is her career in ruins but her life also. The winner of five medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics had, since those achievements, stoutly denied taking steroids and she committed perjury in 2003 by continuing to do so to federal agents. It is a crime that could well see her end up in jail when she comes to be sentenced next January.
Athletically this means that the top eleven women’s 100 metre performances of all time were almost certainly chemically assisted (the late Florence Griffith-Joyner, world record holder, was strongly reputed to be on steroids). The irony is, as IAAF President Diack noted, that Jones would probably have won those medals on natural ability alone.
In 2000 Jones married shot putter C J Hunter who tested positive for drugs; she then partnered Tim Montgomery before he admitted in 2004 to taking human growth hormone. Both Montgomery and Jones publicly travelled to Montreal to consult with Charlie Francis, the notorious coach to Ben Johnson. Montgomery was later indicted for money laundering and is awaiting sentence. Jones was coached by Jamaican Trevor Graham eleven of whose athletes have tested positive for drugs. She was also named by Victor Conte, indicted owner of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), who escaped jail by spilling the beans on athletes whom he had supplied with drugs. She later moved to be coached by Steve Riddick, a number of whose athletes had also tested positive. Riddick was indicted and found guilty along with Montgomery for their fraudulent activities.
At long last justice has caught up with this clique of undesirables who have brought shame upon the sport of athletics. As for Jones she is either extremely devious or extremely gullible.
.
So, the Sydney gold medal in the 100 metres will now be awarded to Greek sprinter, Ekaterini Thanou who came second? Well, possibly not. Thanou and fellow Greek sprinter, Konstadinos Kederis were, in 2004, before the Athens Olympics, involved in an incident worthy of a Feydeau farce when in scurrying around the Greek capital on a motor cycle, possibly to avoid drug tests, they crashed, received injuries that put them out of the Games. Both were banned for two years by admitting to avoiding three tests (their avoidance tactics had become legendary) and they face perjury charges regarding their accident. Kederis, it will be remembered, deprived Darren Campbell of a gold medal in Sydney in 2000. Their coach Christos Tzekos was banned for life.
The cheats are caught, rejoice, rejoice. Well not quite. The World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) with its 25 million dollar budget and the United States Anti Doping Agency (USADA) with its 13 million dollar budget both failed to nail Jones through much vaunted testing procedures and scientific research. They had to rely on federal investigators to force an admission in court. Indeed Jones was found positive for the banned substance Erythropoietin (EPO) in 2006 but her B sample did not confirm the finding and she was cleared. In the cases of Thanou and Kederis both admitted to missing tests but had never tested positive.
3279 out-of-competition tests in all sports were carried out by WADA in 2006, providing just 1.74% of adverse findings. USADA similarly carried out 8421 tests that year, resulting in 0.36%.positives. In athletics the IAAF recently announced that 1132 tests were carried out at the Osaka world championships resulting in 0% of positive findings and in the past twelve months (July 2006 to June 2007) UK Athletics have announced a total of 650 tests also resulting in 0% positives.
Such statistics indicate one of two conclusions: either the test statistics show a miniscule level of drug misuse and questions have to be asked of those who continually bang the drum about the massive drug menace in sport or the testing procedures are not working and cheats like Jones, Thanou and Kederis are getting away with it. Either way serious questions about value for money should (but wont) be tendered in November at the World Conference on Doping in Sport in Madrid
… and Injustice
Paul Edwards, former international shot putter, must be the only athlete in the world to have his drugs case debated in parliament, not once but twice.
On the first occasion the matter was raised in 2002 by Edwards’ then MP Andrew Hunter. The MP, a former Minister at the Northern Ireland office, who would be well versed about bigotry and obfuscation on a grand scale, was scathing in his criticism of the sports authorities. He found the stonewalling by the then UK Sports Director of Anti-Doping, Michelle Verroken highly frustrating and suspicious. “It’s my first experience of athletics’ administration,” he told me five years ago, “and I find it appalling.” The reply by the then Sports Minister, Richard Caborn, was full of self-congratulatory guff about testing in Britain and he suggested to Hunter the various options that were open to Edwards to pursue his case.
None of them bore fruit so this month, Maria Miller, Edwards’ new MP, again raised the matter in the House. Appalled by the injustice, she had taken up Edwards’ cause and its lack of progress over the past five years. She had had correspondence with Caborn before he left his post in the Brown reshuffle. What resulted from his advice was a highly predictable bout of buck passing by UKA, the IAAF, WADA and the Court of Sports Arbitration (CSA). Gerry Sutcliffe, the new Sports Minister, promised to help Miller through the mire of bureaucracy so that the case could be heard by the CSA but nobody is holding their breath.
This is a case that is not only disturbing for Edwards but has much wider implications for sport in this country and around the world; it concerns the efficacy of drug testing and it raises questions as to whether UK Sport and the London IOC accredited laboratory, that will be in the forefront of drug testing at the 2012 Olympics, attempted a cover-up in order to protect its integrity.
These are serious allegations but some believe they have credence because in another case, that of athlete Mark Hylton in 2000, the laboratory refused to accept criticism of its procedures by an eminent authority even though such criticisms were accepted by the IAAF and by the then UK Sport Chairman, Sir Rodney Walker, who was quoted as saying, “What we will be looking for is reassurance that the lapses will not be repeated. If the situation arose where there was a lack of confidence [in the laboratory] then we can send our samples abroad."
In 1994 Edwards tested positive for an anabolic steroid and was flown back in public disgrace from the Commonwealth Games in Canada, along with Diane Modahl (who subsequently cleared her name at the expense of personal bankruptcy). Edwards lost on appeal and was given a 4 year ban. From that moment he has suffered from the age old adage of “once a cheat, always a cheat.”
He was out-of-competition tested in June, 1997 and from that very moment there have been doubts and suspicions about the integrity of this particular test. Edwards was duly accused of taking a prohibited substance and was, because it was a “second offence”, banned in 1998 from the sport for life. He appealed and lost.
For the next eight years he and his team of advisers, including MPs and scientists, have fought to uncover evidence that they believed would clear his name. They met with years of obfuscatory stonewalling of almost unbelievable proportions from UK Sport and the Drugs Control Centre (DCC), both claiming immunity from disclosure under the Data Protection Act. Their problem was that the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) didn’t agree with them. UK Sport successfully stonewalled, despite being formally warned by the DPC, until in December, 2003 the laboratory doors were suddenly flung open and Simon Davis, who has a Ph.D. in mass spectrometry and is a highly respected expert in sporting drug cases, was allowed in and found 600 pages of evidence that had not only been withheld from Edwards but crucially also from the disciplinary and appeal panels that heard the case. Further evidence, it transpires, is still being withheld.
What he found convinced many people that there had been a serious miscarriage of justice. Not only that but they also raised the possibility in people’s minds that the prolonged stonewalling was undertaken so that when, inevitably, the evidence had to be produced, the time for Edwards’ to appeal would have elapsed. He was in Catch 22. He had no new appeal until he saw the evidence; he wasn’t allowed the evidence until it was too late to appeal.
Doubts surrounded this whole process from the moment that Edwards gave his sample, to its journey to the laboratory and to it being tested at the Drugs Control Centre. These could be summarised as follows:
1. The length of the test was recorded as taking 3 minutes. Any Independent Sampling Officer (ISO) would tell you that to carry out all the correct procedures is impossible in that time.
2. The ISO did not follow set procedures laid down by UK Sport. Without the pH being recorded there is no way of knowing if the sample degraded over the weekend – in the same way that Modahl’s did under exactly the same circumstances.
3. Many doubts surround the transportation of the sample from the ISO to the laboratory and the necessary paperwork was withheld from Edwards’ team by DHL, the transporter, on apparent instructions from Verroken (who mysteriously left UK Sport under an unspecified cloud almost to the day that Davis was allowed entry to the laboratory). The transportation took 3 days over a hot June weekend so the possibility of some sample degradation is high.
4. Davis highlights gross errors in the calculation of Edwards’s testosterone/epitestosterone (T/ET) ratio.
5. The B sample container was damaged and had to be opened with a hacksaw.
6. A component was missing from the methods of calibration thus making them useless.
7. There was contamination of the water (which should be pure) used to test levels of T/ET.
8. Edwards produced 170ml of urine; the amount required for the laboratory to carry out, under its own protocol, the 51 analyses it says it did, was 200ml.
9. In a direct infringement of the then IOC Medical Code (now the WADA Code) Edwards’s A and B samples were checked by the same person in the laboratory.
Davis’s report has been read by six independent eminent scientists all of whom unreservedly support his findings. Any one of the above nine reasons alone would clear Edwards. All nine deliver a devastating critique of drug testing in this country. Gerry Sutcliffe said that Edwards’s case had been reviewed in 2002, 2004 and 2005; what he neglected to say was that those reviews had been carried out internally by the laboratory and UK Sport.
What is needed is the evidence to urgently go before the Court of Sports Arbitration (which should demand the release of evidence still being withheld) followed by an independent enquiry into this whole affair. In a criminal or civil court case the withholding of evidence by the prosecution would, irrespective of its validity, result in a case being thrown out. Paul Edwards’s human rights have been shamefully and mightily abused in the name of the greater good of drug testing. That is an Orwellian concept that should have no place in our society, let alone sport.
The remorseful wailings of Marion Jones following her disclosure that she was heavily into performance-enhancing drugs will cut little ice with the sport at large. Not only is her career in ruins but her life also. The winner of five medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics had, since those achievements, stoutly denied taking steroids and she committed perjury in 2003 by continuing to do so to federal agents. It is a crime that could well see her end up in jail when she comes to be sentenced next January.
Athletically this means that the top eleven women’s 100 metre performances of all time were almost certainly chemically assisted (the late Florence Griffith-Joyner, world record holder, was strongly reputed to be on steroids). The irony is, as IAAF President Diack noted, that Jones would probably have won those medals on natural ability alone.
In 2000 Jones married shot putter C J Hunter who tested positive for drugs; she then partnered Tim Montgomery before he admitted in 2004 to taking human growth hormone. Both Montgomery and Jones publicly travelled to Montreal to consult with Charlie Francis, the notorious coach to Ben Johnson. Montgomery was later indicted for money laundering and is awaiting sentence. Jones was coached by Jamaican Trevor Graham eleven of whose athletes have tested positive for drugs. She was also named by Victor Conte, indicted owner of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), who escaped jail by spilling the beans on athletes whom he had supplied with drugs. She later moved to be coached by Steve Riddick, a number of whose athletes had also tested positive. Riddick was indicted and found guilty along with Montgomery for their fraudulent activities.
At long last justice has caught up with this clique of undesirables who have brought shame upon the sport of athletics. As for Jones she is either extremely devious or extremely gullible.
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So, the Sydney gold medal in the 100 metres will now be awarded to Greek sprinter, Ekaterini Thanou who came second? Well, possibly not. Thanou and fellow Greek sprinter, Konstadinos Kederis were, in 2004, before the Athens Olympics, involved in an incident worthy of a Feydeau farce when in scurrying around the Greek capital on a motor cycle, possibly to avoid drug tests, they crashed, received injuries that put them out of the Games. Both were banned for two years by admitting to avoiding three tests (their avoidance tactics had become legendary) and they face perjury charges regarding their accident. Kederis, it will be remembered, deprived Darren Campbell of a gold medal in Sydney in 2000. Their coach Christos Tzekos was banned for life.
The cheats are caught, rejoice, rejoice. Well not quite. The World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) with its 25 million dollar budget and the United States Anti Doping Agency (USADA) with its 13 million dollar budget both failed to nail Jones through much vaunted testing procedures and scientific research. They had to rely on federal investigators to force an admission in court. Indeed Jones was found positive for the banned substance Erythropoietin (EPO) in 2006 but her B sample did not confirm the finding and she was cleared. In the cases of Thanou and Kederis both admitted to missing tests but had never tested positive.
3279 out-of-competition tests in all sports were carried out by WADA in 2006, providing just 1.74% of adverse findings. USADA similarly carried out 8421 tests that year, resulting in 0.36%.positives. In athletics the IAAF recently announced that 1132 tests were carried out at the Osaka world championships resulting in 0% of positive findings and in the past twelve months (July 2006 to June 2007) UK Athletics have announced a total of 650 tests also resulting in 0% positives.
Such statistics indicate one of two conclusions: either the test statistics show a miniscule level of drug misuse and questions have to be asked of those who continually bang the drum about the massive drug menace in sport or the testing procedures are not working and cheats like Jones, Thanou and Kederis are getting away with it. Either way serious questions about value for money should (but wont) be tendered in November at the World Conference on Doping in Sport in Madrid
… and Injustice
Paul Edwards, former international shot putter, must be the only athlete in the world to have his drugs case debated in parliament, not once but twice.
On the first occasion the matter was raised in 2002 by Edwards’ then MP Andrew Hunter. The MP, a former Minister at the Northern Ireland office, who would be well versed about bigotry and obfuscation on a grand scale, was scathing in his criticism of the sports authorities. He found the stonewalling by the then UK Sports Director of Anti-Doping, Michelle Verroken highly frustrating and suspicious. “It’s my first experience of athletics’ administration,” he told me five years ago, “and I find it appalling.” The reply by the then Sports Minister, Richard Caborn, was full of self-congratulatory guff about testing in Britain and he suggested to Hunter the various options that were open to Edwards to pursue his case.
None of them bore fruit so this month, Maria Miller, Edwards’ new MP, again raised the matter in the House. Appalled by the injustice, she had taken up Edwards’ cause and its lack of progress over the past five years. She had had correspondence with Caborn before he left his post in the Brown reshuffle. What resulted from his advice was a highly predictable bout of buck passing by UKA, the IAAF, WADA and the Court of Sports Arbitration (CSA). Gerry Sutcliffe, the new Sports Minister, promised to help Miller through the mire of bureaucracy so that the case could be heard by the CSA but nobody is holding their breath.
This is a case that is not only disturbing for Edwards but has much wider implications for sport in this country and around the world; it concerns the efficacy of drug testing and it raises questions as to whether UK Sport and the London IOC accredited laboratory, that will be in the forefront of drug testing at the 2012 Olympics, attempted a cover-up in order to protect its integrity.
These are serious allegations but some believe they have credence because in another case, that of athlete Mark Hylton in 2000, the laboratory refused to accept criticism of its procedures by an eminent authority even though such criticisms were accepted by the IAAF and by the then UK Sport Chairman, Sir Rodney Walker, who was quoted as saying, “What we will be looking for is reassurance that the lapses will not be repeated. If the situation arose where there was a lack of confidence [in the laboratory] then we can send our samples abroad."
In 1994 Edwards tested positive for an anabolic steroid and was flown back in public disgrace from the Commonwealth Games in Canada, along with Diane Modahl (who subsequently cleared her name at the expense of personal bankruptcy). Edwards lost on appeal and was given a 4 year ban. From that moment he has suffered from the age old adage of “once a cheat, always a cheat.”
He was out-of-competition tested in June, 1997 and from that very moment there have been doubts and suspicions about the integrity of this particular test. Edwards was duly accused of taking a prohibited substance and was, because it was a “second offence”, banned in 1998 from the sport for life. He appealed and lost.
For the next eight years he and his team of advisers, including MPs and scientists, have fought to uncover evidence that they believed would clear his name. They met with years of obfuscatory stonewalling of almost unbelievable proportions from UK Sport and the Drugs Control Centre (DCC), both claiming immunity from disclosure under the Data Protection Act. Their problem was that the Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) didn’t agree with them. UK Sport successfully stonewalled, despite being formally warned by the DPC, until in December, 2003 the laboratory doors were suddenly flung open and Simon Davis, who has a Ph.D. in mass spectrometry and is a highly respected expert in sporting drug cases, was allowed in and found 600 pages of evidence that had not only been withheld from Edwards but crucially also from the disciplinary and appeal panels that heard the case. Further evidence, it transpires, is still being withheld.
What he found convinced many people that there had been a serious miscarriage of justice. Not only that but they also raised the possibility in people’s minds that the prolonged stonewalling was undertaken so that when, inevitably, the evidence had to be produced, the time for Edwards’ to appeal would have elapsed. He was in Catch 22. He had no new appeal until he saw the evidence; he wasn’t allowed the evidence until it was too late to appeal.
Doubts surrounded this whole process from the moment that Edwards gave his sample, to its journey to the laboratory and to it being tested at the Drugs Control Centre. These could be summarised as follows:
1. The length of the test was recorded as taking 3 minutes. Any Independent Sampling Officer (ISO) would tell you that to carry out all the correct procedures is impossible in that time.
2. The ISO did not follow set procedures laid down by UK Sport. Without the pH being recorded there is no way of knowing if the sample degraded over the weekend – in the same way that Modahl’s did under exactly the same circumstances.
3. Many doubts surround the transportation of the sample from the ISO to the laboratory and the necessary paperwork was withheld from Edwards’ team by DHL, the transporter, on apparent instructions from Verroken (who mysteriously left UK Sport under an unspecified cloud almost to the day that Davis was allowed entry to the laboratory). The transportation took 3 days over a hot June weekend so the possibility of some sample degradation is high.
4. Davis highlights gross errors in the calculation of Edwards’s testosterone/epitestosterone (T/ET) ratio.
5. The B sample container was damaged and had to be opened with a hacksaw.
6. A component was missing from the methods of calibration thus making them useless.
7. There was contamination of the water (which should be pure) used to test levels of T/ET.
8. Edwards produced 170ml of urine; the amount required for the laboratory to carry out, under its own protocol, the 51 analyses it says it did, was 200ml.
9. In a direct infringement of the then IOC Medical Code (now the WADA Code) Edwards’s A and B samples were checked by the same person in the laboratory.
Davis’s report has been read by six independent eminent scientists all of whom unreservedly support his findings. Any one of the above nine reasons alone would clear Edwards. All nine deliver a devastating critique of drug testing in this country. Gerry Sutcliffe said that Edwards’s case had been reviewed in 2002, 2004 and 2005; what he neglected to say was that those reviews had been carried out internally by the laboratory and UK Sport.
What is needed is the evidence to urgently go before the Court of Sports Arbitration (which should demand the release of evidence still being withheld) followed by an independent enquiry into this whole affair. In a criminal or civil court case the withholding of evidence by the prosecution would, irrespective of its validity, result in a case being thrown out. Paul Edwards’s human rights have been shamefully and mightily abused in the name of the greater good of drug testing. That is an Orwellian concept that should have no place in our society, let alone sport.
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