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.
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
Monday, 16 February 2009
Men Only
“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.
“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.
Monday, 9 February 2009
Of Rights and Wrongs
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.
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.
Wednesday, 28 January 2009
Fear of Africans
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.
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.
Tuesday, 2 December 2008
Thursday, 20 November 2008
Who should run the Asylum?
(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.
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.
Tuesday, 4 November 2008
Yet Another Brave New World
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).
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).
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