Dame Katherine Grainger, the chair of UK Sport, has warned that Britain’s extraordinary record of Olympic and Paralympic success could be threatened by budget cuts.
Speaking at the launch of a three-month consultation into the future funding of elite sport, Grainger admitted that “the suggestion is very strongly that finances will get tighter and tighter” after 2020, with no guarantee that the government will continue to underwrite the estimated £25m annual shortfall from falling national lottery sales.
“We have seen an amazing injection of money since 1996 and I am one of the athletes who have hugely benefited,” said Grainger, a five-times Olympic rowing medallist. “If the money was cut to such an extent that we couldn’t build around sports and athletes, the reality is that success would be affected.”
Grainger also confirmed that UK Sport would be outlining the potential consequences to government. “It was done in the build-up to 2012,” she added. “The point was put to government: if we get this much funding, we will deliver this; if we get this much more, we will deliver all that; and, if we get less, we will deliver this.”
UK Sport, which invests £100m of National Lottery and government money into Olympic sport each year, believes the consultation will “help shape the future direction of elite sport funding and influence how it strategically invests in the next Olympic and Paralympic cycle from 2020-2024”.
But many smaller sports which are not funded, such as wheelchair rugby and badminton, are desperately hoping it will lead to UK Sport softening its “no compromise” approach to medals.
David Pond, the CEO of GB wheelchair rugby, told the Guardian he believed all sports should get a ‘core level’ of support to enable them to survive and send athletes to international tournaments. “If you look at the sports which get a massive amount of funding, such as rowing, sailing and yachting, some are pretty elitist,” he said. “Meanwhile a lot of the athletes I work with are on disability benefits. As a society we are much the poorer if we cannot invest a base level of funding into sports such as wheelchair rugby.”
Pond, who admitted he was uncertain whether he could raise the money to send his team to next year’s Wheelchair Rugby World Cup, added: “The question we have to ask ourselves as a nation is, do we seriously think it matters if Team GB gets 65 or 72 medals or do we think it’s more important to promote the ideal that we want to be a medal-winning nation and promote equality of opportunity as well?”
Adrian Christy, the chief executive of Badminton England, also backed the idea of a baseline level of funding for a sport, which would be topped up if it wins medals. But he fears that smaller sports could suffer from a cut in UK Sport’s funding. “There is risk with a downturn in lottery sales, and a smaller pot to invest in world-class programmes, that the argument will come down to supporting only sports that win a shedload of medals,” he added. “If that happened, you would get a very exclusive club, which would be even harder to get into. That cannot be healthy for the system.”
However, Sebastian Coe, who led London’s successful 2012 Olympics bid and is now president of the IAAF, insisted the current system was largely working. “I think there are very few occasions in the history of the nation where you can genuinely point to something that you are better at than anywhere else in the world,” he said. “I don’t know whether we can do that in many sectors. So I don’t want to cede that territory.”