End of Empire
Britain’s days as a sporting superpower are over
A once-mighty global power decides to invest in sport. Its strategy, to host major global events and ensure their athletes clean up.
It is an expensive play. Soft power and old alliances are leveraged to win over the secretive, self-selecting elites that hand out the events, then billions of pounds spent on building the infrastructure needed to stage them.
Many millions more are spent on hot-housing athletes identified as capable of winning glory in a narrow band of events where investment and commitment make a tangible difference.
In due course, the country’s officials gain influence and senior positions in the global organisations that run sport.
And all in the name of stoking national pride in a population facing uncertain economic and political times.
This is not the tale of Putin’s Russia, or of Soviet sports policy, or a Gulf state nation-building through games.
This was the United Kingdom during an unprecedented decade of sporting investment dating back to 2005, when London won the right to host the 2012 Olympics.
It was heralded as a “golden decade”, and whether you bought the hype or not — and millions of us certainly bought the tickets to cheer on Team GB — it is now over.
The rugby World Cup just concluded was another example of the UK’s ability to host, if not play, games, but it may prove the final grand project of an era in which sport was a priority.
There is one more event captured during the years of sporting acquisitiveness, the 2017 World Athletics Championships, but by the time they roll into the Olympic Stadium the landscape will look very different.
First, sport can no longer count on public money.
On Wednesday, George Osbourne will unveil spending cuts to government departments including Culture, Media and Sport, Tony Blair’s “ministry of fun” which assumed a key role in delivering big events.
The axe is expected to fall between 25% and 40%, impacting spending on elite and grassroots sport.
UK Sport will have spent £543m on elite athletes come Rio 2016, but will rely on the Lottery backfilling the taxpayer shortfall to compete in Tokyo 2020.
The cuts to grassroots sport could be even more dramatic, with any losses at Sport England (which promotes participation) eclipsed by the impact on local authority-funded facilities.
The Olympic legacy, if there ever was one, has stalled. The promise was to “Inspire a Generation” but participation has flat-lined, and is now lower than when the Games began.
We will discover what the government plans to do about it later this year, but the current system of incentivising governing bodies to get bums off seats and into shorts looks to be over.
The state’s appetite for underwriting bidding and staging is at and end too.
London handed back the 2017 Tour de France Grand Depart on the grounds of cost last month, and after a year that exposed the fetid, corrupt workings of international governing bodies as never before, faith those who hand out the events is at historic lows.
And even if it did want to chase glory, the UK can’t compete with the competition from Brazil (a World Cup and Olympics in space of two years), Russia (Winter Olympics and World Cup in four) and the Middle East (2022 World Cup, and everything else).
From this distance the golden decade looks anomalous, a temporary blip in the shift away from Europe and north America (and their pesky democracies) to emerging markets.
Cricket and rugby will still come to Britain periodically — the old Commonwealth sports can’t live without the market — but truly global sports may be beyond our reach.
The administrators who helped deliver the good times also have more on their minds. Sebastian Coe is fighting for his reputation and his sport at the IAAF, while Sir Craig Reedie, crucial to London’s bid, finds himself President of the World Anti-Doping Agency at a pivotal moment in the organisation’s history.
It was fun while it lasted, but it is games over. The final whistle has blown on Britain’s days as sporting superpower.
