Oh what a year
Reviews dominate year in review
The sporting year of 2018, boiled down to a quatrain: What to do / with the year in review / when your view of the year / is the year of review?
OK, it might not be Keats, it might not even be William McGonagall, but it is mercifully short, which is more than you can say about the reviews and reports that have landed with dull thuds across the desks of sports administrators this year.
By the time the Heron report into cycling had dropped, there was such collective review fatigue among the rapidly dwindling sports journalism corps that it had all the impact of an Act Party press release.
This was perplexing to Sport New Zealand and its subsidiary High Performance Sport NZ, who felt there was enough meat in the Heron report to lead the sports news agenda for multiple days. So disappointed were they by the lack of heavy lifting done by the sports journalism profession, they used the revelation vacuum to write a carefully worded op-ed under the name of HPSNZ chief executive Michael Scott, which the Herald published.
As Scott preaches to the national sporting organisations, largely run by recycled administrators, he will find more receptive audiences than the negligible amount of unique browsers who clicked on the article, but for those who missed it, the key line was this:
“The system is not broken.” Without wanting to take credit for concepts that are self-evident, I’d suggest that line was at least in part a response to a column penned on these pages in August headlined: “Why NZ sport is fundamentally broken.”
In his attempt to refute this, Scott made the now cliche´ d mistake of measuring non-brokenness (my word) with Olympic medals, when in fact it was the blind pursuit of these trinkets that has led to a wave of athlete resistance.
In fairness to Scott, he did acknowledge this when he wrote: “There is absolutely no doubt we need to strike a better balance between winning on the world stage and the welfare of athletes, coaches and others working within the high performance system.”
Medals were an understandable crutch to lean on, however, because every other piece of sporting literature produced in New Zealand this year, and there have been a lot, paints High Performance Sport NZ and its Millennium Centre minions as heartless bureaucrats who treat humans as a collection of bar graphs.
Yep, mark 2018 down as the year of athletes would go all Howard Beale in Network on us: “I’m a human being godammit! My life has value
. . . I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more.”
They’ve got the paperwork to back them up now.
The Heron Report was just one in a chain of reports and reviews that are only now showing signs of abating. Earlier this month, the Cottrell report into Elite Athletes’ Rights and Welfare was made
public.
It was a thorough piece of work, thick enough to keep the Kinleith pulp and paper mill workers in overtime, with an interesting set of footnotes. The remarkably basic conclusions, however, could have been reached at a nominal cost using a simple eyes and ears test: treat athletes as humans, not pawns in the medal and title-hunting game.
While the conclusions might have
been beyond obvious, it required somebody of Stephen Cottrell’s stature in the sports law fraternity to give them weight.
This report did the job then, but it came with a jarring (read: completely unnecessary) note. Cottrell stated that New Zealand Rugby and New Zealand Cricket have demonstrated that a player welfare and high-performance
programme can work in mutual inclusivity. While this might be strictly true, it takes a special sort of 15-man myopia to overlook a by-product of systems that make young athletes feel bulletproof.
Thankfully we don’t have to rewind too far to recall then-ASB chief executive Barbara Chapman using her speech at the 2016 Rugby Awards to strike a blow against the
prevailing macho culture within rugby after a year in which athletes ranging from inexperienced NPC player Losi Filipo to ultraexperienced All Black Aaron Smith made exceptionally poor decisions.
This is also a sport with an important review of its own on the cusp of being tabled, this one looking at the unholy staffroom brawl that has become schoolboy rugby.