UK Sport split over cuts
The decision to strip several sports of their Olympic and Paralympic funding split the UK Sport board, ahead of this week’s initial appeals against the ruling, the Sunday Telegraph can reveal.
The biggest revolt against Great Britain’s medal-winning formula was given more ammunition after the vote to remove exchequer and National Lottery support from five sports in the buildup to Tokyo 2020 was shown not to be unanimous.
The revelation follows the publication last week of the minutes of the December UK Sport board meeting when the decision was taken and one of the eight members present refused to sign off a near £10million increase in the grant to the English Institute of Sport, which provides science, medical and technical support to publicly funded athletes.
The lack of unanimity within UK Sport over how it spends its budget of £550 million over the next four years raises further questions about a strategy that has already led to redundancies on the elite programmes of those sports that have lost out. As will the revelation that the quango’s latest board meeting on Wednesday deferred for the second time a decision that threatens to strip wheelchair tennis of all its funding.
All this comes ahead of formal representations by archery, badminton, fencing, weightlifting and wheelchair basketball against the withdrawal of their UK Sport funding, which will be heard tomorrow and on Tuesday.
The December board minutes show that decision was reached by “majority”, with UK Sport last night admitting there had been one abstention by a member who opposed a policy under which, for the first time, a sport that had won a medal at the previous Olym- pics – badminton – lost all its funding. The cutting adrift of wheelchair rugby has already been condemned by the chairman of UK Athletics, Ed Warner, the first time one of the big winners of UK Sport’s ‘no-compromise’ model has spoken out publicly on behalf of one of the losers. Warner’s intervention was followed by the revelation that wheelchair tennis – the nation’s most overperforming sport at Rio 2016, in which Gordon Reid was a gold medallist – had threatened legal action over attempts to strip it of all its funding.
UK Sport’s board met on Wednesday to finalise its decision on the matter but there was instead a second deferral until its next board meeting on March 23. It had been demanding that the Lawn Tennis Association bankrolls the sport, believing the richer federations can afford to fund related disability events.
That has put pressure on the Rugby Football Union to absorb the costs of running wheelchair rugby, for which it already provides some support. A UK Sport spokesman last night said it would be “incorrect” to suggest the abstention of one its board members from two crucial votes represented a “split”.
He added: “The recommendations we put to our board follow months of work by the sports and the UK Sport executive to ensure that as a system we can fulfil our vision to inspire the nation through Olympic and Paralympic success whilst at the same time operating within a tight financial remit. These decisions are made all the more challenging with sports at the lower end of the meritocratic table. There is a lot of challenge and discussion.”
UK Sport defended the increase in grant to the EIS, despite its remit now covering fewer sports, describing the expanded services it would provide as “crucial” to maintaining the success that took Britain from 36th place in the medal table at the 1996 Olympics to second last summer.