Pressure on UK Sport to launch probe into new athletics chief
UK Sport was last night under pressure to conduct a full-scale inquiry into “extremely serious” safeguarding accusations against the new chief executive of UK Athletics after the ex-detective who made them declared he had no faith in the sport’s leaders to get to the truth.
Zara Hyde Peters, a former Great Britain distance runner who is due to take up her almost £200,000-a-year position at UKA in a week’s time, is fighting to hold on to her job before she even starts amid claims her husband was wrongly allowed to continue coaching and managing at a club where she was vice-chair after he was banned from teaching over an “inappropriate relationship” with a 15-year-old girl.
The allegations made by Martin Slevin, a retired detective chief inspector and ex-chair of Coventry Godiva Harriers, prompted UK Sport to enter into “urgent discussions” with UKA to “establish the facts” of what it acknowledged were “extremely serious” accusations. It also warned that the taxpayer and National Lottery money it handed to sports – in athletics’ case nearly £27 million in the build-up to next year’s Olympics – was “contingent on a sport meeting standards set out by the Child Protection in Sport Unit and the Ann Craft Trust [in relation to Adults at Risk]”.
The chair of UKA, Chris Clark, responded by promising to “clarify the facts” of the case – although he also stressed he “fully” supported Hyde Peters’s appointment. Slevin told The
Sunday Telegraph he would take evidence he had against Hyde Peters and her husband, Mike Peters, to UK Sport, rather than UKA, which he accused of failing to investigate properly after he first alerted it to the latter’s alleged activities more than three years ago.
UKA does not dispute that Slevin was not approached when a safeguarding review was carried out at Coventry Godiva the following year, one its head of welfare, David Brown, this week admitted may have resulted in the governing body being “misled” over Mike Peters’s role there.
Slevin said of Brown: “This guy was a chief superintendent, two ranks above me, in charge of investigations. He should’ve asked the right questions at that point.”
He also accused Clark of risking prejudicing any UKA probe by declaring support for Hyde Peters’s appointment. UKA declined to comment last night.
Peters was permanently barred from teaching in October 2012 over what a damning judgment found to be “very serious” misconduct, which included an “exchange of inappropriate photographs” with a vulnerable pupil while a PE teacher at Bilton High School, Warwickshire. He had been cleared six years earlier of sexually assaulting the same girl during a trial at Warwickshire Crown Court.
Hyde Peters, who did not respond to requests for comment yesterday, is understood to be adamant she and her husband abided by safeguarding rules at Coventry Godiva before relocating to Hampshire in 2017. She worked at UKA between 2000 and 2008, including as director of athlete development, before joining British Triathlon.