Fighting the good fight...
NOW RETIRED AND IN CHARGE, GRAINGER IS ENJOYING THE CHALLENGE OF MAKING SPORT A BETTER PLACE FOR ATHLETES
When Dame Katherine Grainger walked into her office for the first time as chair of UK Sport in June 2017, the welcome gift on her desk was a stack of investigations. All pertained to British Olympic federations, whose funding she now held power over.
Jess Varnish had revealed a ‘culture of fear’ at British Cycling, aiming her ire squarely at technical director Shane Sutton. Similar statements came from reports into swimming, canoeing, bobsleigh, skeleton and gymnastics. Sutton had claimed cyclists had exploited Therapeutic Use exemptions (TUes) to obtain banned drugs and ‘find the gains’. Richard Freeman, the former British Cycling doctor, had received a delivery of testosterone patches to the national Cycling Centre.
And on the day Grainger was first announced in her new role, Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson had published her Duty of Care review, with scathing indictments of behaviour in British sport.
‘I won’t lie, I did feel like I came into the middle of a storm,’ says Grainger, a five-time Olympic medallist. ‘either this is a role you run a mile from, because you don’t really want the challenges, or you think: “I had a phenomenally positive experience in 20 years as an international athlete — not all of that was easy, not all of that was comfortable, not all of that was fun, but I thoroughly benefited and am a better person because of the highs and lows I experienced. I believe in what sport can do for people, maybe I can be part of helping sport to a better place going forward”.
‘It’s like being an athlete again, you’re spending all your time working to make things better and make improvements, finding better ways to do things. I loved that as an athlete and I love that challenge now.
‘Yes, it was a difficult time to come in. Yes, from day one, things on my desk were piling up. But you feel like you’re involved in the good fight, making things better — that’s a very privileged position to be in.’
MORe than 18 months on, many of these scandals are now coming to a head. Varnish is suing British Cycling in a landmark case to decide whether she had employment rights as a UK athlete. Freeman faces a General Medical Council hearing next month.
But as Grainger attempts to steady the ship, she is soon to find herself without her captain. UK Sport CeO Liz nicholl will step down this summer after nine years in charge.
The exit of nicholl, who Grainger describes as ‘a true leader’, coincides with the adoption of UK Sport’s new funding strategy. It signals a divergence from the controversial ‘no compromise’ approach, which came to represent a ‘win-at-all-costs’ culture, with funding decisions almost entirely based on medals.
‘We weren’t aware of it as a policy as athletes,’ says Grainger. ‘It was more the feeling that you don’t compromise on the standards you set for yourself. That can be a very, very positive environment.
‘The use of it was mildly changed, as if success was “a medal at all costs”. That’s never something I’ve experienced. It’s not what we all talk about — I don’t think anybody wants “success at any cost”.
‘There were some sports that tipped over into unhealthy behaviour that you wouldn’t have wanted to hear. There have been problems within sports, everybody’s very alive to that, and hopefully things have gotten better because of things that were exposed.
‘nobody wants situations where athletes or members of staff are feeling uncomfortable, or in situations that are unacceptable.’
Promising change is all very well, but many who suffered in the previous culture will not hold their breath until anything concrete materialises. The new strategy must recognise past mistakes and adjust accordingly.
Grainger knows this, and will meet with athletes and coaches from every sport under her purview this year to hear their ideas and concerns. As someone who thrived in the British Olympic system for two decades, she is determined to see the current crop benefit in the same way. She adds: ‘In my mind and in my heart, I’ll always be an athlete. You want athletes to be able to focus on performance, you don’t want performance to be distracted by the other aspects of sport — financial, political, anything else. When focus turns back to performance, you tend to have everything in the right place.
‘You want an organisation that gives reassurance to everyone they work with, but feels it is open to be challenged, open to be questioned and open to adapting.’
One key area of concern is mental health support. Last June, a horrific tragedy hit when British snowboarder ellie Soutter committed suicide on her 18th birthday, having missed a flight to a training camp. her father Tony blamed the pressure young athletes face as a possible cause.
natasha Jonas — Britain’s first-ever female Olympic boxer — spoke last month of her struggles with trichotillomania, a stressrelated condition which sees her pull out her own hair. UK Sport appointed its first mental health leader, Dr James Bell, last month, and Grainger wants that to be just the beginning. ‘I don’t think it’s an easy thing to discuss in sport,’ she says. ‘In a competitive world, you don’t want to show any vulnerability, physical, mental or anything else. ‘It’s always worse in your own head — someone might think less of you in some way, you might have less opportunity to perform and succeed. ‘It’s got better and it needs to get better. There’s a lot of work to do convincing people that it’s okay, it doesn’t need to be a block on their career and it’s actually really quite common.’ Protecting clean sport is also a priority. The Russian doping scandal is now into a fifth year of investigations, after the nation’s anti-doping agency, RUSADA, missed their December 31 deadline to provide lab samples to WADA, a condition for them regaining their doping compliance status.
WADA have now announced that the executive committee meeting today and tomorrow in Canada, due to decide Russia’s fate, will not announce its decision until January 22, more than three weeks after the deadline. For Grainger, the reputational damage could already be done.
‘There’s a sense of frustration,’ she says. ‘The most important thing is that sport is seen as the wonderful thing that it is.
‘For that to happen, it needs integrity, respect, people believing in it. Any stories, any headlines, any major doping scandal, whether it’s by individuals or by nations, matter massively. We all want to feel WADA is strong, independent and makes those hard decisions it needs to make.’
GRAInGeR’S indignation comes from first-hand experience. At the 2006 World Championships at eton Dorney, she was part of a GB women’s quad sculls team that was edged out by a supposedly superior Russian crew. After the race, Grainger told of her ‘devastation’ at missing out on a home triumph.
Joining her on the podium was Russia’s Olga Samulenkova, lovingly clutching a gold medal she had no right to. A urine sample taken from Samulenkova would later test positive for testosterone, and five months after the race, the gold was Grainger’s.
She was now a three-times world champion. But how do you celebrate when you were cheated out of victory in the first instance?
‘When our coach told us, you’d think there’d be a sense of: “That’s brilliant, aren’t we all happy we’re now world champions”,’ she says. ‘There was no joy.
‘It was a mix of grief, anger, frustration. It doesn’t make things okay, it doesn’t replace that moment, that day, that emotion.
‘We’d all gone through stages of trying to live with the result and gave ourselves a very hard time. One of the people on the team never really came back from that — and then you’re told it wasn’t a real result.
‘For some of the athletes that was the only time they could have stood on top of a medal podium. And that was stolen.’