Hard times (for some) in sport’s big society

SPORTSMEN and women who might have been looking upon Britain’s strategic spending review as a bellwether for the much-dreaded Irish Budget on December 7 have 42 sleepless nights left.

Hidden away in a performance by the UK Chancellor George Osborne which could best be likened to Edward Scissorhands on speed were cuts to the sporting fabric of the next Olympic hosts to send shivers down the spine.

Not to the Olympics themselves, of course. They have been ring-fenced because, in a phrase curiously reminiscent of the 1969 Chicago Transit Authority debut album, “the whole world is watching.”

The concluding line to that song, as oldsters like me remember, is “tell them that they will never get away with it again.” But sadly they will.

It was a week that started badly and got worse. First there was the announcement of the seat pricing policy for London 2012. Gone was Sebastian Coe’s five-year promise that “roughly half” of available tickets would be in the £20 (€23) category. In the new “Big Society” across the water that pledge has been diluted down to less than a third, and with most of those tickets clustered around the less popular morning qualifying sessions of track events.

Also joining the disappeared was the suggestion that people living close to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park — the new name for the Olympic Stadium — would receive heavily discounted, or even free, tickets as a small recompense for the massive disruption which has been visited upon their lives for the past four years.

Never mind, a good seat overlooking the finishing line of the 100 metres will be yours for just £750 (€854), while the prime locations for the opening ceremony are a snip at £2,000 (€2,278).

There is real traction building now for the Olympics — Russia have applied to build a huge temporary hospitality operation called “Russia House” around Marble Arch at the top of Park Lane while France have already agreed a deal to set up a cultural HQ at Old Billingsgate Market, presumably because of its reputation for selling some of the most pungent cheeses in London.

But while there has been a close focus on four weeks of glitz two years from now, there’s a dark shadow falling over sport in England which may yet ensure that there is no legacy, and that the East End extravaganza will be remembered with that same dismissive phrase crafted by the Roman poet Juvenal nearly 2000 years ago. “Panem et circenses” — bread and circuses, by which he meant the replacement of important public engagement with insubstantial artifice. In last week’s €90bnreduction of the size of the British state nearly €200m was withdrawn from the PE and sports budget of schools, abolishing along the way 450 School Sport Partnerships which exist to increase the links between schools and amateur and professional clubs. Specialist sports schools — created to modernise facilities and ensure that they are also open to the public — were scrapped and the extra funding they received, equivalent to roughly €150 per pupil, siphoned off into general school budgets. There is no obligation to spend those sums on sport, and anyway, the organisation tasked with overseeing development, the Youth Sports Trust, has also been dismantled as part of the much vaunted “Bonfire of the Quangos.” In keeping with the general economic strategy in the United Kingdom, it is the most disadvantaged and deprived children — precisely those at whom sport has been targeted as a means of improving their overall self-confidence and levels of attainment — who will suffer most.

Being denied opportunities within school, they will also experience a reduction in leisure centres, swimming pools, and playing fields. Local authority budgets are to be cut by 26% and the staff who supervise, clean and service those facilities are high on the redundancy hit list. This in a country which has recently named obesity as its number one public health problem. During the 1980s, under a succession of weak-kneed and chinless sports ministers, provision of sports facilities was allowed to stagnate, with land scandalously sold off for commercial development.

One of the brighter aspects of the Labour government was a reversal of that policy with investment in all-weather pitches, skateboard parks, new pools, running and cycle tracks. Winning the 2012 Olympic Games, said Tony Blair, “will inspire a new generation to take up sport.”

The last time the Conservatives ran down Britain’s recreational infrastructure the proportion of children participating in school sports for two hours a week (could there be a more minimal requirement) dropped below 25%. In the 13 years since 1997 that percentage has increased to 90%.

While politicians were busily hacking away at their financial commitments to grassroots sport, one young, but currently under performing, footballer was happily increasing his income to nearly €200,000 per week.

Perhaps that’s precisely the sort of justice and logic you might expect from a country which is committed to building two new aircraft carriers . . . but can’t afford to produce any planes to put on them.

Irish finances are as bad, if not worse, than those in the UK. The passion for sport is greater. Capital grant applications in 2008 ran into many millions of euro. A winter of discontent lies ahead.

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