Athletics:I've always said that nothing fuels the paranoia of our more successful elite athletes than the prospect of losing their grant – with the possible exception of losing out on some free gear.
Indeed all my time in and around this sport has told me that athletes usually divide their careers into two distinct phases: those years spent trying to qualify for a grant, and those years spent trying to hold on to it. No athlete, naturally enough, will readily admit to this, although you should hear them talk about it “off the record”, and the blind cursing it evokes.
It’s almost seven years now since the Irish Sports Council last reviewed in any great detail the issuing and distribution of grants – or the carding scheme, as they prefer to call it – and that didn’t go down very well. In fact the announcement that several long-serving athletes such as Sonia O’Sullivan, Mark Carroll, Karen Shinkins and James Nolan were suddenly being cut was greeted with the angry shock associated with an amputation.
“Maybe instead of firing us, we should fire them,” said Carroll, referring to those in charge. Nolan compared it to “unfair dismissal” and Olympic rower Gearóid Towey, who had his grant cut to zero, said it felt like “a big kick in the teeth”.
So I sensed a collective sigh of relief when the 37-page report on the 2012 grant review dropped into my email just before lunchtime yesterday, although that’s not saying it won’t further fuel the paranoia of our elite athletes, particularly if the Sports Council are actually serious about how they intend to dish out the money from here on.
The distinct lack of any radical overhaul means no athlete will be thrown out the top floor window this time, but rather gently shown the back door exit. The key word here, it appears, is “phased” – ideally, it’s almost all change in the long term. This is probably just as well, as least if the Irish athletics performances at the London Olympics were somehow pivotal in the review process. Athletes, we know, are a selfish lot, even at the best of times, and it wasn’t without some envy that they watched the success of certain rival sports. With the honourable exception of Rob Heffernan’s heroic fourth place in the 50km walk, it was actually hard to find an Irish athlete who enjoyed being there: “If there’s a worse place than hell, I’m in it,” one athlete told me after being eliminated in his qualifying heat, although I think that was “off the record”.
What the Sports Council are proposing, behind thinly disguised cost saving exercises, is a more stream-lined grant distribution system, an increased focus on Olympic success, a new and superbly vague “social contract”, and the elimination of a so-called “entitlement culture”.
No one can argue with the latter: for years, certain athletes have got away with daylight robbery, as in securing grants, as the report suggests, to maintain a lifestyle rather than help them reach the pinnacle of their sport. That’s about as damning as things get, however, although some athletes might be worried too that their grants are under threat for the simple reason that they don’t need the monetary assistance in the first place, which seems a crude way rewarding of their success (and doesn’t just apply to athletics).
The new “social contract” is essentially about getting a little more return on the investment, and again there’s nothing wrong with that. Why athletes weren’t required to give more back to the sport in the first place has always been a mystery to me, although hopefully this doesn’t just mean more Tweets or Facebook posts.
Making Olympic and Paralympic success the chief objective of the carding scheme is clearly a case of shooting for the stars, and there’s no harm in that either, but considering the success in Irish athletics is now almost exclusively outside of the Olympics, and mainly at European level, in both track and cross country, that might ultimately prove more costly than beneficial.
Anyway, to the thrust of the review then, and this idea that direct funding to athletes will, wherever feasible, be delivered and administered via the performance plan of the National Governing Bodies (NGB’s). At least the report accepts that until relatively recently few, if any, NGB’s were deemed to have the personnel or the structures, along with the associated governance stability, to be entrusted with a full performance programme.
Critical to this process, therefore, is the “fit for purpose”; in other words, can the NGB’s actually be trusted to hand out the grants? The report suggests there may be “between four and six” NGB’s heading in the right direction in this regard, although some may still have some way to go – and then stops short of actually identifying any one of them. Athletics Ireland, presumably, is not top of their list – not when one of its leading coaches, Anne Keenan-Buckley, only last month walked away, “disillusioned with the management and direction of high performance” within the association. It could be a long while yet before the Sports Council can even think about handing over this direct funding to them, not when there’s so much paranoia already about.
