UK Sport

Mission 2012 - The athlete's input

In May 2007 UK Sport announced that it wanted to fundamentally alter the way in which it worked with sports. With high stakes and high investment wrapped up in the London 2012 Games and just five years to go, a new way of measuring progress and of eliminating potential obstacles to delivering success was required.

For UK Sport the answer lay in the creation of Mission 2012 – a project designed to keep eyes firmly focused on the most critical elements of the performance system, helping sports to identify the issues and challenges lying between them and the achievement of their respective performance ambitions and find ways of dealing with them quickly and effectively.

And Mission 2012 will also provide athletes with a significant opportunity to ensure that their voices are heard. While some sports have included athletes in the review and reflection exercise, the other key input will be the results of the athletes’ survey, which will inform thinking on where good practice exists and identify issues that need to be tackled. With the response rate to the survey approaching 60%, and every aspect of athlete’s experiences on the World Class Pathway covered, there will be plenty of information to work with.

UK Sport’s Head of Performance, Peter Keen explained that Mission 2012 has been designed to build on processes that the majority of sports should already have in place and much of the review work will be ‘light touch’ in nature:

“With Mission 2012, we are asking sports to touch base with us every quarter to let us know whether they are on course to deliver the performance targets they have set themselves, or whether any issues exist that might deflect them. To improve the precision of reporting we want sports to think about their performance plans in three dimensions: their athletes; the performance system that sits behind them; and the leadership and climate experienced within that system.”

Sports’ assessments will then be reviewed by two Mission 2012 Panels (one for Olympic sports and one for Paralympic sports), which will add significant performance knowledge - in the form of Steve Cram, Sir Clive Woodward and Rod Carr (Olympic Panel) and Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson, Sue Wolstenholme and Chris Holmes (Paralympic Panel) – to UK Sport’s existing expertise.

Whilst the panels will add great value to the process, Keen believes that the benefits will be felt much more widely:

“Mission 2012 is about creating greater honesty and trust within the system. The sports themselves start by reflecting on what they are doing well and what works. At the same time they can ask for assistance in dealing with issues – which may well not be of their making – which could get in the way of transforming the performance potential of their sport, not just for 2012, but way beyond that. Our job at UK Sport is to provide a toolkit to help sports with this process and support them in their quest for solutions to their problems.

Sports will take the lead in the assessment process and UK Sport will seek to agree the submissions – only questioning the sport’s conclusions where significant evidence suggests that further thought and review is required. The panels will then consider the reports, focusing their energies where they have the potential to make the greatest impact.

UK Sport will monitor the progress of all Olympic and Paralympic sports on specially constructed ‘tracker boards’ at their Bernard Street offices. Monitoring will take the form of a traffic light for each performance dimension, coupled with an overall setting for the sport’s programme as a whole.

As the Mission 2012 project has evolved, Peter Keen has become more and more convinced that it can be one of the most powerful tools in the transformation of British sport:

“Much of the talk since July 2005 has been about the legacy of the 2012 Games for British sport. Talking of a legacy implies that significant transformation will occur within our system over the next five years. We have been able to invest significantly more money than ever before, but to what end – is it just to deliver medals, burn bright and fade, or is it to ensure once the flame is extinguished, we have a sense of purpose, direction and skill sets that will help us to go on delivering? If that is the opportunity we’re seeking to grasp then we must all rise to the challenge. What better way to start than a starkly honest self-appraisal of where we are now and what we need to do to move ourselves on?”.

Most Viewed