I have been asked this week if £235 million is worth spending to send the Olympic team to Beijing.
Some of you reading this may have a double-take moment when you see the figure involved. £235m sounds like and is a serious amount of money. But then, we are a nation that is now serious about its sport – and Olympic and Paralympic sport in particular. After all, we are looking forward to hosting the world’s biggest sporting event in four years’ time.
We know that Seb Coe and his team will create the ultimate setting for the London 2012 Games – but the Games won’t be a success if the home team doesn’t perform. Seb himself has said that home athletes winning medals is not just the icing on the cake for 2012 success, but pretty well the key ingredient.
Which brings us to the £235m figure. That represents our total investment in 24 Olympic sports over the past 4 years – with more invested in Paralympic sport - via the Government and the National Lottery. Like all big numbers, it helps to break it down to understand where it goes and what we hope it can deliver.
Of UK Sport’s £235m investment, well under half has actually been targeted at the athletes that will make up Team GB in Beijing. Put another way, we have invested £22½m a year to support our best talent – still a lot of money, but more reasonable when you realise it underpins the medal hopes of over 300 athletes.
The investment is very necessary - the days of the plucky amateur are long gone. Olympic sport is now a sophisticated science where nothing can be left to chance and anything that can make as little as a 1% performance improvement can mean the difference between ending up on the medal podium or being amongst the also-rans. Just look at Athens, where five of Team GB’s gold medals were won by a collective margin of just 0.545 of a second.
So we invest to allow our athletes to train full-time and have access to the country’s best coaches, facilities, technology and medical support. We also ensure that they are ready to compete in any environment across the globe, by acclimatising to jet lag, heat and humidity – all of which present hurdles to success in Beijing.
The list goes on, and it all costs money – an average of £50,000 a year for our Olympians – from Chris Hoy to Tom Daley. That is what it takes to achieve success - those moments that last long in the memory, where our athletes stand on top of the podium as the union jack is raised and ‘God Save the Queen’ is played to a world audience of billions. Our athletes’ success is also an inspiration that will get people into sport and help tackle issues from obesity to social inclusion. It can create a powerful sense of pride and put Great Britain firmly amongst the world’s sporting superstars.
We can only have this sense of confidence because we are on the road to building a world class system – in Olympic sport there are no half measures, just a total commitment to work as a team delivering success. UK Sport’s investment will contribute to medal success in Beijing and even more so in London in four years time. That makes the £235 million not just worth spending, but money well spent.
This article first appeared in the Guardian yesterday.