As an unsteady Bradley Wiggins took to the stage at the BBC's Sports Personality of the Year aftershow bash to celebrate his victory by strumming along to the Jam's That's Entertainment, the sepia tones were already permeating the year's golden Olympic memories.
The tears of joy from Katherine Grainger and pain from Zac Purchase, the triumphs of Super Saturday amid a riot of union flags, the relentless positivity, the sweaty mayhem of the boxing arena at ExCel, the roar of the rowing lake at Eton Dorney, the intensity of the velodrome and the giddy abandon of the main stadium. Amid an austere winter and a sporting public again consumed with the passion and poison of the Premier League, it all seemed to already belong to an earlier age.
The BBC's event – attended by 17,000 people including enthusiastic members of the public, athletes, administrators, and the ubiquitous Games Makers in uniforms now fraying at the edges – was one last hurrah for a year of unprecedented sporting success. Eleven of the 12 nominees were Olympic medallists and the shortlist encapsulated some of the themes of the summer – from the pre-eminence of inspirational female athletes to the explosion of Paralympic sport into the wider public consciousness.
Many will have spent the festive period reliving the highs of the summer through the BBC's five DVD box-set, while some of those Olympic heroes including Wiggins, Ben Ainslie and British Cycling's performance director Dave Brailsford are likely to learn that they have been knighted in the New Year's honours list.
Golden moment
But the thoughts of those tasked with delivering on the expansive legacy promises made to secure the Games, which cost £9bn to stage, have already moved on. They are more likely to be considering new figures showing one-third of children now leave primary school overweight or obese, or Labour claims that the proportion of children playing sport for two hours a week in school has dropped from 90% to 50%.
During the Games, there was much talk of the "golden moment", of "maximising the window of opportunity", of turning "inspiration into participation". The much used and abused legacy term has been applied to everything from perceptions of disability to Britain's ability to compete in the global economy. But Lord Coe, who made many of the promises in 2005 on which it will be judged and is now the government's adviser on legacy, has narrowed his focus to three key areas.
"We're in quite good shape. We've got a bespoke little team working out of a garret in Whitehall. The task I was given by the prime minister was to figure out what the pillars were and I think there are three core themes – sport, volunteering and promoting British business abroad," says Coe. The physical legacy of what will become the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park when it starts to reopen on 27 July next year falls under the aegis of the London mayor, Boris Johnson, and is being taken care of by the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC). Their biggest challenge remains tying up a deal for West Ham to move into the Olympic Stadium, now unlikely to reopen until the summer of 2016.
"Across the piece, this is not just a sporting issue. If we're talking about the fact a larger and growing proportion of the population under the age of 11 are now officially obese, then really it's making sure you've got joined-up thinking across government. It is beginning to come together."
Coe, who is finalising his first batch of reports to be delivered to the prime minister early in the new year and will report to him once every 12 weeks on progress, is typically upbeat. There were fears that, having delivered the Games to such acclaim, he would retreat from the legacy challenge. But having been talked into it by David Cameron as they sat next to one another on Super Saturday, he insists he will roll his sleeves up.
"It's not for me to say 'you have to do this'. What we're saying is 'be ambitious, set targets'. Make sure that where you have three or four government departments there isn't duplication of effort or duplication of resourcing. People have to understand that sports participation isn't just something that looks good on Sport England figures, or makes me feel good because more people play sport, but we also want some health outcomes out of this," says Coe.
"I want to be able to say what we've achieved in the first year. My reports will be about where I think the pace is good or where I think there needs to be an injection of pace and purpose."
Haphazard feel
But while you would expect Coe to insist the legacy is on track, others fear the worst. Already, the shadow health minister, Andy Burnham, fears that the "post-Olympic moment is slipping away". He points to a lack of joined-up thinking across government and cites a worryingly haphazard feel to some of the post-Games plans as evidence.
London 2012 organisers proved there was a direct link between elite performance and grassroots participation when they delivered an upsurge of interest in hitherto minority sports among young people. But when those youngsters tried to sign up with a local club, many faced long waiting lists or a lack of qualified coaches. Toni Minichiello, who coached Jessica Ennis to Olympic gold, believes sport generally has "missed a trick" and that athletics in particular faces a "desperate struggle" to accommodate those who want to join clubs.
"If you put them on waiting lists or the quality is not there, the interest goes and you lose them from the sport very quickly. They quickly define their experience of sport as not very positive and they're reluctant to return. Then they will probably pass that on to the next generation of their kids," says Minichiello.
The area where this state of flux is most pronounced is in school sport. The decision by the education secretary, Michael Gove, to axe £162m in ringfenced funding for a national network of school sports partnerships in December 2010, less than 18 months from the opening ceremony, always looked likely to come back and bite the coalition.
So it has proved. The £65m in funding that was reinstated following an outcry to fund the day-release of secondary school PE specialists to primary schools runs out at the end of this academic year and there is an ongoing cabinet dispute over a new strategy that has delayed any announcement.
For ideological reasons, Gove remains reluctant to force headteachers to spend money earmarked for school sport on specific schemes. But others, including those at the sharp end, insist ways have to be found to improve the expertise of primary school teachers in particular. They argue that without giving young children a basic level of physical literacy and making sport part of their lives at any early stage, there is much less chance of preventing them from giving up altogether at secondary school. The so-called "post-16 drop off" remains a huge challenge, particularly among girls.
Rash of medals
There were hopes that the rash of medals for Nicola Adams, Ennis, Grainger and others would provide a cadre of impressive new role models for teenage girls. But without any structure in place, the fear is that the moment to capitalise is fast disappearing.
Labour claims that since the requirement for at least two hours of physical exercise in schools was dropped, the proportion of children hitting that target has fallen from 90% to 50%. They fear that if funding is simply handed over to schools without stipulations on how it should be spent, it will disappear into the wider school budget as harassed headteachers focus on other priorities.
The legacy for those governing bodies that delivered such success in the summer of 2012 seems secure – at least in those that have powered Great Britain's rise up the medal table from 36th in Atlanta to third in London. British Olympic Association officials have already begun preparations for Rio and signed a deal with a preparation camp in Belo Horizonte. During the Olympics, the government promised to maintain funding for elite sport and it was revealed last week that £347m will be poured into cycling, rowing, athletics, swimming and the rest in the four years to 2017.
All the projections indicate that UK Sport's vow to become the first host nation to improve on its medal table performance at the Olympics and Paralympics that follow is no idle boast. For Paralympic sport, a 43% rise in funding was recognition of the huge breakthrough made by David Weir, Sarah Storey and Hannah Cockroft et al in London and a reflection of increasingly intense international competition.
The debate is now whether UK Sport's "no compromise" formula, so demonstrably successful in delivering medals, risks harming the wider legacy aims. Sports such as basketball, table tennis, handball and indoor volleyball – all of which hoped for a boost to participation figures from London 2012 and are well suited to urban areas and schools – have had their elite funding cut altogether because they could not prove they were capable of delivering medals within eight years.
Instead, they must rely on the £493m invested through Sport England in grassroots sport through governing bodies over the next four years. The grassroots funding body has already been forced to drop one target – to get 1 million more people playing sport three or more times a week – and now focuses instead on a new metric that measures once-a-week participation. The most recent survey showed that those numbers had increased by 750,000 during 2012 to 15.5 million, driven by sports such as cycling and athletics.
Figures among 14- to 25-year-olds continue to flatline, however, and Sport England has now been charged with directing two-thirds of that £493m over four years towards building up links between schools and clubs and trying to engage children in a wider range of sports so they can find something that suits them.
There are other alarm bells that undermine Coe's upbeat prognosis. Local authorities facing huge financial pressures are bound to further cut sports budgets as they try to balance the books, hitting attempts to provide facilities that are both accessible and affordable to those on low incomes.
Figures seen by the Guardian show that on average local authorities cut spending on sport by 13% between 2010-11 and 2012-13, but in some areas such as the north-east the cuts were as high as 27%. Organisations such as StreetGames, which takes sport into urban communities, and Sported, a charity started by the Locog deputy chairman Sir Keith Mills, are likely to become disproportionately important.
Deserted offices
The now almost deserted Canary Wharf offices of the London 2012 organising committee overlook the concrete expanses of an Olympic Park that increasingly looks a bit sorry and windswept after all the temporary structures and "dressing" have been removed. The temporary "wings" have come off the Aquatics Centre and the basketball arena is being dismantled and shipped off – not, as billed, to the Rio 2016 Games but broken up into parts and put to more mundane use around the UK – as part of a £292m "transformation" programme.
The LLDC board hopes to either come to a deal with West Ham by March, with a scheme to spend upwards of £160m converting the £429m main stadium into a genuine multi-use stadium with retractable seats and a full roof, or will abandon the idea altogether and press ahead with an alternative plan that doesn't involve football.
Hobbled by the mistakes of their predecessors, stretching all the way back to a 2007 decision to end consideration of a top-flight football club as a likely tenant and press on with a semi-permanent bowl that kept options open, they are under huge pressure to get it right. The wider questions about the regeneration of Stratford, east London – whether planners can successfully marry provision of affordable housing with making a commercial return, whether the Olympic Park will be integrated with the wider area rather than become an oasis of prosperity among poverty, whether the iCity development that will move into the cavernous media centre will provide meaningful local employment – will take rather longer to answer.
It is not only in medals or bricks and mortar that the legacy of British sport's annus mirabilis will be measured. For all the medals and all the joy they brought, if it ultimately fails to deliver on its own "inspire a generation" rhetoric it will be deemed a disappointment. Coe, in his new role as chairman of the British Olympic Association and as the government's legacy adviser, insists he will not shirk from the challenge. He is not likely to have time to bask in the glory of 2012 for too much longer.
No comments:
Post a Comment