Robertson: Basketball needs a long hard look at itself
Basketball has to be “turned inside out” according to the Minister for Sport, Hugh Robertson MP, at an adjournment debate last night in the House of Commons called after the recent funding cut in basketball by UK Sport for the next cycle ahead of Rio 2016.
Admittedly, basketball did not reach its target of a quarter final appearance in the London 2012 Olympic Games, but having started from scratch as a national side, coming through the ranks in FIBA and hitting the targets the international body set out for Team GB on numerous occasions, almost beating the eventual silver medallists Spain in the group stage, and could, in the end, have knocked them out because of a single basket – it wasn’t deemed good enough, and the future is not regarded too great either if we are to make anything of the words of Robertson.
With an appeal to UK Sport due this week, the online petition (which you can still go and sign) that has been created and has over 12,000 signatures, together with the impassioned plea by Chicago Bulls and Team GB star Luol Deng to the Prime Minister himself; this adjournment debate (called by chairman of the BBL Foundation and MP for the City of Chester, Stephen Mosley) couldn’t change anything, as only the panel for UK Sport can do that, but as one MP noted, it could add significant influence if the points made are taken away by Minister of Sport.
Below is the FULL transcript of Hugh Robertson’s statement after the attending MPs had finished making their comments on the situation at the start of the debate:
Can I start by congratulating the honourable member of Chester [Stephen Mosley] for securing this debate and for the manner in which he presented his case.
It is probably worth saying now, I will proceed with a certain amount of caution on this tonight.
The appeal is due in front of the UK Sport board, I believe, on Wednesday, and that, in any event, is not the end of the process, there are a number of other hurdles over which they could progress. If they have got the terms of that appeal right, and many of the points made tonight will form part of that appeal, then it strikes me that they will have a case that is going to provoke some further thought. Let me put it no further than that, but we do have this debate tonight a slightly delicate moment.
Just a couple of other things I’d like to say that frame my remarks this evening before I answer some of the individual points.
The first is that it is important, and I hope that honourable members forgive me for making this point, but it is important to frame this against the fact that this system works.
Our elite performance system in this country is the envy of almost every other Olympic system in the world.
Back in Sydney we were 10th in the medal table with 28 medals. Here we are in London, 12 years later, third, with 65; the Australians would kill for this sort of system, as with many, many others, people are here in this country, looking at how we have done it, trying to work out the processes that we have adopted and I know talking to many of the Australians, they feel will have to be much tougher and come far more closer to our no compromises approach if they are to win and catch up on some of the ground they feel that they have lost.
I was talking to a forum of performance directors this morning and knowing I had this debate, I said “Let me just road test this on you, have we got this right? Have we gone too far? And do we need in fact to crank it back?” and they said absolutely not.
They felt that the funding, and the funding awards this year, the way they were done, to be the fairest and most robust method that they had been put through. These were performance directors who had done this for a number of years, and they had nothing but praise for the way that they had been guided through the system by UK Sport and the results that had been reached at the end.
I absolutely understand the passion, expressed about a sport that many members care about deeply, but do just balance it with the fact that it is a performance system which for a country our size has just produced 65 medals and a third place in the medal table; that is an extraordinary success by anybody’s standards.
A couple of other points very quickly; the honourable member for Knowsley is absolutely correct, I can set the overall strategy for UK Sport, and indeed I do, it is not up to me to make individual funding decisions within that because there is about two thirds of that money which goes to any of these funding awards is Lottery money, and anybody who has been in this house for any length of time will know that is not ministers to direct.
And the final point I would make, is that funding is not inexhaustible.
We have done very well to increase the overall budget for Olympic and Paralympic sport by 11%, the only host nation that has ever done that, for the Rio cycle, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to take tough decisions, and this has been one of them. And I know having been through the decision making process with UK Sport, they had took me through it, Sport England, looking at both funding settlements together; they have a chart and the question is at which point they slice the thing off up and down the funding pile, and that is done on the basis of UK Sport, the basis of medal success in Rio.
Let me run through the various issues raised by my right honourable friend, he asked me whether I met with UK Sport, and indeed, Sport England, and I do so every month, I see both chief executives every month, and I spend close to three hours with both organisations going through both these two funding awards.
As far as the UK Sport decision was concerned, they made that decision, and I entirely take on board what the honourable members have said, on the basis that basketball itself had failed to demonstrate that it had a realistic chance of qualifying for Rio 2016 or that it had a medal potential for 2020, and it is worth saying here, they have come a long way, but the fact remains that of the ten games they contested at the London Olympics, of the men and the women; they did only win one, which is not a great performance record I have to say for all the fact that they may be on fast improving pathway.
How are these decisions made? GB Basketball themselves put a submission forward then goes to UK Sport, is then considered by a performance panel with independents on it, they go through each and every aspect of it, as I say, other performance directors that I was talking to today said that this was the best iteration they had been through in a number of these cycles. It is an incredibly detailed process that not only looks at their medal potential for Rio, but also for their medal potential in 2020, and indeed in Rio the line was drawn at a point where they needed to medal which may explain the cycle discrepancy and whether they will qualify or not.
The issue over the governance structure, I think the easiest thing will be to write to the honourable gentlemen and try to nail it down exactly for him.
I have been involved in sport as a politician since 2004, when we were in opposition, and all through that time, basketball has been a bit of a frustration because it is a sport with such an enormous and obvious potential, so many of the contributions tonight have acknowledged that, it is a sport that has the ability to reach into communities in a way that some other sports are unable to do, and yet it somehow fails constantly to just catch light. Sometimes people think that is because of the Active People survey doesn’t pick it up, the sort of people who play basketball don’t always respond to the survey, so therefore the participation levels are getting under played, I’ve heard that. I think there have been in the past some weaknesses in the structure of the way the sport has been delivered.
A sport like netball is a fantastic example of a sport from pretty difficult beginnings has managed to increase its participation base extraordinarily, I’ve visited schemes and they have run for school gate mothers in places like Leicester, where they have adjusted the whole way that they run their sport to try and get more young women in particular back into it and as a result of it, they have been rewarded with a very considerable increase in their funding, so this can be done, but I’ll find out exactly what the governance issues are.
I suppose that leads on to the key question in all of this; what does basketball need to do?
I am told, but I haven’t yet met him, that basketball has just got a new independent chairman. I think what impresses people least at this stage is a huge amount of fuss and bother, I think the best thing he could do be to take a really long hard clinical look at the sport of basketball, and I hope that many of the members who have shown enthusiasm with us here tonight are involved with this and would play a part in it; take a real hard nosed look at what needs to be done.
Go and take a look at teams in sport that have tackled this successfully, go and look at how cycling have put half a million people on their performance base, go and look at how netball, team sport, have done this.
Of course there must be some transferable lessons from netball to basketball. We have enormous performance based expertise in this country; that’s what has driven us from 10th in the medal table to 3rd, make use of those experts, in academia, in UK sport, and really turn this sport inside out, and then I will give you the hope in all this.
For all the fact that these initial funding decisions have been made and announced, there is an appeal process through which they can go and which are going through at the moment, and if they present the right sort of case they will a perfectly good chance of securing funding, but also this is not the end of the story, and if they start to perform and show they are likely to qualify and they are in with a chance of a medal in 2016 or 2020, then there will be the opportunity to fund them.
I just leave with the house the story of gymnastics, where I have seen people from the sport recently, they had their funding cut after a disastrous Olympics in Athens where they basically washed out and they had their funding almost completely cut; difference in the sport but not a wholly different position. They went back and had a really long dig out of the sport, to work out what was required to ensure these young athletes we see in our gyms in our constituencies up and down our land could turn into Olympic medal winners in the future. They turned the sport inside out, putting a really tough performance based culture in place and result of that was very plain to see in London, where they were not only one of the great successes, but probably, arguably, one of the most unexpected successes; so this can be done.
To address the social point, I take the point about basketball’s social reach, but it’s not as though we are just funding sports that have a reach elsewhere, sports like athletics, cycling, boxing in particular, one of the great successes of London 2012, has huge reach into deprived communities in the inner cities, so if I could reassure members one thing, they do make these decisions on performance basis.
*MP for Knowsley, George Haworth, intervenes by saying the difference between amateur boxing and basketball clubs, is that of being a long-standing background and tradition, but basketball is in it’s relative infancy*
It is a fair point, and I suspect that it backs up the point I was making early on, the need to have a look at this long hard look at the structure and get it absolutely right.
I finish where I started and say I want to thank the honourable member for bringing this debate before the house and congratulating him for the way that he did it, and in fact congratulating all the honourable members who have taken part for their comments. Let me finish by saying this, I absolutely, as the minister responsible for this, I want sport in this country to be successful, and I absolutely want basketball to be as successful as rowing or cycling or sailing or any of the obviously more successful Olympic sports.
It has had this sort of troubled past, without overdoing it, but it has been a source of frustration to think that it hasn’t just taken off. It occurs to me there may be a moment of opportunity here, with a new chairman, if he is really prepared to take this on, sort the governance of the sport out, make sure they have people who understand, properly, how to do the participation piece and the performance expertise that really drives success at the top end.
I am sure if he can take that case to UK Sport and prove that indeed we do have a chance of medaling in basketball in Rio or in the 2020 Games, or have a good chance of doing so; they will look again at this decision.
With that all said, it can be seen as a damning verdict of the state of basketball currently, the missed opportunity perhaps when funding was initially given, or maybe even a second chance is now on the horizon, but that will no doubt be dependent on what success the UK Sport appeal has.
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