Spice: GB U20s and Futures “have to go” with cuts

I’m still slightly holding back my view on all this UK Sport funding malarkey, but TalkSport and its listeners today had plenty of debate on the matter (Darren Gough – you’ve said enough though).

In particular, Chris Spice, Performance Director for GB Basketball, who spoke of the disappointment, and also of what may lie in store for basketball in Britain now the die has been cast.

Below is the transcript of the interview which can be found here (Click on 1500-1530 – roughly 21 minutes in).

Obviously, we are pretty devastated with the news that we got yesterday, it leaves us with a lot of work to do. We obviously think that we are worthy of an appeal, so the first thing we are doing is putting our heads together to so what that might look like.

Our sport is built in the heartland of British inner cities, and we are absolutely crushed for them, the kids, and the inspiring young people who play basketball, and there are a lot of them. A lot more obviously than other sports that are well funded. That’s the focus of our attention now, but we are still hopeful that we can go forward.

We knew that we’d be on the cusp [of gaining funding or not], but the reality of our sport is that it is probably the most competitive team sport in the Olympics, football is only an under-23 competition, with basketball, all the world’s greats turn up. We started out this campaign four years ago, outside the top 80, and we finished it, at the moment with the men at 23rd and the women at 24th. To come up, both teams, fifty places in the world, we thought that we had done enough to push ourselves over that line.

There’s a couple of myths out there at the minute, firstly, that we got our host place by right. In fact, we had to meet criteria FIBA had set for us, we were the only sport that didn’t qualify by right and had to qualify. Secondly, it was a nonsense that we were given a host place to boost ticket sales, because everyone and the greater good knew that basketball would sell out no matter who turned up.

And thirdly, that we are an expensive sport. We only asked for £8million, which was a continual of our funding now, and unfortunately you had other team sports asking for almost double that, who have been invested in for sixteen years and finally win a bronze medal; all we are asking is for the same opportunity to win a medal after only six years.

Anyone who knows basketball will know how deep basketball competitions are, and certainly when we pitched for funding in 2007, we talked at length about this being an 8-10 year project, and that London was a stepping stone along the way, it’s interesting in the two games that we really went close, both silver medallists in the French in the women’s and the Spanish in the men’s, if one ball in one hundred shots had fallen the other way and we’d beaten either of the silver medallists, I don’t think we’d be sitting here having this conversation; that’s how close we are to the top teams.

It certainly means that we won’t be able to invest in our youngsters, and that is the biggest disappointment to me to be honest. Our Under-20s and Futures programmes will certainly have to go.

We have an amazing sponsor that has been right on our shoulder the whole time, and are going to stay with us. We are looking to see how, if we don’t get any additional funding, or different funding, how we can put teams out for the Eurobaskets this year. Remember the men have qualified for their third straight Eurobasket; our football team can’t even do that.

It looks like the 30th January [as the date of appeal to UK Sport]. I don’t think we will be pleading but I think we have a case and a story and I’m hoping that when we get in front of the board they will see just how far we’ve come and how much we’ve improved in the last four years. I think we can qualify for Rio, and of course, Europe is so strong, if you qualify through Europe, you do get in the medal hunt, which the French and the Russians all proved this time around.

The two things we have found, and we have only just got some figures in, is that participation is slowly on the rise, but the other thing that has increased massively, is the attendances in the BBL, which is again is a reflection of how basketball touched the nation, and these young kids feel that. To have quality basketball taken away from this country, means that there will be no aspiration. So obviously we will be fighting hard, we have got the whole sport behind us and we are hoping we can turn around the tables.

(Main image: Surrey Sports Park on YouTube)