Basketball lost its funding, not due to the struggling and mostly non-British professional game here, but for its failure to demonstrate medal potential. That's the sole criteria of UK Sport. It is dough for show and the show is podium potential. It's the financial equivalent of the East German doping programme ....... that should make you splutter into your Americano.
I'm not against Lizzie Yarnold at all, or Amy Williams or anyone else keen on tobogganing ..... but it is hard to overcome the perception that without mountain ranges and winter resorts, tracks or a programme to involve both participants and spectators within this country, we're styling a Meet-me-at-MacDonalds on top of a metaphorical skeleton. We're supposedly a competitive athletics nation but we've only produced one woman javelin thrower in thirty years since Sanderson and Whitbread, who could even get the damned thing beyond 60 metres and that's just one example of the many events we might choose to popularise and also uncover medal potential.
The sliders might give us spin-off skin-tight suits, that'll soon be banned like our swim suits and bit of world-class engineering, but any developing sport that caught the nation's attention and took place within the country could surely be more financially productive? There seems to be a huge difference between advantaging our athletes with warm weather training and financing people to participate in sports we will never hear about, or be involved in.
(Yes Peter Schmeichel did play handball and maybe young Cameron Dawson needs to start too. I was impressed with him up to the second goal last night. And then after all those years of professional coaching his position was off, how he went down was off and the ball went both under him and through his legs ........ How come goalies in this country have forgotten the fundamentals? The aim is to make it harder for the forward not easier.)
I'm not against Lizzie Yarnold at all, or Amy Williams or anyone else keen on tobogganing ..... but it is hard to overcome the perception that without mountain ranges and winter resorts, tracks or a programme to involve both participants and spectators within this country, we're styling a Meet-me-at-MacDonalds on top of a metaphorical skeleton. We're supposedly a competitive athletics nation but we've only produced one woman javelin thrower in thirty years since Sanderson and Whitbread, who could even get the damned thing beyond 60 metres and that's just one example of the many events we might choose to popularise and also uncover medal potential.
The sliders might give us spin-off skin-tight suits, that'll soon be banned like our swim suits and bit of world-class engineering, but any developing sport that caught the nation's attention and took place within the country could surely be more financially productive? There seems to be a huge difference between advantaging our athletes with warm weather training and financing people to participate in sports we will never hear about, or be involved in.
(Yes Peter Schmeichel did play handball and maybe young Cameron Dawson needs to start too. I was impressed with him up to the second goal last night. And then after all those years of professional coaching his position was off, how he went down was off and the ball went both under him and through his legs ........ How come goalies in this country have forgotten the fundamentals? The aim is to make it harder for the forward not easier.)