Barring some exceptional performances by our ever popular New Zealand Sevens Team and Silver Ferns – along with that of some of our most talented and exciting individual athletes – the results from our Delhi Commonwealth Games team, and in particular our performance compared to that of Australia, appears to have once again raised the question as to how we can compete in international sport.
These results, along with our cricketers’ astonishing series loss to Bangladesh earlier this month, justify a further debate about how we can develop the capability to compete on the world stage.
Firstly, the debate about ‘how’ we develop the capability to compete in global sports tends to resurface following international competitions. While the Commonwealth Games aren’t necessarily considered ‘global’ they are a good litmus test for how well we are faring in many of the sports we focus on. Needless to say this debate has its origins (at least in part) in history - not of a bygone era but in recent times when we shifted the focus of our children from ‘winning’ to ‘participating’. While this discussion, which occupied the national psyche for months, may seem like a distant memory, it is important we continue to explore the topic for the benefit of future generations.
As some of you may recall, there was a time when we as a nation, like most nations of a similar standing, believed it was all about winning - and for many it was. There is no doubt this premise played a healthy part in enabling us to produce some extraordinary results over the years however it wasn’t without its problems i.e. while we may have encouraged those who had the capacity to excel to do so, we risked ostracising a far greater number of children who were unable to win thereby compromising the very sports we pursued.
While I believe it was important to engage in this debate at the time, it needed to be extended to all facets of life to be of value rather than being isolated to sport as it invariably was. By this I mean it was equally important to identify the ‘benefits’ we would gain as a nation if everyone endeavoured to excel (in the areas they could) as it was to retain a ‘winning’ attitude on the sports field. However, as many social practitioners knew, if we continued to emphasise the importance of winning over and above everything else, we would not only marginalise those who were unlikely to secure a spot on the podium, we would diminish participation levels in the very activities we focused on.
Nevertheless, I hear more and more people today express their disappointment and concern about the state of our athletes’ success – putting a lot of that down to a lack of competitive attitude – and rightly so, given they as tax payers foot the bill. A question I have often asked which draws no end of passionate responses is ‘has the funding of sport made a difference to our success or would we have achieved similar results had we left things as they were i.e. with little, if any, centralised funding?’
My views on this are mixed. Firstly I believe the likes of Valerie Adams, Cameron Brown, Sarah Ulmer and Hamish Carter, to name a few, would have succeeded irrespective of government funding. The reason I believe this would have been the case is because of their personal commitment and level of professionalism i.e. they weren’t sitting on the sidelines with their hands out saying that unless they received funding, they would be unable to compete. They made things work by seeking the assistance of the people they needed to help them develop along with that of private sponsorship. However, on the other hand, there is no question government or tax payer funding has enabled sports like rowing and cycling to prosper in recent years.
In fairness, I would argue the people who have benefited most noticeably from the modernising of sport are not so much the athletes but those who longed to pursue a career as a coach or sports administrator. Funding sport as we have has unquestionably given rise to the advent of ‘professional’ infrastructures that cost a great deal of money to sustain but whether they add the value these people believe is critical to the success of their sport is not entirely clear.
There is one argument I would like to pitch however, which often comes up in such a debate, and that is to do with sacrifice (sacrifice, and the need to be more professional to be competitive, are often cited as the principal arguments to justify funding). The fact is athletes do not make sacrifices – as we are so often led to believe - at least not to the extent the nation should feel sufficiently indebted to them that we should be obliged to foot the bill. At the end of the day, athletes chose to pursue their careers just like the rest of us. To say we as a nation benefit from their success ‘more’ than we benefit from others is to belittle the efforts of the countless number of people who contribute to society in a profoundly meaningful way for no material gain or prominence but because they believe it is appropriate to do so.
If an athlete chooses to participate in sport, that is their choice. Do we benefit from their activities? Of course we do and for this reason, we as a nation should support them i.e. provide the facilities and opportunity for them to participate and encourage them to excel – however I do not believe it should therefore be a given that we should be expected to plough more and more money into their careers when there is no sure way of assessing the value we will reap as a nation by doing so. The benefits athletes gain personally as a result of their success will, if they respond appropriately, last them a life time i.e. society’s interest in leveraging the attributes they develop or the skills they acquire as a consequence of participating at an elite level tends to ensure they are handsomely rewarded well beyond the time they retire.
If we believed as a nation that funding an individual’s future was appropriate, why don’t we establish a funding pool whereby every youngster would be given the right to draw down a set sum of money over a given period of time to use as they see fit? This could, for the likes of an athlete, pay for additional equipment, coaching or competitions they may otherwise be unable to access or, alternatively, for a students education.
One of the issues I have is that we as a nation put vast sums of money into a pot which is then distributed by an entity (whom we call SPARC) on our behalf to the athletes and/or sports they believe will generate a good return on investment for the country. The problem I have is twofold. Firstly does SPARC (The Sport and Recreation Commission of New Zealand) need to be the size it is to do the job it is required to do or could we come up with a more sophisticated model and criteria to match that allows a single board to make more informed decisions in regards to funding sport whilst at the same time reducing its political influence and secondly, how should we (in fairness to all athletes) define a ‘good’ return on investment? If it is about winning Gold Medals, World Championships or World Cups, then we need to think very carefully about which sports we can consistently and realistically compete in over the longer term rather than assuming all sports are equal i.e. winning the gold medal at the Commonwealth games in say netball is a very different proposition than winning the gold medal in say the 1500m as we hoped Nick Willis would do.
In other words, the question we need to ask is this – is Willis’ third placing considered by the nation to be of similar value to the country as the Silver Ferns or Sevens gold or is his bronze a bronze and the Silver Ferns gold a gold? If we simply tally up the medals or placings and see them as equal as we currently do, we will inevitably migrate our focus to fewer, smaller sports in the future meaning we will end up being a nation that excels in fringe or minority sports but remains absent from those that are global.
A pertinent example of this is swimming. While it is only fair that we should expect our swimmers to perform in an event like the Commonwealth games, which in fairness they did not, let’s not forget that it is infinitely harder for a swimmer to take a gold medal in their sport than it is for the majority of the athletes we support to win in theirs - simply because of the sheer size of the sport and the number of competitors involved.
The argument I make is perhaps best observed in the US with its inaccurately named but nationalistically hyped ‘World (Baseball) Series’. In truth very few nations around the world play baseball (it isn’t a ‘world’ series but rather a ‘national’ competition), despite it being one of the biggest sports in the US. The reason it isn’t a problem to the US is because 1) they have an enormous population which ensures the game remains healthy and 2) because they compete successfully in the majority of global sports. However, if all they played were baseball, gridiron and basketball they wouldn’t register internationally as a legitimate participant, meaning the nation would experience less interest, recognition and/or benefits by way of its athletes from the global community (I state this example as these aspects are often positioned as the reason we should fund sport in this country).
To this end, I would like to see SPARC initiate a deeper discussion with the sporting community to further clarify what they consider (as the nominated distributor of funds) to be a reasonable ROI. To achieve this, they would need to consider whether the number of international competitors or competing nations in a particular sport has any bearing on a sport’s expected or ‘required’ success to qualify for funding. If this was deemed too difficult to assess, or the variabilities too complex to manage, I suspect we will become a nation that excels in a few sports but gradually disappears from those of interest to most.
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