Basketball Cuts Campaign Gathers Pace

Posted: Mon, 21 Jan 2013 14:26

A campaign has been launched by "Fund British Basketball" and has gathered some high profile backers over the course of the last few weeks, including Sir Clive Woodward where he argued the following:

In a column in the Daily Mail, England's World Cup winning rugby coach and former British Olympic Association's Director of Elite Performance wrote:

"We must adopt a broader and longer-term vision and aspiration rather than leave ourselves accused of developing an unhealthy lust for medals at all costs, and invest and develop other sports, especially team sports on the back of our Olympic and Paralympic triumph.

"It is much more difficult to win medals in team sports compared to individual sports and, traditionally, they do not add many medals to the final medal table because they are not multi-discipline events like rowing, cycling boxing, swimming and athletics. In team sports like basketball you usually only have the men's team and women's team.

"Yet, if you analyse the low cost and highly accessible aspect of most team sports, compared to other sports and those which sit comfortably in our inner communities, it is completely baffling to me, why funding has been completely stopped in this area."

The statement from Fund British Basketabll reads as below:

"As I hope you are aware, the UK basketball community was rocked last month with the news that British Basketball has had its funding cut to zero by UK Sport for the next Olympic cycle toward 2016.

The implications of this are very severe and means an end to Team GB as we know it - no money to be able to afford NBA players such as Luol Deng and Joel Freeland, world class coaches or support staff.

For a sport that provides benefits to so many, as you know, this is an outrageous decision that needs to be reversed.

A campaign called 'Fund British Basketball' has been started, with the aim to get as many people as possible to sign an online petition to make the government take notice.

The petition is here:

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/43456/

Please sign it right away, and get a minimum of 10 of your friends to do the same. If we all take action together, it should be no time before we get a sizeable number of people supporting the campaign to be able to approach the government with.

There is also an accompanying website at www.fundbritishbasketball.com to follow the campaign news, and the hashtag #fundbritishbasketball is being used on Twitter to track tweets.

Please take action today and help secure the future of British basketball."

Here at the Sports Think Tank we did try to open the debate about the funding for 'Team Sports' and those who were not likely to medal in Rio 2016 as part of the 'No Compromise' approach to elite funding. As always we simply wanted to open up a nation wide dialogue about what people and sport wanted from its public investment in elite sport (assuming of course you accept lottery and exchequer funding being used to secure Gold medals at the Olympics in the first place). We have not concluded either way - we simply wanted there to be an open and transparent process for a proper consultation and honest debate. We would encourage research in this area and look forward to receiving articles.

As part of our rationale to create good public sports policy based on evidence and open dialogue the minimum we would have expected was a nationwide debate about the issue of No Compromise. There are many non-Olympic sports who equally feel they have lost out on the funding they enjoyed pre-Olympics. Their voice needs to be heard and the decision on such a sensitive issue surely needs to be made by more than the Sports Minister and UK Sport Board.

The No Compromise approach may well be the right decision - but as our own mini survey on the website shows there are mixed feelings about this issue. It is a shame it has taken the bravery of Basketball to challenge the decision to create a public debate.

Of course GB Volleyball have also made their views known here http://www.britishvolleyball.org/News.php?articleId=485

Tags: Basketball, Rio2016, Uksport

Comments

No comments yet, why not be the first?

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published.