Joy at the prize, or dejection over the what if? It’s the conundrum of the silver medallist, a question some are probably still grappling with after their efforts at the Paris Olympic Games, one written on the faces of Josh Kerr and Matt Hudson-Smith in the immediate aftermath. Does the motivation for gold transform into obsession after a near miss?
“It’s different for every single athlete,” says Dame Katherine Grainger, a five-time Olympic medallist in rowing and now chair of UK Sport. “I won a silver where it was the greatest thing ever, my first medal,” she says, recalling success at Sydney 2000 in the women’s quadruple sculls.
“We’d never won any medal at all in women’s rowing for Team GB. It was incredible. Whereas eight years on, I had a silver medal that was heartbreaking because it wasn’t where we thought we would be able to deliver. Expectations shift. There needs to be so much patience and support for athletes coming back. Whatever the result, they’re all Olympians now and that is a celebration in itself.”
But gold, which Grainger finally claimed at London 2012, does matter. Speaking last week to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Grainger, while pleased with an overall showing of 65 medals, admitted there is “a bit of work to do” on the gold front, with Team GB’s tally of 14 their lowest in 20 years. Cue questions around UK Sport’s funding of sports that delivered limited returns on investment. Boxing, as an example, produced one bronze after receiving just over £12m during the Paris cycle.
Grainger emphasises that a lack of medals doesn’t equal a cut in funding for sports. “If you think: ‘That’s a disappointing Games, now we need to transform what we invest in,’ then every sport is terrified of having, say, one bad series of results. It puts far too much pressure on individual athletes thinking: ‘If we don’t perform, this could be our sport over.’
“There’s no way we have an immediate reaction, that there’s a result, therefore, this next decision gets made instantly. It’s a far healthier conversation than that.”
Finances have been tricky for UK Sport lately. In April the Times reported a statement from Sally Munday, chief executive of the organisation, to national governing bodies announcing plans to cut a quarter of its own staff. Munday wrote: “We do not believe we can make a credible case to your government on your behalf for an uplift in investment unless we all play our part and demonstrate considerable savings and efficiencies.”
Grainger says cutbacks have taken place. “Los Angeles is the next summer Games. It’s obviously much different for travel, for everything else, it’s going to be more expensive. People have experienced cost of living throughout this last year, everything is costing more. Realistically, we don’t know if our own budgets will be able to increase, or certainly not going to be able to match those increases in costs.
“It’s the sports that are doing this phenomenal work, and the athletes are doing incredible things. Our priority is to make sure that, as much as we can, the money goes straight to them. The right thing to do was look at UK Sport as an organisation, see where we could reduce costs and still deliver the strategy, still give the sports the support they need.
“It was still important that we could deliver the ambitions we have, and we still feel we can. We’re just going to do it in a reduced way, which is why we got the restructure and had to reduce staff, which was not an easy thing for anyone to go through. It’s a hard thing for everyone to experience. But it was the right thing to do.”
A new four-year cycle prompts a search for the next big things, too. Grainger is speaking as part of UK Sport’s launch of its latest talent ID programme, Find Your Greatness. The goal is simple: to reach out to 16- to 24‑year‑olds with natural athletic ability searching for the right sport to channel it into, primed to fill gaps in Team GB and ParalympicsGB. Applications, now open, will be followed by regional testing, with the funding agency hoping to find athletes to compete in skeleton, cycling, modern pentathlon and handball among others.
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“When the Olympics and the Paralympics capture the imagination of the public,” Grainger says, “it’s a great time for people sitting at home thinking: ‘How do you get into that sport?’ It’s a really exciting thing to try and capture that great potential.”
Similar UK Sport schemes in the past have been rewarding. Lizzy Yarnold was a heptathlete before she applied for the Girls4Gold programme in 2008. She was introduced to skeleton, eventually becoming Britain’s most successful winter Olympian. Around the same time, Helen Glover was taken on by the Sporting Giants programme, which aimed to find taller athletes. In Paris she added a silver to her rowing gold medals from London and Rio.
“[The programmes] will change from year to year, from Olympiad to Olympiad, but they work,” Grainger says. “We’ve just seen four of our brilliant Olympians, men and women, who were on those incredible bouldering walls in Paris, but they were all in the lead and bouldering aspect. We didn’t have anyone in speed climbing. So where can we find the athletes who could have talent for speed climbing?”
The whole thing just takes a bit of imagination, Grainger suggests. “If you’ve got the natural attributes, you can be brought in and helped along the way.” Some may even satisfy that thirst for gold.