Rethinking Sports Funding

JOSEPH ROMANOS TAKES A LOOK AT THE REVIEW OF AUSTRALIAN SPORTS FUNDING PRIORITIES AND PONDERS THE FOLLOW ON EFFECTS THAT IT MAY HAVE HERE.

There’s been a lot of fuss lately about what sports Sparc should be funding in New Zealand.

The spark for the latest round of animated discussion was a report prepared for the Australian Government by businessman David Crawford, who has previously helped to overhaul the set-ups of the AFL and the Football Federation of Australia.

Crawford and his panel spent 18 months reviewing sports funding in Australia and the gist of their report was that the sports funding priorities are wrong.

While key sports officials in Australia have set a goal of Australia returning to the top five on the medal table at the 2012 London Olympics, Crawford feels the emphasis for funding should be on the major participant sports. These he names as swimming, tennis, cricket, cycling, the football codes, netball, golf, basketball, surfing and surf lifesaving.

Presumably he sees little justification in much funding of athletics, skiing, weightlifting, volleyball or handball. The immediate follow-up to a report that has sent shockwaves around Australian sport is to ask whether it should apply also to New Zealand. Outspoken Sunday Star-Times columnist Richard Boock leapt in with a piece pointing to what he thought was the absurd infatuation with Olympic sports in New Zealand.

He paraphrased Crawford, saying the Olympics were over-rated, over-indulged and poor value for money. He said Crawford’s report was confirmation at last that the Olympics have become for Australia (and New Zealand) a self-serving industry of entitlement, a publicly-funded Masonic lodge in which members continually expect preferential treatment at any cost.

Successful Olympic sports, said Boock, offered nothing to the community in real terms, despite the spurious claims. There were no public benefits; just a public cost.

Boock, it must be said, has made his reputation in sports journalism as a cricket writer and to my knowledge has never reported on an Olympics. It reminds me of the case last year of Richard Becht offering a sports critique for Radio New Zealand and rubbishing the Paralympics while conceding he had watched none of the event on television.

It is always better to offer strong opinions from a background of knowledge, not ignorance.

Boock’s anti-Olympics column – he questions the funding that sports like triathlon, rowing, cycling, swimming and athletics get, at the expense of rugby, netball and cricket - provoked a mixed reaction, but not surprisingly people from non-Olympic sports thought he was a brilliant thinker.

I don’t particularly like Sparc’s infatuation with its “key” sports, or its massive emphasis on medals won or world titles gained. However, it’s clear there’s not enough money to fund every sport to the extent it would like, so tough decisions have to be made.

The Olympics are the biggest sports festival on the planet, by far, so it makes sense to me to place a great deal of emphasis on them and on the sports involved.

The temptation in New Zealand is to become caught up with what might be termed “Commonwealth sports” – cricket, rugby, rugby league, netball. I know countries outside the Commonwealth play these sports, but they are by no means global sports and they appeal primarily to Commonwealth countries.

Rugby has such a hold in the New Zealand sports psyche that it is able to raise vast amounts of money by way of television revenue, spectator admissions, sponsorship and advertising. I would argue strongly against any Sparc money going to rugby, even if its playing numbers are extremely high.

Similarly, cricket and netball, because of their high profile in New Zealand, are able to generate good income. There’s never enough, of course, but by and large, cricket and netball do exceedingly well, in terms of exposure and money generated.

Therefore I am against the Crawford model being applied to New Zealand. I like the fact that so much funding is channelled towards Olympic sports.

New Zealanders feel a massive surge of pride when one of their own cracks it on the Olympic stage – think of the reaction to the Beijing triumphs of the Evers-Swindells, Nick Willis, Hayden Roulston and Valerie Vili or the Athens gold medals of Hamish Carter, the Evers-Swindells and Sarah Ulmer.

New Zealand sports fans are a lot more sophisticated now than they were half a century ago. They might still love to see the All Blacks win, but they understand the significance of global sports...

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STORY BY + JOSEPH ROMANOS
PHOTOS COURTESY + PHOTOSPORT