Slim pickings for Brits indoors

With the World Indoor Champs being the sole global level event held on British shores this winter, Ben Bloom looks at the dearth of competitive opportunities for ambitious athletes

It is the start of an Olympic year and you are a British athlete with international aspirations. Perhaps you are on UK Athletics performance funding, or maybe you sit slightly beneath that level and the goal is to one day join the privileged ranks of the financially supported.

There is the carrot of a home World Indoor Championships in Glasgow looming at the start of March, so time is of the essence – the indoor campaign is so short that there will only be a few opportunities to hit the standards required to gain selection.

You load up the competition calendar to see what international-calibre meets are taking place on
British shores over the course of the season. None. Nothing. Zero.

On the World Athletics website is a list of 56 World Indoor Tour meets, only four of which are not in Europe. They range in profile from elite gold events, through silver and bronze to the bottom challenger tier.

An almighty 14 of them take place in France. Nine in Germany. Five in Czechia. Three countries who claimed a combined total of three medals at last year’s World Championships in Budapest, where the British team alone bagged a weighty 10. Yet, when it comes to indoor opportunities, there is no doubting which country lags lamentably behind.

It is difficult to shake the feeling that Britain’s athletes are succeeding in spite of the system rather than because of it.

The scale of UKA’s financial turmoil is well known, laid bare in early December when chairman Ian Beattie revealed record losses of £3.7 million for the financial year. Amid a multitude of factors, the lack of a title sponsor and television deal were paramount. Those absences meant significant losses across all recently staged international one-day events in Britain: £800,000 on the 2022 Birmingham Diamond League meeting, up to £500,000 at the 2023 London Diamond League, and another £500,000 at the 2023 Birmingham World Indoor Tour.

That sole indoor meet – which served as last year’s tour final – has been removed from the 2024 programme entirely, taking with it Britain’s only global-standard indoor competition of the winter. For athletes and supporters alike, it is not so much slim pickings as nothing to pick from whatsoever.

That the 50,000 sell-out London Diamond League – the highest attendance at any athletics event worldwide last year – lost such great sums betrayed the scale of the problem facing UK Athletics.

Shorn of the BBC’s £3 million-a-year contract that expired in 2020 and struggling for sponsorship, the governing body currently stands no chance of recouping the outlay of appearance fees and expenses involved in putting on big competitions. Commercial and broadcast partners are crucial to financial prosperity.

For an organisation mired in an array of controversies, from accounting woes to coach departures and contentious selection policies, attempting to figure out how to continue staging such events is a headache it could really do without. Perhaps one day in the future it will.

Senior figures within UKA are keen to separate an entwined relationship between the organisation’s governance strand and its events side that is rare across global athletics.

Incredibly few top-level international meets are put on by federations. As just one example of many, the hugely popular Lausanne and Zurich Diamond League events are staged by private organisations entirely separate from Swiss Athletics. The 14 French indoor meets coming over the coming weeks are almost entirely arranged by regional clubs, not the French Athletics Federation.

UKA would dearly love for someone else to take the burden of staging Diamond League and Indoor Tour events off its hands.

The federation has recently been in discussions with the commercially successful London Marathon Events and Great Run Company over plans to form an official partnership, with the initial hope of creating wider sponsorship and broadcasting opportunities, as well as sharing event-staging expertise. The hope is for that to ease the financial burden of organising top-tier events.

“Going forward, the organisation [UKA] will be smaller and events will be done differently,” said Beattie. “We are looking at a much leaner organisation.”

A separate question remains over whether any other private organisation possesses the ability, desire and financial acumen to stage its own international-standard competition in Britain, and provide an alternative for athletes just below the very highest level, who must currently travel to mainland Europe to compete.

Of the 102 Continental Tour (which operates underneath the Diamond League) meets this summer at gold, silver and bronze level, just one will take place in Britain: the rightly acclaimed Night of the 10,000m PBs. Beneath that are seven British challenger meets, either hosted by the brilliant British Milers’ Club or otherwise aimed at mile runners, plus the standalone Loughborough International.

So that’s one international-level competition in Britain this outdoor season for anyone who does not get into the London Diamond League and is not fortunate enough to be a middle or long-distance athlete.

For a short period in 2022 and 2023, the privately-operated Manchester Continental and World Indoor Tour meets attracted the likes of Keely Hodgkinson, Ben Pattinson and Reece Prescod. Even then it failed to generate significant crowds, although its demise was unrelated to its viability. But there is no sign of anything or anyone filling the void since it disappeared.

All of which means another winter of VPNs and dodgy streams awaits athletics supporters, attempting to watch their favourite British stars compete across Europe.

For the athletes themselves, it will be a familiar few weeks of cramped budget airlines and shared cheap hotel rooms in far-flung locations across the continent.

At least it means they avoid the interminable vagaries of the British train system. Silver linings and all that…

» This article first appeared in the January issue of AW magazine, which you can read here

Slim pickings for Brits indoors appeared first on AW.