Keep backing British sport - it matters

The success of Lewis et al was a great boost for Britain

The BBC's Rob Bonnet believes that British success in the Sydney Olympics proves that sport needs to be properly supported nationwide.

For once, the Monday morning feeling this coming week will owe more to Whistle While You Work than to the Boomtown Rats. And all because of those Olympic medals won in a far-flung stadium, field and harbour.

Funny, isn't it, how Steve, Denise, Crafty Ben and Don't-call-me-Audrey have followed the lead set by England's cricketers in making us all feel so good... about sport, about ourselves, and about being British?

Actually, though, it's been painful. Face-ache from all that smiling, lumps in the throat from all that emotion and a hurting belly from all that laughing. Which I suppose celebrates, in times elsewhere in the world of collective or personal despair, just how good it can feel just to be alive.

Funniest moment? For me, it's got to be the last Saturday morning - Britain's Colin Daley versus Sweden's Marcus Thoren in the Tae-Kwon-Do - a violent activity that looks like anti-sport to me, lots of lashing-out and shouting, the kind of behaviour that football yobs get up to outside foreign railway stations. But then what do I know?

Telling off

Absolutely nothing about Tae-Kwon-Do, which is certainly not as much as commentator Harry Gration who got right inside the competitors' minds with the phrase "C'mon... I can take you any time you want"! And poor Marcus Thoren.

There he is, padded and helmeted from the groin upwards against a good solid kicking, only to get a glancing blow on the thigh and collapse from a dead leg!

Harry told us that this was worth "a right telling-off" but Colin won anyway in much the same way as Charlie Chaplin used to duff-up the big guy in a bum-kicking competition.

Which all goes to prove... no pain, no gain. That, I guess, is why we come over all unnecessary when we share that triumphant moment with the medallists, their four-year stresses and strains finally at an end.

Redgrave was at the centre of a revival of the Olympic spirit

Have I been fooling myself when I've found myself warming to the purity of their ambition and achievement? I don't think so.

Somehow I've gone soft to the point where I believe absolutely that a) they haven't cheated or b) done it for the money and that c) they really deserve it for their dedication, skill and sheer love of sport? And they probably love their mums, too.

It felt like Chariots of Fire 1924 revisited, not just in the medal tally but also because sport was being enjoyed, perfected and, yes, even suffered for its own sake.

And somehow the Brits did seem to be at the centre of what looked like a serious revival in Sydney of the Olympic spirit. The Australian people, with their natural enthusiasm and organisation, were the folk who got the IOC out of its Salt Lake jail but Great Britain helped provide sportsmen and women worthy of the setting.

Wide-eyed

No drugs positives for a start, and then an abundance of good winners and losers.

Colin Jackson was as gracious in 110m hurdles defeat and disappointment as Denise Lewis was grateful in heptathlon victory after her struggle through that second day injury.

"Denise Lewis, Olympic Champion" said the BBC's trackside interviewer.
"Say it again!" said wide-eyed Denise.
"Denise Lewis, Olympic Champion".
"Oh thank you, thank you!"

There was just one dodgy moment for Britain - the expulsion from the Olympic village of swimmer Mark Foster for wearing Speedo rather than Adidas during his final. Whatever the contractual rights or wrongs of the matter, it looked like heavy-handed officialdom enforcing the commercialism that we all thought had been left behind in Atlanta.

But don't go away thinking the British Olympic Association are just a bunch of stuffed blazers. Chairman Craig Reedie got it absolutely right when he said that our success was a tribute above all to the competitors, not to the administrators or the Lottery.

Foster's punishment looked like commercially-motivated heavy-handed officialdom

So what does this mean for sport here in Britain, where we call ourselves sport-loving but where we haven't the vaguest notion of how feeble our national enthusiasm looks and feels when compared to the passions of outdoor-living, competition-loving, friendship-offering Australia?

Maybe the positive images that have flowed from Sydney will - at the very least - help us to a better understanding of what we mean by the values of sport.

The media could help with less back-page tittle-tattle about greedy footballers, more role-model stories of courage, determination and fulfilment across a broader sports spectrum.

And in practical terms, fewer playing fields disappearing under brick and tarmac, more hours per week PE in the school curriculum.

No need to persuade Sports Minister Kate Hoey - that's preaching to the converted. But sport also needs a permanent place at the government's top table - a full time Cabinet post. It needs cast-iron commitments beyond the pledges of Ms Hoey that there will be no lottery funding shortfall, even if the public stop buying the tickets.

Inadequate facilities

And since we're talking Lottery, it needs a little more carrot and a little less stick from UK Sport, the distributors who have been threatening funding withdrawal to those sports which did not deliver in Sydney.

That means swimming, a sport which has got just over £6 million in three years from the world-class performance programme, but which has feeble, inadequate facilities.

Withholding money from swimming will only tighten the downward spiral in a vicious circle of under-achievement, won't it? Better to support and encourage the Brits in the Olympic's second sport, surely.

And a word of warning for Athens 2004. Refunding British sport is a long-term project. The French started back in the 1970s and only enjoyed the benefits in the late 1990s, not only in football but also in Sydney where they were one of four comparably sized European nations to win more golds than Britain's eleven.

Meaningful

France, Germany, Italy and Holland won't be standing still. We'll have to move forward just to keep up.

But anyway, can we take it now, once and for all please, that sport MATTERS? It matters because, to put it bluntly, it keeps the kids off the streets, the grown-ups out of the hospitals, and the smiles on our faces.

So even if it means a Blair/Redgrave photo-opportunity on the Serpentine, let's have meaningful, consistent, practical support for British sport, from the elite right down to the grass roots. We know it makes sense.