Fight for sporting chance of funding

Former Olympian Barry Magee is happy to help out the Auckland Athletics Club as an unpaid volunteer, as are many of the sport's coaches. Picture / Kenny Rodger

Six teenage girls and six boys meet in Cornwall Park on this coldest of August nights. Wearing flimsy shorts and cotton T-shirts, they seem immune to the plunging temperature. They have legs like gazelles.

Beyond the vast green bowl that encircles the Cornwall cricket oval, motorists are stuck in traffic, heaters pumping, many heading home to teenagers glued to computer and TV screens.

But these teens are fixed on a 72-year-old man wearing a fisherman's jersey and glasses, genially telling them how many laps they must do. He speaks gently, yet commands total respect. The boys are dispatched to work on sprints. For the girls, tonight is time trials. They set off one by one at the click of the coach's stopwatch, effortless stride belying their speed.

Coach Barry Magee was a household name as one of "Arthur's boys" in the 1950s and 1960s. Under Arthur Lydiard's tutelage, he won an Olympic marathon bronze medal at Tokyo in 1960 and recalls crowds of 25,000 at Western Springs and Eden Park in that halcyon era of track and field.

Overseas, athletics remains a glamour sport but this generation of New Zealand runners lack role models like Snell, Halberg and Davies, whose success and training methods inspired Walker, Tayler, Quax and Dixon.

"People loved to see the champions run," says Magee. "Then it all went down the gurgler in lots of ways."

Magee's work with the Auckland City Athletics Club is unpaid, although the club covers his expenses.

"Lydiard used to say 'it's always the coach'," he says. "The coach doesn't just give out a schedule - he gives them part of his life."

But finance for grass roots coaching and administration is swallowed up "somewhere between Sparc (the Government sports funding agency) and Athletics New Zealand".

"Many of our best coaches don't really get supported. They do it because they love it."

Athletics is a field of lonely sacrifice, these days up against professional team sports with talent spotters, development programmes and career paths. Like most other sports, it relies on volunteers and hit-and-miss funding sources such as pokie trusts.

Last month, athletics suffered the ignominy of having development funding withheld by Sparc. The agency has a dual role of bankrolling elite-level sportspeople to produce the medal winners which boost national pride, while funding grass roots participation for health and fitness reasons. It is well-equipped to do so, with a $90 million budget and 72 staff; 20 per cent of whom last year earned over $100,000.

The funding cut to athletics, with its unpaid coaches and mum and dad administrators, seemed to make no sense at a time of official angst about rising childhood obesity. And if we want sports to consistently produce medal winners, surely the way to do that is to invest long-term, at the grass roots.

The cut also came at a time of renewed interest in running. Even in the Playstation age - perhaps because of it - sports such as athletics, gymnastics, swimming and soccer are experiencing roll growth.

Athletics is not the first to feel the squeeze. Two years ago, Sparc froze funding for NZ Swimming and forced a revamp of its national administration. This year, Sparc helped tennis reorganise from 25 associations into six regions. Cycling and rowing have previously restructured - and reaped the reward of increased funding.

Government and lotteries money for Sparc has trebled in the past six years but as funding has increased, the number of sports benefiting has narrowed.

This week, Sparc launched its new high performance strategy, choosing just six "performance sports" to receive the lion's share of top-end funding.

The favoured six, selected on recent results and anticipated medal-winning prospects, are athletics, cycling, rowing, sailing, swimming and triathlon.

High profile, high participation sports to miss out include hockey, basketball, bowls and gymnastics.

Flagbearers of the 80s and 90s, equestrian and canoeing, were excluded. Athletics could probably thank the Commonwealth Games performances of Nick Willis and Valerie Vili for making the cut.

Sport by nature is harsh - it is also unpredictable. Sparc's forerunner, the Sports Foundation invested heavily in "picking winners" at the Sydney Olympics. The chosen few, such as Hamish Carter and Beatrice Faumuina, were crucified when they didn't win on the day. This year, Sparc's target of 46 medals at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games proved wildly optimistic.

Undeterred, it is placing bigger bets on a smaller field. Chief executive Nick Hill says to win more medals requires a more focused approach.

Criteria to take us through to the London Olympics in 2012 include sports with the potential to deliver multiple medals and, more subjectively, "sports that matter to New Zealand". The target is 10 medals in London.

Money will also be available for well-resourced rugby, cricket and netball - which, in return, are expected to win their respective world cups.

But elite funding is only part of the picture.

About a third of Sparc's $90 million budget goes into high performance programmes. $37 million is spent on programmes to boost parti-cipation and fitness in line with Government health goals, leaving around $22 million for national sports associations.

It's a pittance compared to bigger overseas rivals but Sparc says New Zealand can be "smarter, more nimble and more innovative".

Given our diminishing returns at the Olympics since the early 1990s, and this year's Melbourne setback, a case could be argued for investing less in short-term glory - perhaps lowering expectations for an Olympics or two - while the fundamental problems affecting grass roots sport are addressed.

Sparc believes New Zealanders wouldn't wear that. Hill - who last year earned between $260,000 and $270,000 - employs a business analogy: "It's always about whether you should be investing for future profits, whereas the people running the company are focused on the dividend in 12 months' time.

"If we started shifting resources out of the elite and putting it into programmes for 13- and 14-year-olds, you can imagine the political backlash."

Sport will always rely on volunteers, but most sports suffer from a lack of full-time paid coaches backed by full-time paid administrators.

Sparc accepts that more professionals are needed at development level.

One frustration is that gaming trust funding is tagged mainly to events or training, and cannot be spent on staff. Grants applications are time-consuming and the outcomes unpredictable - parents still need deep pockets.

Club and school sport is not always in alignment; clubs struggle to identify and retain talented youngsters while school commitment varies, with teachers these days too busy.

Hill says our sporting structures grew from the bottom up; clubs look after members' interests and are not always attuned to national goals.

"Today sports really need to take a holistic view and have their leadership driven from the centre."

Hill and high performance senior adviser Marty Toomey want administrations with strong governance, professional management and "connectivity" between regional and national bodies. Reviewing our Commonwealth Games effort, Sparc warned it would only support elite programmes with a professional structure and could "assume a role in the management" of high-risk programmes, or withdraw funding.

Hill says Sparc is acting like a bank, putting its dollars where it has the best chance of success. "There will be people better off financially - and people less well off - but we expect more of them."

The concern with athletics appears to be around the national body's ability to deliver programmes and exert control, with separate bodies for walkers, children, secondary schools and masters' athletics as well as regional associations and clubs.

Hill was at Athletics NZ's AGM last month but came away "unconvinced that athletics accepts it has a problem".

It is not quite blackmail - he says sports can run themselves as they see fit - but the message is clear: get your structures right, get some results, then we'll help.

The policy is transparently unfair and subjective. Basketball and soccer, for instance, are hugely competitive internationally compared to netball. The potential is there, but under this regime they can expect limited Government help.

But that's sport. "Maybe we have missed [sports] out but we have limited resources," says Hill. "At the moment we are spreading our resources too thinly. At the end of the day, it is about being uncompromising, about being the best."

Back at Cornwall Park, Grace Keown is pushing hard to finish her lap without being overtaken by Katie Wright, the Auckland under-19 cross country champion.

"At your own pace," calls Magee. She strides on.

The young athletes train in all weather, six nights a week. Their immediate goals include the coming road racing season and the secondary schools athletics championships in December, but they would love to run at an Olympic Games or Commonwealth Games.

Their legs will carry them a long way, but they deserve all the support they can get.

Gold beckons in country's gyms

In a Papakura gymnasium, children as young as 12 months are being introduced to the seven fundamental movements - learning to land safely, jump, turn, balance, move, swing and develop eye-body co-ordination.

These movements form the basis of sports from gymnastics to rugby. Run by gym clubs nationwide, the Playgym programme progresses from toddlers to pre-schoolers and school-age children but is no baby factory. If rising participation delivers an extra Olympian or a Jonah Lomu, it will be a bonus alongside health and social benefits.

"We're not a conveyor belt," says Playgym director Tas Evans. "But from quantity you get quality - as long as the input at the bottom is also quality."

New Zealand Gymnastics, which has just "rebranded" as GymSports NZ, is viewed as a foundation sport and is well-regarded by Government sports funder Sparc.

Since the sport restructured, Sparc is satisfied that its investment in gymnastics is wisely spent at the grass roots. Its structure, with a strong national body calling the shots, is one Sparc wants replicated in other sports, such as athletics.

President Jack Ralston says more than 100,000 New Zealanders, mostly under 14, are enrolled in gymnastics. The sport has 2500 coaches, ranging from "highly professional Russians to volunteers.

"Sparc gets a lot of flak but they are trying to do something at the development end of sport," says Ralston. "They're doing a tremendous amount, helping to put people on the ground in these facilities."

But there is frustration that gymnastics is not seen as worth supporting at elite level, despite producing a world champion in aerobics (Angela McMillan) and internationally competitive performers in other disciplines.

"Unless you are winning gold medals it's pretty hard to get funding for the high-performance end," says Ralston. "When we had high-performance funding under the Sports Foundation we produced 11 medals at Commonwealth level between 1992 and 2002. Since funding virtually ceased we haven't produced any more.

"We must have stars for kids to aspire to. If you haven't got that you really struggle."

He says Sparc's criteria of funding sports that matter to New Zealanders and sports capable of delivering multiple medals is confusing. "A minor sport with 1000 members can produce a lot of medals; the whole world participates in gymnastics.

"To be fair to Sparc, there's only so much money to go around. They are in a no-win position."