Peter Williams: Don't forget, grassroots are vital to sport

Minister of Sport Murray McCully didn't waste any time hiring some familiar faces for the board of Sparc when the terms of some longstanding members like the founding chairman Sir John Wells ended this week.

McCully's gone back to the future and appointed Paul Collins to the chair with Bill Birnie as his deputy. Both join Sparc for the first time.

Those who read the business pages will remember these two as high flyers from the heady days of the 1980s. Collins was chief executive of Brierley Investments, while Birnie was a young star at Fay Richwhite. Perhaps as of a consequence of what happened to those companies, their profiles have been considerably lower since.

Collins was chairman of the New Zealand Sports Foundation for most of the 1990s.

The Sports Foundation, started by Keith Hancox (later a convicted fraudster) in the early 1980s, existed solely to fund high performance sport.

It raised money from corporate New Zealand and combined that with Lotteries money to bring a degree of financial security to huge numbers of mainly Olympic athletes up till the end of last century.

Gold medallists Mark Todd, Ian Ferguson and Paul MacDonald are among hundreds who benefited from that system.

The Sports Foundation's functions were taken over by Sparc when it was formed.

Collins' new appointment comes at an intriguing time in the evolution of Sparc and of government funding for sport and recreation. The government's budget for the financial year just finished allocated $75 million dollars to what's known as Vote Sport and Recreation. For the next 12 months, to the end of June 2010, that figure drops to $67 million.

Of the $75 million in 2008-09, Sparc were given just under $69 million. The balance went to Drug Free Sport New Zealand and the Prime Minister's Scholarship scheme.

Sparc also gets revenue from the Lottery Grants Board and has had total income of around $100 million in recent years.

Because their annual report for 2009 hasn't yet been published, we don't know exactly how much was spent on high performance sport last year. However, if the two prior years are a guide, it would have been between $35 million and $38 million.

So let's take a mid point and estimate $36.5 million was spent on high performance sport. That's 48 per cent of the government's allocation for sport and recreation.

In Bill English's latest budget, of Vote Sport and Recreation's $67 million, an extraordinarily high $38.3 million (more than 57 per cent of the total allocation) is specifically earmarked for high performance.

This is the first time in Sparc's existence that a Finance Minister's budget has actually stated how much government money is to be spent on high performance sport. As Sparc will also get some Lottery Grants Board money, what's to say there won't be even more for high performance athletes? Collins' background at the Sports Foundation, and his chairmanship of the Hurricanes Super 14 franchise, suggests his main interest is in elite sport.

But will the extra funding for these mainly Olympic and Commonwealth Games athletes come at the expense of important Sparc programmes encouraging participation? Or decrease the resources for national and regional sports bodies to do the vital work at grassroots level around the country?

Is Collins' appointment the first step in a move back towards a stand-alone organisation to fund elite sport?

It's all great news for those athletes at the top end but we know that stars don't emerge unless the base is broad. Collins and his new Sparc board will do well to remember that.