Olympic gold doesn't come cheap

Ground Floor: The business of sport is notoriously tricky because, in our hearts, we don't want sport to be a business, we want it to be an ideal

Recriminations over our poor medal haul at the Athens Olympics continue to rumble and the questions being asked revolve as much around the money and structures as they do around the athletes. Like any business in trouble, the problems regarding Irish Olympic performances are both fundamental and financial.

A lot has been made of the funding for Irish athletes under the Athens Enhancement Programme. Leaving aside individual athlete grants, 10 sporting bodies plus the Olympic and Paralympic Councils received around €7.8 million, around €2 per head of population. So, for Ireland, winning one gold medal cost €7.8 million.

The Medical Journal of Australia did an analysis of the cost of winning medals following the Sydney games in 2000. Their results show that Canadians won 14 medals with a spending programme of €39 million, making their cost per medal €2.82 million and cost €1.17 per head of population. The British won 28 medals and spent €151 million on their athletes, making their cost per medal €5.41 million and cost per head of population €2.54. And Australia won 58 medals, spending €178 million in the process, making a cost per medal of €3.07 million and a cost per head of €9.42.

Comparatively, it cost Ireland more than twice as much as the average Sydney 2000 cost to get our Athens medal; but per head of population, we spent less. We need to review our medal-winning methodology and our financing and to decide if the return on winning a medal is worth the investment.

If we decide that it is, the question is: who should be making that investment and should they be spreading the risk or concentrating it in prime sports? Most of the investment money comes from government and this is true of other countries, too. But, increasingly, overseas nations are turning to commercial interests to supplement that investment, by becoming involved in Olympic preparation projects.

However, most of the commercial money in Irish sport (as well as a lot of state funding) goes into soccer, rugby, GAA and golf. The reason they get funding is that they're the sports receiving TV coverage and the guys in the corporate marketing departments demand TV coverage.

Sure, every four years someone from a sport like athletics might be in with a chance of a medal, but are they in the news roundups every weekend with a picture of them wearing the corporate logo? No, because our media generally cover mainstream sports and don't concentrate on a four-year Olympic preparation cycle.

There are quicker, easier headlines in team games. You can hardly blame the corporate sponsor who can only devote so much of a marketing budget to an ideal, but it skews all of the private investment towards very few sports.

GAA is a national sport with no international dimension. At the risk of soundly madly unpatriotic, it's more than likely that if other countries played GAA disciplines we'd end up down the world rankings in that too.

The difficulty in looking towards medals in another four years time is the short-term focus involved. When sports associations look for high-performance funding, they will find that the focus will be on Beijing even if the sport itself is looking further ahead. It's easy to say that we should be building from the bottom up, but - like the stock market - nobody wants a slow-growth portfolio, just a quick return.

Sports associations themselves cannot invest in medal hopes, because most of them are funded by annual membership fees from people who participate at a social level.

This funding barely covers administration costs in most cases. Yet these associations must also attempt to adopt high performance training programmes, anti-doping programmes, child protection programmes, developmental and medal-winning programmes.

Government funding is by way of grant aid from the Irish Sports Council. Sports which were not part of the Athens Enhancement Programme were out of the high-performance funding loop and so will struggle to get a foot on the medals ladder even if they spot potential medal winning athletes for Beijing. The ISC does what it can under the system that's currently in place but if the system itself is ultimately short-term then how can it fund potential eight-year or 12-year plans?

Commercial sponsors in other countries see track and field, swimming and other individual sports as credible options; and they see the athletic endeavour as a full time career. We don't. When it comes to sport, we still seem to prefer the idea of people rushing to training after putting in a day's work, grafting out a win and overcoming obstacles by sheer will alone. The obstacles are there but the biggest obstacle is that the countries against whom we compete are investing more; and more of their businesses are interested in the risk return that international, not national, success brings.

In our business lives, we've realised that we have to have an educated, skilled workforce, with good training and a knowledge of our product, to do well on the international market. We must realise that the same holds true in the sporting arena.

You can't win just by wanting it really badly. You have to be trained to within an inch of your life and want it really badly. And even then it can still go horribly wrong. Ask anyone who came fourth.

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