So Where Do We Go From Here?

IN PART TWO OF HIS LONDON 2017 ANALYSIS, TOM McNAB LOOKS AT HOW THE SPORT CAN BOOST PARTICIPATION AND PERFORMANCE

- Tom Mcnab

LAST WEEK, I wrote about the treatment of athletics as a commodity, rather than as a sport following Michael Johnson’s comments that the less popular events in our sport should be scrapped. Remove events and you deny youth the opportunity to test themselves in them, and the events die. But there is also no evidence that replacing a few “unpopular” events would increase public interest in athletics. There are other factors that might impact the popularity of our sport, some of which were raised – directly or indirectly – by Johnson.

Departure of Usain Bolt

If athletics lacks the strength to survive the departure of Usain Bolt, then it does not deserve to exist. What Johnson was referring to was media interest. Now any loss there is regrettable, but the future of athletics participation does not rest upon the media. In the USA, there is virtually no TV interest in athletics, but it nevertheless has a thriving high school and college culture. Athletics has almost certainly been declining in Europe for the past two decades, for different reasons and at varying rates in different countries, and it is a pity that the IAAF has failed to keep regular temperature checks.

Making Bolt some sort of globe-trotting IAAF ambassador will be like a fly dancing on a cannonball. This is because the process of developing athletics is local, and clubs create governing bodies, not the other way around. And growing the sport at local level is a slow, low-key endurance event, not a public relations sprint.