Olympics: Seb Coe’s solution to Australia’s sports funding crisis
The executives and consultants whose eye-watering salaries suck up millions of taxpayers’ dollars won’t like this idea one bit but the solution to Australia’s Olympic funding crisis is so simple.
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One of the most powerful men in world sport has a simple solution to Australia’s Olympic funding scandal.
Just give the money to the people who need it the most.
Not the executives and the consultants and the advisers whose eye-watering salaries and perks suck up millions of taxpayers’ dollars, but the actual competitors, the folks who give up their sweat, blood and tears while struggling to make ends meet.
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These same athletes are about to have their funding levels slashed even further after the Tokyo Olympics but Sebastian Coe, the president of World Athletics, says there’s another way.
“Put more money in the pockets of the athletes,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.
“I know how hard it is out there. It’s a prohibitive cost, particularly for those athletes coming through and it’s a massive demand on families.”
If Coe’s homespun solution isn’t enough to rattle Australian sport’s well-heeled chief executives, they’ll have heart palpitations when they discover he didn’t take a salary in his first two years in the top job. Not a single cent.
“I’m too old in the tooth to get involved in domestic issues but what I can say as the president of the biggest Olympic sport is that all federations want the best possible funding for the athletes,” he said.
“My objective over the next four years as federation president is to create as many commercial opportunities as I possibly can to get, and I’m not going to class this up.”
Before taking on the job of World Athletics boss, Coe served as chairman of the British Olympic Committee, where he succeeded in getting more funding — and how he did it wasn’t rocket science.
He started by cutting administrative costs, hiring people who actually delivered on bringing in new sponsorship deals and repaired the strained relationship with UK Sport, the body that allocates funding for sports through the national lottery.
The result: British athletes won a staggering 65 medals at London in 2012 and 67 at Rio in 2016.
The situation in Australia couldn’t be any more depressing. While Australia has been steadily tumbling down the medals table, the money spent on the executives in charge of Olympic sports keep going up while the money going to athletes gets reduced.
In 2017, Swimming Australia spent $1.98 million on its seven key management personnel. In 2018, the total remuneration for 10 executives was increased to $2.4 million after Mark Anderson resigned as chief executive and was replaced by Leigh Russell, according to their published financial year report.
In 2008, the total compensation for key management personnel was $554,038.
At the same time, Australia’s most successful sport has lost its major sponsor and couldn’t help negotiate a way to get last year’s world championships or national championships on television and there could be more turbulent times ahead.
And it’s not just the disparity between incomes that is frustrating athletes. They’re also becoming increasingly disheartened by the lack of support they’re getting from federations on key issues, particularly when it comes to dealing with doping.
Athletics is one of the few sports taking tough action with Coe unwavering in his insistence that Russian athletes will be banned from Tokyo unless their officials come clean.
The entire executive board at the Russian Athletics Federation resigned en masse earlier this month but Coe is adamant nothing will change his sport’s stance until they own up.
“Four years ago we suspended them, we were the only federation to do that. It wasn’t the most popular thing at the time but I think history now tells everybody that we made the right decision,” he told The Sunday Telegraph.
“There’s a new election, I think February 28, so the new board will be elected and what they do and what they say immediately after that is of importance to our next council meeting.
“So they know that this is probably getting towards the end game here.
“They’ve got to be able to act and there has to be some acceptance of culpability here.”