Yep, that makes sense. A little sad that our athletes have to rely on funding from the national lottery, but it's certainly worked a treat. There'll be a ripple effect for trampolining and gymnastics now I imagine, but even if it's a short lived interest for 99% of the surge, there might be a couple of future Olympians in front of their TVs tonight. Good to know part of my 2 useless scratch cards today will go towards helping them
It's also very strict these days, at the start they were giving money out willy nilly and some average to rubbish athletes were doing ok on it, if you don't hit certain high marks these days your out on your ear sharpish
I'm not a big fan of Olympic games/Atheletics etc but one thing these guys n gals have done is shown pride in representing Great Britain and done there all to get gold, not a couple of golds but bloody lots of them. Compare these to footballers and they wipe the floor with them. Footballers, when they played for England in the European Cup, they gave the impression they couldn't be arsed and took the money regardless. They should be ashamed in comparison! That's all
My understanding is that funding is based on a country score which pushes standards at the very top and a more conservative approach is taken with the juniors. I know an ex from a long time ago had hers cut as a team mate set a world record and this pushed the whole echelon up....a bit counter intuitive for me as you are told to improve yet have all your support taken off you....as @WoodyLubber said they are for more measured in how it's all managed these last 10 years. The lottery funding has made huge difference to infrastructure...we have velodromes (plural), geographic spread for swimming pools and water based Astro, revamped stadiums, centres of excellence for loads of sports, local initiatives for participation. Lots of countries use lotteries for sports funding.....I'd never want politicians involved in this, would you. In amongst all the smiles there are losers. Some sports, despite great participant numbers and relative success have their funding cut, which can ruin them, e.g, basketball after London 2012.
I only love South Africa's Wayde van Niekerk, 400m world record man. He's trained by a 74 yr old great grand mother, Ans Botha
Cycling v exciting . Got my 84 yr old dad watching Olympics yday. He scoffed at a number of sports saying that the only sports he'd have in the Olympics is cricket and football (he used to play them). He reckoned he could win the cycling by a sensible addition to his bike - putting a mirror on so he didn't have to turn round
We had some rules, but we didn't know what they were, and even if we did, we didn't know how to interpret them.