Pounds mean prizes all round

13 April 2012

As a thoroughly modern symbol of Britain's most garlanded Olympics for 80 years, Audley Harrison was perfect. Nobody was about to argue when the eloquent, poetry-spouting giant with his technicolour barnet intoned: "Let's embrace the athlete, let's embrace sport, because we've proved here at these Games that Great Britain is great again."

Few triumphs at an Olympics carry the kudos which gold in the heaviest boxing division confers. Harrison was clutching the gong which, before him, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Teofilo Stevenson and Lennox Lewis had worn and it seemed fitting on the last of 17 days which have so reenergised British sport that a figure with superstar hallmarks should emerge.

Yet, though Harrison, with his Cassius Clay patter, may turn out to be the man for whom Olympic glory was only a staging post on the road to untold further riches, perhaps his greatest victory has been to help create a new climate to ensure that less high-profile sports - track cycling, sailing, shooting and modern pentathlon - had their day in the sun.

For Harrison was fighting, not only for himself but for the future of British Olympians, long before his moment of glory at Darling Harbour. Outraged by officialdom's financial neglect of his beloved amateur sport a couple of years ago, he led a march of pugilists on Downing Street.

He was thousands in the red when promoters offered him £100,000 to turn pro after his Commonwealth Games win, yet he turned them down, preferring to bang the drum in obscurity, not only for a better deal for his colleagues in the unpaid ranks but for all those sportsmen and women in Britain whom he felt were under-funded and under-appreciated. He even penned a 10,000 word thesis espousing the cause of his ailing sport.

Harrison, the sports politician, would wind up the hierarchy with his strident voice. Sports should be about the athletes, not the blazered brigade of amateur officialdom, he would boom. If Britain wanted sports success, the performers would have to be funded properly and be backed by professional structures.

And, lo, he smiled as he posed with his medal, perhaps at last it was all coming to pass. For while he was speaking - "What's happened here is going to be a future framework for British sport, not just in amateur boxing but across the board" - a woman, who would probably not even have been at these Games if not for the brave new world of lottery funding and enhanced British Olympic Association support, was at that minute winning our 11th and final gold in Sydney.

Stephanie Cook, first victor in the women's modern pentathlon, said: "There is no way I'd have been able to get up to the standard required without lottery funding."

For Cook, read all our champions. One by one, they sang from the same songsheet after their victories; the reason why Britain was celebrating its best Games since Antwerp 1920 was that, at last, financial backing for their unsung labours was enabling them to compete on a level playing field.

So, it was with incredulity that they pondered rumours that their funding might now be cut. If that happened, said Cook, she might have to return to medicine full-time. "It's inconceivable with the success of this team that there can be any cut in the funding," said Craig Reedie, chairman of the British Olympic Association.

Indeed. Because, if Britain really covets the sort of feel-good atmosphere generated by the Sydney heroics, the platform must not be dismantled for the sake of a few million pounds.

"It would be a big mistake," reckoned Steve Redgrave. "For now we have the base to do even better in the future."

Redgrave's real miracle is that his five golds were garnered, for the main part, in a system which never helped him.

Britain has always embraced its sporting heroes who achieve against all odds. But why should they have had to? The reason that our golden harvest has been so plentiful this time is that only proper funding can give athletes the winning edge.

Now, we had the chance to see Olympians with cash to back their marvellous character and determination; sailors like Ben Ainslie, ruthless as Schumacher as he won an unwinnable duel for gold; marksmen like Richard Faulds, so well prepared that he could even blank out the noisy home support while his Australian opponent choked like Greg Norman; cyclists like Jason Queally, honed by a new professional set-up in Manchester, transforming Britain into an international power of the velodrome; athletes like Denise Lewis and Jonathan Edwards taking advantage of improved medical support to prove themselves the best.

"Now, everyone knows," roared Harrison. "We can produce the goods if we are given the chance." Just like the big man who should no longer have to go knocking on the door of No 10 to punch home the message.

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Pounds mean prizes all round

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