It will come as no surprise to quango watchers that the new government is looking closely into the activities of Sport England. The body that has been funded with hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers and lottery money is currently under severe scrutiny. The National Audit Office has concluded that Sport England have failed to meet most of their aims, particularly in relation to increased participation. They must now be nervously awaiting the accountants’ forensic attentions and sharp scalpel. The future of our sport will surely be in the mix somewhere.

Since 1998 athletics has become increasingly professionalized starting with the formation of UK Athletics and later England Athletics. These 12 years correlate almost exactly with the decline in participation and the fall in standards. For some time here has been no doubt that we are heading into an abyss and that athletics can no longer be claimed as a major sport in this country.

UKA and EA must now face accusations of a paucity of vision and squandering of precious funds. Both bodies set out with claims that only 25% of their resources would be spent on salaries, administration, company cars and the rest of the paraphernalia that accompanies centrally controlled bureaucracies, the remainder, purportedly, to be spent on regenerating grass roots activity. It is hard not to conclude that position has been reversed and only a small proportion of funding drifted downwards. At various times in Athletics Weekly, when they were less supportive of governing bodies and amenable to controversial material, I was able to point out that the `England set-up is fatally flawed’ and `the rain never reaches the roots’. It seems I might have been prescient after all.

Since 1998 and the demise of the British Athletic Federation the administration of the sport has been gradually transferred to so-called `professionals’ many of whom had no history or understanding of the club nature of athletics or the voluntary system that underpins it. Infamously in October 2008 senior officers of England Athletics, sadly with a degree of support from a handful of prominent individuals, were so confident and arrogant they were able to sack all their existing staff and disband the elected regional bodies they were originally supposed to be answerable to! This amounted to a complete takeover of the sport by paid officers. They could argue they were indeed accountable, to their masters in Sport England, but no longer to the sport itself. Unsurprisingly the new structure that emerged was little different than any of its ill-fated predecessors. Meanwhile, numbers partaking slid and standards slumped. All the `smoke and mirrors’ generated could not hide that fact.

It is laughable in the extreme that England Athletics Road Show is now touring the country posing the question, `What does the legacy look like to you?’ There are, of course, blunt responses to this the reader can easily construe. If EA was really interested in analyses regarding the health of athletics they could consult a variety of existing sources including one I have posted on this website in 2009 on the state of cross country running, the published independent research undertaken by Jonathan Grix of Birmingham University also in 2009 but fresher still the recent ABAC survey (April 2010) which paints a painfully accurate picture of the sport that club officers and coaches will immediately recognise. Even the most neutral of observers must now conclude we are in a parlous state.

Things would undoubtedly have been so much better if the volunteers had not been patronised and sidelined. Other sports have proved much more imaginative and successful than athletics and with considerably less public funding. Likewise delivery strategies elsewhere might have been considered. One thinks principally of the Swedish model that eschews layer upon layer of professionally paid administrators and directly funds club activity (see the research of David Reader in May 2005 supported by the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust)). It is, of course, far too late for all that. The money has been blown and it is highly unlikely that present or future governments will be seduced down this route again.

Inevitably the professionals will depart for pastures new, no doubt with self-enhanced CV`s none of us would recognise. Fortunately there remains within athletics volunteers who actually know what they are doing. One thinks principally about the North, Midlands and South and their counterparts in the home countries plus other competition providers that have continued to run their affairs efficiently and often on a shoe-string. This scaffolding provides some hope for the future. It is going to be needed when the exodus begins.