Former chair of the governing body breaks silence and slates poor decision making and lack of ambition shown by his successors
Ed Warner, chair of UK Athletics from 2007 to 2017, says the governing body’s current financial problems are due to “unnecessary politicking, pursuit of vanity projects, timidity and simple sloppiness”.
Exasperated by the decline in UKA’s reserves and amid reports that the organisation is close to bankruptcy, Warner has written a fiercely critical article at City AM and his own Sport inc. newsletter and insists the present issues were “all entirely avoidable”.
He writes: “In my time, our financial model revolved around the delivery of profitable, high profile athletics competitions, broadcast on terrestrial television, that were of sufficient quality to generate rights fees from TV and to pull in event sponsors. We even built an in house team to do this, replacing an expensive outside agency whose hefty fees leaked money from the sport.
“I spearheaded a bitter battle to secure a 50 year rent-free deal to use the London (Olympic) Stadium, providing the venue for those events and major global championships. The result? A clear profit of comfortably over £2 million a year from events, with sponsor income a bonus on top. All to reinvest in athletics.”
Warner claims that both himself and former UKA chief executive Niels de Vos recommended to their successors that the renewal of the long-standing BBC deal with UKA should be a priority.
“Yet the existing contract – for whatever reason – was allowed to run down and expire,” he says, adding: “At a stroke, the model was destroyed.”
Ed Warner (Mark Shearman)
Warner also says he was “dismayed by the lack of ambition” when one of his successors as chair during the pre-pandemic period suggested UKA should abandon holding athletics at the London Stadium and instead focus on making Alexander Stadium in Birmingham the epicentre of the sport.
It is hard to work out which chair Warner is referring to. As Warner himself says in his article, there have been so many, with five chairs and six CEOs – some permanent, others interim – over the last five years.
Richard Bowker was the immediate successor to Warner as UKA chair and had an ignominious one-year reign during 2018 before being forced out. Sarah Rowell was then interim chair for a spell before Chris Clark, another businessman from outside of athletics, took over as chair, but Clark’s spell lasted only seven months before he decided the role wasn’t for him. Then, just before the Covid pandemic erupted, Nic Coward had a spell as interim chair.
When it comes to chief executives, Zara Hyde Peters was due to take over as chief executive from De Vos but was forced out of the position before she event started in autumn 2019 after it emerged her husband was involved in a safeguarding issue.
Jo Coates was another controversial CEO appointment and had the bad luck to take over just when the pandemic was breaking out in 2020. She later left under a cloud in autumn 2021.
Warner stresses that many of the current staff at UKA are not culpable and he is not critical of current CEO Jack Buckner. However, he predicts that Buckner could end up presiding over a governing body that is increasingly detached from grassroots and instead focuses on the elite athlete programme with UK Sport likely to be its “white knight” when it comes to financial problems.
“Those responsible for this scandalous situation are not those currently in charge,” he says. “And there remains a core of dedicated, long-standing staff at UKA – a number of them my friends – who have deserved better.”
You can read Warner’s full column here
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