Athletics in the UK: The Rise and Fall of the BAF

109 The end of a beautiful friendship? meeting with ITV on 26 July, Ian Stewart and I thought that we were too far apart on price. Obviously we had played a better hand than we thought as a phone call from Trevor East, Bob Burrows’ assistant, two days later brought news of an offer. ITV had agreed to the requested price and the result was that the one year arrangement with ITV was extended by two years to the end of 1996 with an option for a further two years, the option to be decided by the end of 1995. ITV would pay £1.4m per year for the extra two years. This deal included a twist that had been in the background for years but had hitherto been sidelined; programme sponsorship. This concept was a potential money spinner for ITV who, under new rules, could sell the opportunity for a company to be the “sponsor of a programme”. Such a company would feature at the beginning and end of a programme and at the beginning and end of each advertising break; and this is now common but was then untried. This was potentially disastrous for sport which relied on sponsors who in turn expected their advertising boards to be seen prominently during the broadcast of the events they were sponsoring and would not expect their competitors to share this exposure. These sponsors had brought substantial monies into athletics, money which was now at risk. To understand the problem, imagine that, say, Peugeot Motors has paid handsomely to be the title sponsor of “the Peugeot Games” only to discover that the television transmission is to be “presented by”, say, Ford Motors. The potential for conflicts of this kind was obvious. The BAF and their sponsorship selling agents, APA, were desperate to avoid such clashes but ITV was equally determined to exploit this new income source and the negotiations over this right that ITV demanded were tense. Eventually, in order to protect its sponsor income, the BAF agreed to effectively buy out the programme sponsorship rights and endeavour to sell them on to its own sponsors. Against the odds, therefore, athletics had secured what were, in the circumstances, acceptable TV contracts. This would extend the relationship with ITV to 12 years but each contract renewal had been fraught and the BAF needed to plan on the basis that it would not go on. An attempt had been made to interest the BBC when the first ITV contract came up for renewal but this had been too soon as the BBC was still sore at losing out in 1985. But relationships had been maintained with Head of Sport Jonathan Martin and his deputy John Rowlinson and, by early 1993, the BBC had been ready to talk again. As it became clearer that any new contract with ITV would probably be even more restrictive than before,