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

111 The end of a beautiful friendship? “I would say the fact that the British Athletes Association was so enthusiastic about helping to find new ways to bring athletics up to date..........and to become intimately involved with both the events and the TV production processes, helped clinch the deal.” However, even before the first year of the contract with Channel 4 had ended, the BAF went into administration and the balance of the contract was taken up by the new UK Athletics. Subsequently, in a further twist of fate, Mike Millar was appointed head of sport at the BBC on Jonathan Martin’s retirement and, when the Channel 4 deal expired, took athletics back to the BBC. It was perhaps remarkable that the BAF (and, before it, the AAA- BAAB), managed to cling on to its lifeblood income from television for so long. The lucrative deal with ITV in 1985 was never likely to be repeated; John Bromley had shrewdly enticed the sport with money and promises of a breadth of exposure that was unsustainable on commercial TV where ratings were, and are, everything. Except for the few big track events, athletics could not survive in such an environment. Having burned its boats with the BBC, athletics ended up with nowhere else to go and could count itself lucky that, because of the basic decency of Bromley, Burrows and East, ITV did not exploit this as it could have. Somehow, the sport struggled on, from one contract to another, slipping from the comfortable arms of the BBC, firstly to ITV and then to Channel 4. Probably, it should never have left the BBC in the first place but was seduced by a mixture of greed, inexperience, naivety and a lack of strategic forward thinking. At the time of writing, athletics is back with the BBC and the sport is under an entirely new form of management.