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

63 The joint standing committee (JSC) Alan Pascoe had been one of Britain’s most successful athletes in the 1970s, including taking the gold medals for 400m hurdles at both European Championships and Commonwealth Games. Even while still a student and competing, he had dabbled with event promotion, helping to direct the Philips Night of Athletics at Crystal Palace. He subsequently gained more experience, commentating on athletics for television and involving himself in sponsorship of the AAA championships. With limited experience, but plenty of determination, Alan went head to head with the likes of marketing giants IMG and West Nally and persuaded the AAA and BAAB to give him the contract. The JSC was responsible for managing the contractual and financial obligations and the actual organisation of events was deputed to a new entity called the British Athletics Promotions Unit (BAPU) composed of persons with practical experience of event organisation, under the leadership of Promotions Officer Andy Norman. BAPU was responsible to the JSC which set the strategic parameters. The first task of the JSC was to make an attempt at estimating the budgets for the first year of the contracts. Much time was spent in trying to work out a system for sharing the income and what emerged was a fiendishly complicated system of allocating points (each point having a money value) to the individual events that were to be organised so that, as the money was received, it could be shared out according to the formula. The largest element in the costs of putting on these events was the appearance fees for the athletes and one of the key decisions for which the JSC was also responsible was how much they should be paid. A few years earlier, in 1982, the IAAF had bowed to the inevitable and introduced a system under which athletes could be paid for competing. It had long been commonplace, but technically illegal, that the top athletes were paid by promoters to appear at their events and, the bigger the star, the bigger the payment, naturally. The AAA itself had connived in this deception by closing its eyes to what was going on at its own events. Under the new system, an athlete could set up a personal “trust fund” that would be managed by his governing federation. His appearance fees would be paid into this trust fund and he could apply to the federation to draw out money to meet reasonable training or living expenses. The balance of the fund would be paid to the athlete when he or she retired. In