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

65 The joint standing committee (JSC) amateurism that was the aberration and that, by the end of the twentieth century, it merely reverted to what it had originally been. Promotions Officer Andy Norman, who had been appointed to manage the TV events and negotiate with the athletes, lived in the real world and knew that there were market rates that would handsomely reward the top athletes who attract crowds to the stadia but offer next to nothing to all the others. (Norman had famously jibed to Linford Christie early in his career that he “ could not fill a telephone box ”.) The JSC, however, thought that such a market oriented approach was unfair and proceeded to work out a set of “objective criteria” to govern the payments made to British athletes who competed in the British events. The general idea was that all athletes would fit into a scale and be paid proportionally according to their status. As there was a going rate for the top stars the “objective criteria” inevitably meant that the lower ranked athletes received far more than they could command on the market and that the total cost of the package would be very high. Even the athletes’ clubs were to get a modest cut. The objective criteria would be applied only to British athletes as it was accepted that the payments to invited foreign stars would be negotiated individually by Norman according to the going market rates. Based on these principles, estimates were made of what it would cost to put on the events scheduled for the summer seasons (it was initially decided that payments to athletes would not be made for the indoor events) but these estimates proved to be wildly optimistic and were overspent by a considerable amount. The “objective criteria” were eventually abandoned in the face of financial reality. Having established the basic principles for dealing with the budgets, the JSC settled down to meeting regularly as it was responsible for managing all aspects of the contracted events, not just how much athletes should be paid. Unfortunately, this brave new world ran into a problem in the first months of its existence, with a dispute over political advertising at the Dairy Crest Games in Edinburgh in the summer of 1985. A year earlier, the sport in Britain had been drawn into the controversial issue of South African apartheid politics when South African athlete Zola Budd had been fast tracked to a British passport. She had started competing in international events, including the 1984 Olympic Games, for Great Britain but was still spending a lot of time (too much it