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

69 THE BAAB GOES BUST The BAAB was a curious organisation. As explained earlier, it had been established as a hybrid to represent the UK internationally as the member of the IAAF for Great Britain. It was then given the responsibility for selecting and managing Great Britain international teams but was not provided with any funding from the domestic associations that had set it up. It had to fund itself and did this through a mixture of grants from the government funded Sport Councils and the profits of organising international athletic matches. In the 1950s and 1960s such matches had been the staple diet of international athletics but, by the early 1980s, public interest in them was waning and international matches were being succeeded by specially organised “grand prix” type spectaculars. The AAA had shown some initiative in this area and, on its own and through the entrepreneurial spirit of individuals such as Andy Norman, Alan Pascoe, David Bedford and others, was tapping the emerging public appetite with some success. Thus an unhealthy rivalry between the AAA and the BAAB (limited by its nature to promoting international matches) grew up and festered. The BAAB had also been given responsibility for managing and financing a UK wide coaching scheme which employed professional coaches and this merely exacerbated the BAAB’s financial situation as the coaching scheme was only part funded by Sport Councils grants and the balance had to be found from the BAAB’s own resources. As a consequence, the BAAB lurched between profit and loss without any solid financial base. The AAA, on the other hand, having passed its own responsibilities for coaching to the BAAB, was cruising nicely and declaring modest profits year after year. As I described earlier, this imbalance had, in fact, not gone unnoticed by the Sports Council, with the result that an official enquiry into the financing of athletics was ordered by the then Minister for Sport, Neil Macfarlane. Not surprisingly, this enquiry was heavily critical of the way athletics was organised, at least from the financial point of view, and hinted strongly that a rationalisation of the organisation of the whole sport was needed.