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

71 The BAAB goes bust spending the riches on the development of the sport; a laudable objective but perhaps a bit premature. Thus, the AAA and the BAAB slipped into a complacency, believing that their financial problems were solved. Oh dear. By March 1985 (before the start of the new TV contract), the BAAB had managed to accumulate reserves of £147,000 and in the financial year just ended had turned in a surplus of £34,000. With the new TV wealth coming on stream in April, the BAAB could reasonably expect to substantially improve on these figures but it simply did not happen. Having changed its financial accounting period to match that of the AAA and end in September, the result for the 18 month period to September 1986 was miserable; a profit of a mere £9,000 out of revenue that had grown fourfold; and even this paltry result had needed a special transfer of £60,000 from the AAA to the BAAB. These results were criticised at the AGM of the BAAB in December 1986 with Derek Johnson claiming that “ the sport was worse off than two years ago ” and Roger Simons demanding that the BAAB and AAA accounts be prepared on the same basis so that everyone could see the overall income and where it was going. The AAA, for the same period, declared an after tax surplus of £107,000 (up from £60,000 the year before), itself hardly impressive given the rise in revenue. The Treasurer of the BAAB, Mike Turner, prepared a budget for 1986-87 which revealed a potential surplus of a mere £1,300 and the realisation gradually dawned that the system of allocating revenues was not working. The BAAB believed that all that was necessary was to adjust the sharing (make it fairer!) in their direction but the problem was much more fundamental than that. What had been revealed was the paucity of financial acumen within the leadership of the AAA and BAAB. They appeared to have been dazzled by the size of the likely income and had taken insufficient steps to put in place a full and proper appraisal of the essential costs that would be a first charge on the income (the costs of organising and promoting the