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

74 The BAAB goes bust The financial situation was explained in detail by Mike Turner and there was a long discussion during which numerous alternative solutions were suggested and, one by one, rejected as impractical. The inescapable fact was that the BAAB had run out of cash and was unable to pay its debts. To raise a bank loan in these circumstances (one suggestion) was felt not only to be unlikely to succeed but also irresponsible as it would serve merely to postpone the day of reckoning. Those at the meeting slowly came to the realisation that they had to put their own house in order and that meant finding extra cash from their own resources. The smaller associations were openly fearful about the likely consequences of a heavy demand on their already meagre reserves. The offer from the AAA was explained and accepted by the BAAB Council, subject to approval at an EGM. The AAA could have pushed much harder at the Council meeting and, given the demoralised state of the other members, could well have achieved an immediate decision to wind up the BAAB. This would then have given the AAA an opportunity to expand itself to embrace the remainder of the UK substantially on its own terms with the resultant single governing body that most by then seemed to want. Thus the arrival of the BAF (even if it might have been called AAA of the UK) would have been advanced by some three years. Was this an opportunity missed? Probably it was but it may well also have generated such ill will against an “AAA take-over” that it would have been a pyrrhic victory. We shall never know. And so, at an Extraordinary General Meeting, held on 10 th October 1987, the earliest possible date, at the Grosvenor Hotel, Victoria, London, the BAAB bowed to the inevitable and voted to hand over the management of its affairs to the AAA and to allocate to the AAA an additional six Council votes. The AAA’s caretaker arrangement was expected to last only until the formation of the one governing body (target date 1 st January 1989) but eventually continued for a further four years as the formation of the BAF was delayed, for reasons that we have already seen. If the responsibility for this situation was placed on the shoulders of the BAAB, the truth of the matter was that both the BAAB and the AAA had been seduced by the income flowing from TV and marketing and had been progressively living beyond their means, being generous