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

80 Management challenges action by Budd. The BAAB decided to establish an independent Committee of Enquiry, chaired by Edward Cazalet QC and with members Marea Hartman and Ron Goodman, to investigate her eligibility. Before the Committee of Enquiry could complete its work, Zola Budd voluntarily returned to South Africa and relinquished her right to compete. With a sigh of relief, the Committee was suspended and the issue shelved. Later on in the same year, the BAAB controversially decided not to select Sebastian Coe for the Olympic Games in Seoul, thus denying him the opportunity to defend his 1500m title that he had first won in Moscow in 1980 and then won again in Los Angeles in 1984. This decision outraged the athletics press, generating headlines such as “Coe must Go”, and the sport’s leaders were once again under fire. Both the doping and Budd issues had blown up almost simultaneously and placed massive demands on the time of the management of the sport. The chairman of the BAAB, Scotsman Ewan Murray, had to somehow meet the urgencies of the doping, Budd and Coe situations, with the whole of the British media on his back, while at the same time managing his full time job as an insurance underwriter. And, if these pressures were not enough, trouble had been brewing over the latest BAF proposals and which had culminated in the “Southern Counties EGM” in July 1988. The great hope was that the inauguration of a BAF would pull all these management strands together into a cohesive organisation and the pressure be taken off the honorary officers by quality professional management. To a very limited extent, some cohesion had been achieved when the AAA took over the management of the BAAB’s affairs through the “caretakership” but this was only ever seen as a temporary arrangement, pending the formation of the BAF.