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

95 A poisoned chalice? developmental costs if the BAF itself ran into difficulties. All told, there were therefore available reserves of over £2.5 million at the end of 1995. No formal accounts were prepared for the BAF prior to its administration on 14 th October 1997 and I do not know whether Management Accounts were produced during the final months or, if they were, whether they still exist. Nevertheless it is not difficult to calculate that, even after the loss of £640,000 in 1996, there should still have been actual reserves of around £1.9 million on 30 September 1996. The statement of affairs produced by the administrators when they took office disclosed an overall deficit of £314,587 implying that the BAF had lost a staggering £2.2 million in the 12½ months since 30 September 1996. Admittedly, the administrators took a conservative view of the value of the federation’s assets, writing down fixed assets by £100,000 to their “realisable value” and allowing for employees claims (only relevant if they were made redundant) of a further £100,000 and a “provision for further claims” (probably a guess) of £50,000. What appeared to be a catastrophic collapse in the federation’s finances is hard to understand, especially when one considers that, on the day that it went into administration, the BAF’s assets included around three quarters of a million pounds in the bank. Little more than a year was to pass before UK Athletics was launched and which, in its first year, would generate a surplus of £210,000 on a turnover of over £7 million, including a healthy profit on promotions. In the meantime, the winding up of the federation was to drag on for almost 12 years before being finally concluded and the administrators’ costs would amount to £499,000 with legal costs taking a further £426,000, a total of £925,000, with the inevitable result that the ordinary creditors, which included unpaid athletes, received only a fraction of their dues. The Federation had clearly not taken the painful steps necessary to reduce costs in line with its reduced income and this was a serious failure of management. But it might still have survived if the cash flow situation could have been managed with, in particular, a new era of public funding through the Sport Council just around the corner. Whether the survival of the BAF would have been in the interests of the sport is another matter as the shock of its bankruptcy effectively gave David Moorcroft, with the intervention and support of the Sports