GREAT BRITAIN did not achieve historic Olympic success in London or Rio because of some unprecedented golden generation of sporting talent.
We did it through a ruthless and systematic targeting of medals unsurpassed by the totalitarian regimes of China or the old Soviet bloc.
UK Sport recently rejected appeals from the governing bodies of archery, badminton, fencing, table tennis and weightlifting, who have had their funding stripped for the four-year cycle leading up to Tokyo 2020.
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The treatment of badminton was particularly harsh, after British duo Marcus Ellis and Chris Langridge won bronze in Rio — meeting their sport’s target — in a game played and followed fanatically in the Far East.
With £5.7million of funding reduced to zero, badminton in Britain will go back to being a sport played in church halls by maiden aunts, because UK Sport do not believe there is enough chance of a medal in Japan.
And with Paralympic sport subjected to the same pitiless approach, wheelchair rugby and goalball, a sport designed for blind people, have also had their funding stripped.
Because you’d hate your National Lottery cash to be wasted on disabled athletes who aren’t the absolute best on the planet, right?
UK Athletics, however, will continue to be funded to the tune of £27m and it helps greatly that Sir Mo Farah has won four gold medals — two-thirds of Britain’s track-and-field triumphs in London and Rio.
It is no surprise, therefore, that Neil Back, performance director of UK Athletics, has described Farah’s coach Alberto Salazar as a ‘genius’ — despite one of his organisation’s medics having raised concerns over his methods six years ago.
Farah’s performances have improved greatly since he joined Salazar’s Nike Oregon Project team and UKA must be extremely grateful.
Yet while there is no suggestion of any wrongdoing by Farah, a leaked report by the United States Doping Agency infers Salazar might have broken anti-doping rules.
The leak, via Russian hackers Fancy Bears, shows USADA reported last March that Salazar and Nike Oregon team doctor Jeffrey Brown conspired to use medications in ‘potentially unlawful ways’.
Salazar’s former deputy Steve Magness believes he was used as a guinea pig for the performance-enhancing substance L-carnitine, suspecting he may have been given a bogus diagnosis of a thyroid disease by Dr Brown.
But UK Athletics reckon everything inside the Nike Project is tickety-boo.
Put it this way, though. My 11-year-old has made the school cross-country team, having yet to discover the tendency of pupils at my former comprehensive to sneak off to the chippy for a sausage in batter during this tortuous activity.
As a parent, you want to encourage the running rather than the battered sausages.
But what if your kid turns out be extremely good at distance running? Surely you would only encourage him to go so far?
Not as far as the level at which coaches might give him legal prescription drugs, which may endanger his long-term health but enhance his performance without breaking rules.
Kids get into running to be healthy. Not lab rats.
Salazar, who has had close links to the disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, is alleged to have blurred such a basic principle. And UK Athletics support him ‘unequivocally’.
Farah responded to the latest allegations about Salazar by insisting he is a clean athlete and said it was ‘deeply frustrating’ that he was associated with suggestions of drug misuse.
But he did not tackle the claims against Salazar and is not frustrated enough to sever ties with the American.
Farah claims the media are being allowed to act as ‘judge and jury’ — a strange phrase given that the media have no decision-making power and that we’re liable to end up before judges if we don’t word articles like this one correctly.
Salazar says he has ‘clearly and repeatedly refuted allegations directed against me and the Oregon Project’ and that he ‘believes in a clean sport’.
But he does not refute claims that he gave infusions of amino acid L-carnitine to some athletes, including Farah before the 2014 London Marathon.
Salazar merely stated that L-carnitine is widely available and not banned — true, within permitted dosages.
Farah’s fellow Olympic legend Sir Bradley Wiggins has been similarly frustrated by leaks from Fancy Bears which showed he was granted ‘therapeutic use exemptions’ for injections of Triamcinolone before three major victories including the 2012 Tour de France.
Again, there is no suggestion Wiggins broke any rules.
But again there are suggestions legal drugs have been used to aid performances.
Still, if your sport was threatened with losing all funding for failing to achieve absolute excellence, mightn’t you be tempted to push the limits, bend the rules, seek every possible advantage or conveniently ignore questionable practices?
Perhaps our badminton medallists, wheelchair rugby team and blind goalball players ought to have tried it.
STING POWER
ONE of the most astonishing aspects of Claudio Ranieri’s sacking is the number of people at Premier League clubs now moaning about ‘player power’.
Often the very same people who foster a culture of diminished responsibility among footballers, from academy level upwards.
If you treat your players like precious lambs, you forego the right to complain when they chuck toys from prams and blame their manager after a catastrophic run of form.
Players have power because clubs treat them like little gods.
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TRAVEL BLUES
MANCHESTER CITY have been drawn away in domestic cup competitions on nine consecutive occasions.
That is eight times against Prem sides and once against Championship high-fliers Huddersfield.
A Manchester University professor has calculated that the odds against this were 10,000/1.
So it’s just lucky, really, that City fans aren’t prone to paranoia.
Otherwise they might be imagining a conspiracy.
IT SUMS UP SAM
IN his programme notes for Crystal Palace’s match with Middlesbrough, Sam Allardyce explained that if he improves each of his 11 players by just two per cent, his team will have improved by 22 per cent overall.
Which suggests the grand master of ProZone and PowerPoint presentations has no grasp of basic maths.
Yet one fact remains undisputed.
One win from one match means that Allardyce’s win record as England manager was definitely 100 per cent.
TOP CROCK JOCK
AFTER falling from his mount at Kempton Park on Saturday and receiving a serious hoof to the ribs, Barry Geraghty announced that he still hoped to compete at Cheltenham.
That is despite suffering from what he described as a ‘slightly collapsed lung’.
Geraghty has since reluctantly withdrawn from the Festival. But he’d already summed up the uncommon courage of jump jockeys.
A collapsed lung, yeah, but only a ‘slightly’ collapsed one.
REAL ED TURNER
IT would be easy to condemn Eddie Jones for whingeing about Italy’s controversial spoiling tactics in Sunday’s Six Nations clash at Twickenham.
And the England coach did sound like Arsene Wenger when he suggested inferior opponents had an obligation to make it easier for his own team — by playing entertainingly against better players.
Yet Jones coached the Japan side which caused one of sport’s greatest sensations by defeating South Africa at the 2015 World Cup — and proved that rule-bending cynicism was no necessity.
AMIR KHAN says he and Manny Pacquiao agreed terms for a ‘super fight’.
But, until it has been fought on April 23 and has been super, it is not a ‘super fight’.
No more than a Sunday of football is a ‘Super Sunday’. Don’t set me off on ‘super agents’. OK? Super.
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