Great Britain's Olympic sports funding: thrifty or profligate?
Has the public money thrown into sport funding for the Olympics been money well spent?
A straightforward answer is not always possible, depending on past as well as present funding and on the objectives that each discipline/federation set itself for the London Games, which may not be quantifiable purely in terms of medals won.
What GSN can do is compare funding money with points obtained, thus giving a comprehensive and objective measure of how much any penny spent on Olympic sport has been worth. More specifically, we divided the funding figure given (by the Daily Telegraph of 14/8/2012) by the number of points won by Team GBR in that sport.
In other words we weighed £ 264,9 million worth of funding in 27 disciplines over 1843 GSN points won in those disciplines (equal to 86.9% of points won by Team GBR). The average result was a cost of £ 143730 per Olympic point, and the full data is in the chart below.
| Funding | |||
| Great Britain | £ x.000 | points | £ x .000 pt |
| Archery | 4400 | 0 | |
| Athletics | 25100 | 345 | 72.75 |
| Badminton | 7400 | 0 | |
| Basketball | 9600 | 0 | |
| Boxing | 9600 | 131 | 73.28 |
| Canoe/Kayak | 16200 | 70 | 231.43 |
| Cycling | 26000 | 155 | 167.74 |
| Diving | 6500 | 21 | 309.52 |
| Equestrian | 13400 | 124 | 108.06 |
| Fencing | 2500 | 11 | 227.27 |
| Gymnastics | 10800 | 64 | 168.75 |
| Handball | 2900 | 0 | |
| Hockey | 15000 | 220 | 68.18 |
| Judo | 7500 | 45 | 166.67 |
| Modern Pentathlon | 6300 | 8 | 787.50 |
| Rowing | 27300 | 89 | 306.74 |
| Sailing | 22900 | 160 | 143.13 |
| Shooting | 2500 | 20 | 125.00 |
| Swimming | 25100 | 207 | 121.26 |
| Synchronised Swimming | 3400 | 3 | 1133.33 |
| Table Tennis | 1200 | 0 | |
| Taekwondo | 4800 | 66 | 72.73 |
| Tennis | 0 | 64 | 0.00 |
| Triathlon | 5300 | 40 | 132.50 |
| Volleyball | 3500 | 0 | |
| Water Polo | 2900 | 0 | |
| Weightlifting | 1400 | 0 | |
| Wrestling | 1400 | 0 | |
| TOTAL | 264900 | 1843 | 143.73 |
On the naughty side we have as many as 9 sports which have not produced a single point but have been bestowed with £ 34,7 million of public money: Archery, Badminton, Basketball, Handball, Table Tennis, Volleyball, Water Polo, Weightlifting and Wrestling. The highest outlay has been for Basketball at £ 9,6 million.
Interestingly enough this list comprises four Team Ball Sports, notable for GBR’s chronic weakness at international level. The government and the federations will have to figure out if the money spent on these sports is indeed not enough, and not merely misspent.
The “thrifty” list is headed by Hockey, where an outlay of £ 15,0 million produced 220 Olympic points: at £ 68180 per point it needed Hockey almost less than half of the average outlay to score a point at the Games.
Second was Taekwondo, with £ 72730 per point, third was Athletics with £ 72750 per point. At £ 25,1 million, the Track&Field athletes equalled the outlay on Swimming but were much more efficient: it took swimmers as much as £ 121260 to earn an Olympic point. The discipline with the highest funding (Road & Track) Cycling at £ 26,0 million was slightly less thrifty than Swimming, as it needed £ 167740 to earn a point. Finally, in one case (Tennis) a zero outlay did produce points (64) and medals.
There is no particular moral to this but, we hope, an incentive for British sports federations to become as cost-effective as possible in working towards Rio 2016.
