Team GBR hit the jackpot

£494,000 increase in this year's funding for British Olympic sailing team through increased government investment

Funding for Olympic and Paralympic sport received a massive boost on Wednesday when UK Sport announced additional awards for the three years through to Beijing 2008. The increased public investment totals £65.3 million - conditional upon meeting a series of funding ‘triggers’ - and is available as a result of the Government’s decision last month to allocate up to £300 million to athlete preparations for London 2012. Of this, £58.8 million is earmarked for Summer Olympic support and £6.5 million for Summer Paralympic sports.

A total of £17 million is being invested in 2006/7 as some Olympic sports gear up to entering the world class sporting arena for the first time, with a further £23.2 million invested in 2007/8 and £25.1 million in 2008/9. According to UK Sport’s comprehensive investment model, the accepted basis for all the new funding being distributed, this will allow athletes from a total of 27 Summer Olympic disciplines the chance to pursue their dreams of competing and winning at a home games in six years time. UK Sport will review progress across the sports after Beijing before determining the allocation of funding required to meet its overall ambitions for success in London 2012.

At present the majority of funding for Olympic sailing comes from UK Sport with money fed down from the National Lottery. On top of this the new government money represents an increase to sailing of some £466,000 over the previous budget from UK Sport.

As a result of this total funding for sailing over the 2006-9 period will now amount to a wopping £17,194,000 and for the 2006-7 year represents £5,730,000. According to John Derbyshire, the RYA's Racing Manager and Performance Director, this funding represents around 80% of their total war chest, the rest coming from their Gold Sponsor, Skandia, their four silver sponsors and numerous partners such as Volvo.

"It is good news," Derbyshire told thedailsail. "I think they have had a difficult job looking at all the different sports and trying to bring some sports on that don’t have a program at the moment. And it is only going to get better as well I think."

Derbyshire estimates that the increase for sailing represents around 11% - the UK Sport announcement shows substantially greater increases in other sports - archery 66%, boxing 337%, equestrian 48%, fencing 147%, hockey 112%, shooting 151%, table tennis 129%, taekwondo 109%, weightlifting 87% and wrestling 379%. The award to sailing is perhaps most similar in budget and budget increase terms to swimming which this year will receive £6,487,000, an increase of 8%.

In fact the £466,000 figure includes money sailing is already receiving and Derbyshire estimates the real cash increase to the sailing team will be closer to £315,000 this year. "The sailors that are on our performance program get athelete awards, living costs paid for, etc but they are administered by UK Sport so we can’t use that money for program funding or coaching or anything like that," he explains. "It is money that goes straight to the sailors for the cost of their housing and everything else, so that is taken out. Also we have got sports scientists and some of them we employ directly, some of them the English Institute of Sport employs and they work full time or part time on our sport and some that of cost is included."

Even better news is that this funding increase will get larger year on year and come 2008, the year of the Beijing Games will be touching £500,000.

As mentioned by RYA Olympic Manager Stephen Park in our interview with him earlier in the week, the calculations made by UK Sport to come up with this funding allocation depend mostly on track record in terms of the numbers of medals won, number of prospective medals to be won and the medal slots available. Derbyshire points out that the British Olympic sailing team have won five medals at both the last two Olympics, but this is out of a maximum of 11 medals available in sailing. "Proportionally how many more can we win compared to say athletics where at the moment we aren’t winning very many but where we could win 68?!"

So where will the new money be spent? Derbyshire (right) says that the money will be spread throughout the program and this doesn't just mean more wedge for the high fliers in the Performance Squad. "A key area will be to help the transition to senior [squads] and to Olympic – so the top of the 420, the Laser Standard making the jump into Olympic classes. It’s hard to make that commitment and it is the time the sailors want to go to university and have lots of pressures on them."

Derbyshire says he'd also like to see this money being used to marginally increase squad sizes throughout their program. "What we want to do is to retain the Ben Ainslies, but have the Giles Scotts pushing them in the Finn class. So we need to be able to support more sailors and this money will allow us to do that. And the first sign of that will be at the Youth Squads at the Youth Nationals this year, so we have already taken the decision to increase the size of the youth squad slightly and try and support the really talented ones in there to a greater degree in anticipation of this funding."

The money from UK Sport has obviously come as a prelude to London hosting the Olympics in 2012 and UK Sport wanting to give the best opportunity to our athletes to up their game. "It is good news. The really important point is that UK Sport don’t just see this for 2012. They want to transform the face of high performance sport and so after 2012 the intention is that this level of funding will be retained so that it carries through to 2016 and 2020. If sport can deliver what we think it can in terms of improvements in performances and healthier lifestyles, there is every reason why it should continue. We have been waiting for a while for this," concludes Derbyshire.