There
should be no debate as to whether this was the right way to be investing public
funds during a period of austerity: from my perspective, as a nation, we have
no option to capitalise on Legacy as a result of the challenges that are
staring us in the face. We only have to make the most marginal impact on the
projected cost of overweight and obesity of £50bn by 2050 to have made this the
very best £7bn we have ever spent.
And
that is now the challenge that we have to pick up, together. There will be acres
of column inches written in the weeks to come, debating whether we truly will
have a lasting Legacy from these Games. To squander this opportunity would be
criminally negligent, given the opportunity we have to harness the excitement
of a generation which truly has been inspired. The support to do so is
deafening and crosses the political divide. Even before the Games, we learnt
that Tony Blair was to return as a
policy advisor to Labour on Legacy. Yesterday we had the announcement that Seb Coe would take up the
same role for the Government. My hope is that they pick up the phone to each
other and tackle this challenge hand in hand. Creating a lasting Legacy from
the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games is too important for knee-jerk
decisions and party political positioning.
The
decision to secure elite sport funding through to Rio 2016 was the right one; however,
as The Sports Think Tank has pointed out, the
comment by the Prime Minister that primary schools
should focus their efforts solely on competitive sport was a statement seemingly
shaped by personal experience and based on no evidence or advice from the
experts. You only have to listen to the comments of some of our greatest
Olympians such as Sir Steve Redgrave and Denise Lewis this weekend to realise
that what matters is getting the youth of this nation moving, building their
physical literacy and enjoying themselves, with the ability to excel and chose
their sporting route later in life.
But the
challenges we face as a nation mean that we cannot simply focus the debate on Legacy
on children and young people – there is a far wider issue that we have to
tackle.
Our
opening ceremony placed the National Health Service at the heart of the Games
and it has to be at the heart of thinking about Legacy. Physical activity,
including sport, is intrinsically linked to the future of our National Health
Service. This is increasingly recognised within the medical profession, as the
recent Royal College of
Physicians report “Exercise for Life” demonstrates. The reality, as it stands, is
that the provision of healthcare free at the point of use through the National
Health Service is at long term risk as it struggles to meet the rising costs of
an aging population increasingly burdened with lifestyle related diseases.
Currently,
only a third of adults meet the Chief Medical Officer guidelines for physical
activity whilst physical inactivity is the fourth leading risk factor for
global mortality and costs the UK economy £8.2 billion per year. According to
the Chief Medical Officer, physical activity can reduce the prevalence of
chronic conditions such as Type 2 Diabetes, Obesity, and Stroke by between
30-50%. An inactive person spends 38%
more days in hospital, yet there is no clear plan regarding how to increase the
number of healthcare professionals who recommend and refer to physical
activity. As Jo Webber, Deputy Director of Policy at NHS Confederation pointed out at a
recent FIA Vanguard Members event, meeting this challenge is essential to the
survival of the NHS.
So how
do we move forward? At the FIA, we stand for getting more people, more active,
more often. We always have and always will. We’re currently going through a
process to rebrand our organisation so that we can bring more organisations
together. The fact is, together we can achieve more.
But
what do we want to achieve? Team GB demonstrated at the London 2012 Olympic and
Paralympic Games that it’s amazing what can be achieved when you put your mind
to it. And we should put our mind to achieving something amazing: like making
the UK the most active nation in the world.
How do
we do that? Well, that’s the hard bit to which I only have some of the answers.
It requires a “grand partnership” across the sporting and activity world,
bringing together strategies which together can have a great impact than the
sum of their component parts.
As a
starter for 10, here are some of the key recommendations from our perspective:
- Bottle
the spirit: the GamesMakers truly made the Games. Volunteering is what keeps
community sport alive in this country. Sport is the very embodiment of the “big
society” with volunteers giving birth to the backbone on which success at the
elite level. We need to continue to say thank you and support those volunteers
that make such an impact. Sports Makers, a programme led by Sport England, should be embraced and we should all be
thinking about how we can make sport happen for our local community. You could
even start this weekend – why not check out www.joininuk.org and join the
thousands of people who are going back to where every Olympic medallist starts,
their local community sports club.
And as part of the legacy if people will not come to the sports club, let's bring the sports club to them and drop it on their doorstep just like StreetGames.
- We
have to make exercise a routine part in the prevention and management of
chronic disease. We have the National Health Service but we need to make
“wellness” an equal concern to “illness”. How can we get exercise professionals
into every GP surgery as part of the healthcare team? How can we make the most
of the fantastic asset we have in the new National Centres for
Sport and Exercise Medicine? How can we harness the expertise of specialist Sport and
Exercise Medicine Doctors who are now able to have such a huge impact on the
health of the nation? Finding the answers to these questions really will help
us to establish what we all know: exercise is medicine.
- Put
simply, these Games would not have happened without the support of the 54
Olympic partners who contributed significantly towards the cost of bringing the
greatest show on earth to London. Rightly, they owned the Games. However, we
have to be clear: the Legacy belongs to everybody. Those brands and commercial partners,
who have so far been excluded from the glow of Olympic glory, need to now be
embraced at the heart of making Legacy a reality. The major challenges facing
us in creating a Legacy cannot be addressed by Government action alone.
Ultimately, a societal approach is needed in which business, government and
other actors all move forward in the same direction together. The Responsibility Deal Physical Activity Network which now has over
200 organisations signed up shows that corporate Britain wants to play a role
in improving public health and needs to be embraced.
- These
were the first truly “Digital Olympics” – the Games in which
social media came alive to bring us as the spectators intimately close to the
competitors and each other as we cheered them on. In addition to human
endeavour, these have also been a technology focused Games with our most
successful teams such as British Cycling exploiting every opportunity to
explore technology in pursuit of their much craved “marginal gains”. Technology
has to be embraced by the sector as the primary driver of growth in the future.
As a start, I urge everyone to get behind spogo – the sports and
fitness finder which the FIA is developing in partnership with Sport England.
It is early days, the site is in beta, and we are aware of the challenging task
we face in making it as easy to find and book sports and fitness services
online as a train ticket or hotel room but I promise to disrupt and challenge
everyone in the sector until we have reached that goal. Innovation has to come
to the fore and technology has to be the way we achieve that. Just imagine where
the digital world will be by Rio 2016? Let’s not get left behind.
- 9.8%
of children enter primary school as obese yet twice as many (18.7%) leave
primary school as obese. Such figures leave our primary schools open to
accusations of being “Fat Factories”. We have to crack this once and for all –
a ridiculous debate about whether competitive sport or Bhangra Dance is the answer helps
us get nowhere. For starters, let’s confirm that school sport funding for
secondary schools needs to be returned to the levels they were at prior to the
Comprehensive Spending Review. Once that’s done, let’s give activity in Primary
Schools the attention it deserves, and the resources. This isn’t just financial
– exercise, sports and activity professionals across the country could do worse
than to volunteer an hour or two of their time every week to their local
community primary school. The Jason Kennys, Katherine Copelands, Adam Gemilis,
Laura Trotts, Brownlees, Sophie Hoskings and Anthony Joshuas of this world have
grown up during a period of unique investment in school sport and we need to
keep investing to make sure the well doesn’t dry up. The Youth Sports Trust is one of the
sector’s greatest success stories and we could do worse than listening to them
moving forward. This agenda stretches beyond the school yard and requires
community sports clubs, local leisure facilities and exercise professionals to
work together to improve provision of young people. I also like the campaign
run by First News – the children’s
newspaper – to guarantee membership of a local sports club for every young
person. Big ideas like that deserve to thrive. You can back the petition here.
-
We
have an army of professionals out there who can make an impact on the health of
the nation. The fitness and exercise professionals across the UK need to be
deployed appropriately but they also need to keep on training, improving their
skills and learning new approaches to deal with people who simply haven’t been
interested in getting active in the past. We also need to recognise that ours
is a sector full of opportunity for young people and open our doors to provide
work experience and real job opportunities in a sector with no artificial glass
ceiling created by a preference for academic ability over the ability to
emphasise and motivate the public. We need to recognise the role of the sector
on the health of the nation and deem it as a “priority sector” for skills
investment in the future.
- Finally,
it’s a hackneyed phrase which is often the case with something which is simply
true: the drive for Legacy has to be an integrated cross Government strategy.
This means that we need to bring
together those various Government departments and make sure they interact where
their interests in physical activity converge. DBIS, DWP, DCMS, DH, DCLG, DfT, DfE,
and DEFRA all have considerable interest in the agenda but lack a means of
coordinating effectively. We need to recognise that the Olympics will leave a Legacy
far beyond the local community sports club which will stretch out onto the
roads of Britain as youngsters seek to emulate [Sir] Bradley Wiggins and we
need to have an infrastructure in place to support them. That’s why
organisations such as Sustrans have such a crucial
role to play in the Legacy debate, which simply shouldn’t be the preserve of
the sporting bodies that have delivered athletes to the main event but a much
wider coalition of organisations dedicated to getting more people, more active,
more often.
Rising
to this opportunity will not be easy: embedding sustaining volunteering and
community sports structures across the country, establishing exercise as
medicine, innovating to capitalise on the Digital Olympics, nailing consensus
on school sport, tooling up our army with the skills they need and generating
cross Government support and investment is some task. But so is finishing third
in the Olympic medal table. We are now the pound for pound most successful
sporting nation in the world. Can we become the most active as well? That’s a
national challenge I’m excited about taking part in.
