Olympic Games and Paralympic Games 2012

Baroness Campbell of Loughborough Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Campbell of Loughborough]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Shutt and Lord Moynihan, for initiating this debate. I declare an interest as chair of two of the three bodies that have repeatedly been mentioned today—UK Sport and the Youth Sport Trust.

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Grey-Thompson, who is not only an exceptional athlete but a remarkable role model. What makes our great athletes role models is not the medals but the journeys they take to achieve those medals. They are role models for every young person to learn that, despite any set-backs, if you set your mind on a dream you can make it come true. She is also a woman of great principle and immense integrity, and I have no doubt that she will make an important and positive contribution to the House.

I congratulate John Armitt and David Higgins of the ODA and the noble Lord, Lord Coe, and his colleague Paul Dayton at LOCOG. They have set a new standard for us in sport of excellence, ambition and innovation. I hope the rest of us can achieve the same standard as we pursue the future of sport in this country. Finally, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, who, with her energy and dynamism, has brought the Legacy Company to life and driven it forward with immense purpose. I am sure that the legacy she leaves will be one that we will all treasure for a very long time.

I shall focus for a few moments on the preparation of our athletes. I believe that nothing will convince the British public more that the Games have been a success than our athletes in the Olympics and Paralympics winning medals, those glorious moments when individuals’ dreams come true. Indeed, at the Winter Olympics recently in Vancouver, the Canadian athletes not only managed to galvanise a nation together in a way that Canada had never dreamed possible but when surveyed later, not only in Vancouver but right across Canada, more than 90 per cent of the population felt that the Games had been worthwhile. I have no doubt that a great part of that was due to the athletes’ performances, which were quite outstanding.

So how is our team being prepared? I am pleased to say that we have the best resources that any team has ever had. I am the chair of UK Sport and have been so since 2003. We have four very important constituent parts of the United Kingdom—Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, each playing a significant part in the preparation of our Olympic and Paralympic athletes. UK Sport is investing more than £100 million a year of Exchequer, Lottery and private sector money in the preparation of our team. Following the Athens Olympics and prior to the Beijing Olympics, we introduced a policy of no compromise, which meant that our intention was to drive results through targeted investment. Our fourth place in Beijing, our best in Olympic Games for 100 years, and the continued success of our Paralympic team, finishing second in the medal table in Beijing, are testimony to the way in which that system has worked.

Not only is it the best resourced team in our history but it is also the best prepared. We have been fortunate enough to recruit the best performance directors from around the world. We have now a growing number of outstanding coaches. Initially, many of them were imported from overseas; now, we are home-growing our world-class coaches. They are supported by four home-country institutes that provide sports science and sports medicine support of the highest quality to every individual athlete wherever they are. There is a programme of research and innovation, linking with some of the biggest businesses in the country and finding that cutting-edge, 0.01 per cent difference in performance between gold and bronze medals. We have a new and creative talent identification programme, searching out those young people with talent who did not even know that they had it. A simple example was our tall people talent identification programme, which found a young woman who, three years on, has just won a medal in the women’s under-23 rowing world championships.

Not only are our athletes the best prepared in terms of the support system around them and the coaches and performance directors leading them but we are also staging between now and 2012 60 world and European events in 30 sports across 20 cities, giving our athletes home-country advantage. However, it is not only our athletes whom those events are preparing. More than 10,000 technical officials and volunteers will be involved in them, helping them develop the expertise that they need to be world-class at London 2012. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Shutt, that if our resources and support stay constant, I believe that this British Olympic and Paralympic team is on course for the best results ever: more medals in more sports and, most importantly, more inspiration for more young people across the whole of the United Kingdom.

However, not only do I hope that we will produce a better medal count but I also believe that, in this short time, we have produced a world-class system that is among the most envied of the world. If we can continue the investment through to 2016 and 2020, we will continue to build on the success of 2012. That is something that no other country has succeeded in doing.

I shall talk finally about youth sport and the inspiration of young people across the UK—my noble friend Lord Pendry eloquently addressed the issue earlier. As chair of the Youth Sport Trust—which is an independent company, limited by guarantee and with charitable status; it is not a non-departmental public body—I know that it has worked tirelessly for the past 10 years to create an infrastructure for school sport that many countries see as the most outstanding in the world. I have just recently returned from a visit to New Zealand and Australia to help them understand the way in which we have structured school sport in this country, which they now both envy and wish to copy.

It is critical that we sustain participation among our young people, which is the greatest legacy that we can achieve. During the past few years, all four home countries have invested in their school sports structure. In England, we have developed 450 school sport partnerships. Let us be clear: they are not just about schools. Those partnerships include every primary, secondary and special school, but, just as importantly, they include the community providers—those clubs that we talked about earlier, those community coaches, those volunteers. Each school sport partnership covers a local area which is equivalent to what might have been once the old districts. Within those, we have been able to drive opportunities for young people to participate, to perform and to lead in sport. All of that has been possible because of the investment in an infrastructure of people that stands ready to deliver the most exceptional legacy programme of all time.

This army of people is capable not only of creating new opportunities for young people, which is the easy thing to do, but of sustaining their commitment to participate, perform and lead in sport. That is equally important. The work that we do in the next two years could make a transformational difference to the lives of millions of young people.

At a time of considerable national challenge, I am reminded of a quote from Nelson Mandela:

“Sport has the power to change the world, the power to inspire, the power to unite people in a way that little else can”.

Sport can spread hope and inspiration to the world. I hope that we take the opportunity presented by London 2012 to spread hope and inspiration to the youth of this country.