Olympic Legacy (S&T Report)

Lord Addington Excerpts

Wednesday 11th December 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this is one of those papers that when you pick it up and read it makes you think, “Oh!”. I have raised sport and exercise medicine on numerous occasions, and the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, and the noble Earl, Lord Howe, have been dragged in. My approach has always been about enhancing general medicine and making sure that people are encouraged to take up sport, because they are put back together again quickly to carry on with the rest of their lives and to carry on with sport.

This report is a fairly academic paper, and I feel that it misses some of the point. You do not play a sport or push yourself to keep fit; that is a by-product. If we could all stay fit by jogging 2.3 miles every third day or whatever it is, everybody would be happy. We would have the medical benefits. We could get on with it without trouble, but we do not. We know we do not. We need an incentive and a reason to take the exercise to get the benefit. This report slightly missed the point that you do sport because it gives you a buzz. Enjoyment is not quite the right word. Sport at various levels gives you a buzz, a feeling of achievement, the competition and the thrill. Exercise sometimes provides you with another good feeling: the chance to get outside. These feelings are going on. Although the report mentions the psychology, I do not think it got under the skin of why you are doing it.

Having said that, the report is right about the fact that we do not co-ordinate, in trying to make sure that we get the benefit of the health agenda—and, presumably, the preventive health agenda—and the saving that the nation gets. The two bits do not speak to each other.

I have come to the conclusion that sports are slightly worse than political parties for wanting to sit in darkened rooms talking to each other about themselves—only slightly, but probably worse. They do not like people intervening on what they do, and change is usually forced on them—usually by a failure to perform at a certain level, to achieve an increase in numbers or, classically, to compete at the level to which they aspire or that they are used to. So when the report says that the science of elite-level sport is unclear, that does not surprise me very much. I suspect that the art of coaching and getting the best out of people is at odds with scientific method. The psychology involved, and the signs that you are responding to what goes on around you, are probably not approached best by this. There is also resistance to intervention. Sharing—and we are much better at sharing now than we were before, probably because we have to take on funding from outside government, and it is taken seriously—still has not gone into the culture.

One obvious thing that I had not even thought about until this report came out is that, if you are an elite-level sportsman, you do not want to be experimented on. It is a bit of a no-brainer. Who does want to be experimented on, to be perfectly honest? They want to be treated, helped, supported—yes. But they will take on a revolutionary new course of action only if they absolutely have to. That is a very logical point of view to take. It is always going to be anecdotal when slight changes in practice occur.

I am increasingly aware that I am not qualified in my own sporting life. Although I flirted with the top of my sport, I am totally aware that we were amateurs; although we did not think that we were amateurs, we absolutely were. I remember the shock when a first-class rugby club got its first diet sheet. Those days are long gone. But having worked a little bit with the elite level, I can say that trying to change the culture of behaviour, when people’s whole lives have been dominated by trying to achieve performance, is something that acquires scientific language, if nothing else. Trying to identify exactly what you are getting out of it is a very important factor here. To get benefit for wider society in terms not just of health but of community support and interaction is another very important point that is not covered here.

Sports medicine has important lessons to teach ordinary medicine. It is a simple fact that a sportsman knows that, if you get a bump, you get it treated quickly; you do not go to your GP and wait three weeks for a physio appointment, because then you would find that a muscle was weakened or that there was a slight imbalance in how you walked that has led into an imbalance in your entire body, which means that you might have to take time off work. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt, said that it was a very sensible idea to get more physios involved in accident and emergency, when I raised this issue a few years ago. We are still not quite there yet, because we do not take soft tissue injuries seriously enough. Sport has already taught us, and given us examples, that you should intervene early on those things to stop them becoming chronic. We have simply not adopted that yet.

I have always been something of a fan of having sport more closely linked to the Department of Health so that we can get those benefits together, especially preventive stuff. Certainly, exercise is a factor in controlling weight and gives you an incentive not to carry extra weight—by which I mean surplus weight. My rants against the body mass index are well recorded here, and I think that we will leave the subject there. But a sensible approach to how to control weight and stay healthy is something that probably should be led by the Department of Health.

The report is interesting because it starts to open a door to what is going on. When you open a door you do not know what you will find, but here was a corridor leading to interesting places which was perhaps felt to be irrelevant to sport, at least at the moment. It is an interesting start but to think that the Olympics would change the culture overnight was a total misconception. It will not be the only misconception about the Olympics. My noble friend and I have been sitting on a committee which looked at this issue and we got the impression that many people felt that, once the Olympics arrived, the days would be longer, the summers warmer and we would be guaranteed to win gold medals not only for the next 20 years but for the next 30 years.

This has been an interesting start to a debate that needs to go further, and for that I thank all noble Lords who sat on the committee.