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Listed below are comments made by RPM_08 between Monday, 6th October 2008 and Monday, 6th October 2008.

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Government steps in to help elite athlete funding 08:34am on 06 Oct 2008 " At 2:11pm on 05 Oct 2008, Plexico wrote:
Bose is trying to get himself a new job as a financial analyst with all these articles about money and economics, he must be bored with football journalism"

I think you just gave away more about your own view being possibly too narrow, rather than Mihir's being too wide ?

He's not a football journalist, he's a sports editor.

To answer the question re funding, the levels of funding you get are based on results. Success will net you maximum funding, failure will see it reduced. But don't forget that of that funding only a percentage goes to the athletes - the rest is used for coaches and support.

This is great in principle but it does pose some problems, for example in the build up to a major event, some athletes target their training regime just for that major event, but by missing out on others, they could see their funding cut. It's a tricky balancing act.

We may not like it, but money is an important ingredient to success in sport. To be top of their sports, athletes need to give up a great many things, including any hope of a non sports career for a significant time. The funding they receive even at top ranks is quite low comparitive to a career, and most do not get a whiff of decent sponsorships unless they are lucky enough to be in a sport that the mass media in the UK popularises (usually for no good reason)

What concerns me is about this policy is the way that, unchanged, it will ultimately lead to minimal investment. Here me out - we only started getting very succesful at many sports with the advent of lottery funding. That allowed us to develop and retain sporting talent. In other words, sports that were not doing well, received good funding and we became good at them.

Now, if we substanitally cut funding to those sports we aren't doing well at, it makes sense to say it becomes harder to do well at them at all. Conversely those we do fund have a better chance of doing well, but ultimately it's about more than just money so all we need is an underperforming athlete, or other atheletes in the world being particularly talented (fancy going against Phelps ?), and the funding gets cut, ergo gets harder to achieve success next time.

We are totally reliant on the distrubuting bodies taking the long view on some of these sports, and when it comes to money I think the credit crunch is proof that insitutions are spectacularly bad at taking the long view....

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