With the World Indoor Champs being the sole global level event held on British shores this winter, Ben Bloom looks at the dearth of competitive opportunities for ambitious athletes
It is the start of an Olympic year and you are a British athlete with international aspirations. Perhaps you are on UK Athletics performance funding, or maybe you sit slightly beneath that level and the goal is to one day join the privileged ranks of the financially supported.
There is the carrot of a home World Indoor Championships in Glasgow looming at the start of March, so time is of the essence – the indoor campaign is so short that there will only be a few opportunities to hit the standards required to gain selection.
You load up the competition calendar to see what international-calibre meets are taking place on
British shores over the course of the season. None. Nothing. Zero.
On the World Athletics website is a list of 56 World Indoor Tour meets, only four of which are not in Europe. They range in profile from elite gold events, through silver and bronze to the bottom challenger tier.
An almighty 14 of them take place in France. Nine in Germany. Five in Czechia. Three countries who claimed a combined total of three medals at last year’s World Championships in Budapest, where the British team alone bagged a weighty 10. Yet, when it comes to indoor opportunities, there is no doubting which country lags lamentably behind.
Ellie Baker (Mark Shearman)
It is difficult to shake the feeling that Britain’s athletes are succeeding in spite of the system rather than because of it.
The scale of UKA’s financial turmoil is well known, laid bare in early December when chairman Ian Beattie revealed record losses of £3.7 million for the financial year. Amid a multitude of factors, the lack of a title sponsor and television deal were paramount. Those absences meant significant losses across all recently staged international one-day events in Britain: £800,000 on the 2022 Birmingham Diamond League meeting, up to £500,000 at the 2023 London Diamond League, and another £500,000 at the 2023 Birmingham World Indoor Tour.
That sole indoor meet – which served as last year’s tour final – has been removed from the 2024 programme entirely, taking with it Britain’s only global-standard indoor competition of the winter. For athletes and supporters alike, it is not so much slim pickings as nothing to pick from whatsoever.
That the 50,000 sell-out London Diamond League – the…
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