End to BBC TV deal risks best of British athletes running on empty

The best of times, the worst of times. In Dina Asher-Smith, Katarina Johnson-Thompson, Jemma Reekie and Laura Muir, UK Athletics has four potential Olympic champions pounding loudly at the door. Yet its lucrative BBC TV contract worth more than £2m a year has ended, there are fears UKA may have to scrap its Diamond League meetings as a result and it is now staring at more red ink on its balance sheet than a miscreant pupil’s exercise book.

Life and death. Yet between the two, a sliver of hope.

Yes, hope. True, you had to look hard for it on an unseasonably chilly weekend at the British Championships. Especially as of the 78 athletes UKA put on its Olympic world-class programme last December, barely a dozen turned up, a terrible look for a sport craving relevance and a new broadcasting deal. Yet over 1.4 million people tuned in on BBC Two – more than most sports get on satellite TV. That suggests there is a possibility of a rebirth, a chance for UKA’s new chief executive, Joanna Coates, to find a way out of the mire.

Related: Diamond League athletics meetings under threat in UK

It is barely four months since an independent review by UK Sport found UKA “couldn’t get any worse” and demanded changes to its structures, culture and ethical approach. Privately, though, many believe UK Sport barely scratched the surface. For years athletes have felt their talents are poorly projected by their governing body and that its medical provision falls short. It is also not hard to find coaches who feel a massive central hub in Loughborough is too expensive and has not worked, and that coach education has been ignored.

You also did not have to be a soothsayer to predict that throwing money at a new event, the World Cup of Athletics, on the same weekend as the 2018 World Cup final and the finale of Wimbledon would be a disaster – especially without all shoe brands on board. And while some at UKA maintain it has a duty to attempt new ideas, this one cost it nearly £2m.

So far Coates has shown a refreshing transparency in her first six months, acknowledging not only UKA’s mistakes but promising to put ethics before medals. It gives hope that the days of slipping into grey areas, of highly embarrassing moments, such as having UKA’s former head doctor Rob Chakraverty being censured by parliament for failing to record the amount of L-Carnitine administered to Mo Farah in 2014, are behind them.

However identifying problems is one thing, implementing solutions quite another. Take the TV deal that UKA hopes to have in place by December. No one is going to pay more than the £2m a year the BBC have been doing since 2013, to show the British indoor and outdoor championships, the Müller Grand Prix and two Diamond League meetings, which means another financial hit is coming. And without terrestrial coverage of a London and Gateshead Diamond League, Nike and Müller will also lob less into UKA’s coffers – a double disaster for the sport.

There is another fear lurking in the background: that UK Sport may have less money to dole out to UKA in future. Already Coates is having to perform a high-wire act in a force 10 gale.

Controversially, she has also chosen a willingness to gamble in picking Christian Malcolm, who has only five years’ coaching experience and was only an assistant relay coach behind Stephen Maguire and Benke Blomkvist as recently as 2017, to be her new head coach. That was certainly risky: the equivalent of a craps player rubbing their hands, rolling the dice and trusting they end up with a golden arm.

Other applicants for the job – particularly Maguire, Toni Minichiello, Peter Eriksson and Harry Marra – had more weighty CVs. Malcolm’s friends insist he has the leadership qualities to rise to the challenge and that he impressed UKA during his interview with his “radical” and “innovative” plans.

One idea being mooted is to assemble an Avengers-style team of retired stars to bring though more talent. Yet a fundamental question remains: high performance is about winning medals. So what is the plan to bring more juniors through successfully, revitalise the country’s field events, and move UK Athletics back into the fast lane?

Elsewhere there are suggestions that Coates wants to plug everyday and grassroots athletes into the sport. Already she has talked of wanting to put “athletes first”, with an aspiration of having a finalist in every Olympic event by 2032 and plans to fundamentally improve the infrastructure at every level.

The hope, apparently, is that more people will see athletics as a means to get active and then dive deeper into track and field but for that plan to work it requires a terrestrial broadcaster to reach into its wallets to keep the sport in people’s homes.

Yet even in these perilous financial times, there is reason for cautious optimism. Asher-Smith and Johnson‑Thompson are reigning world champions, Reekie and Muir have quietly set the quickest times in the world over 800m and 1500m this year and Amy Hunt is a fast-emerging star.

With such talent leading the vanguard of women’s sport in this country, surely it would pay for the BBC or ITV to remain in track and field’s slipstream?