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British ski racing has reached a crossroads - 2010/03/27 18:25
British ski racing has reached a crossroads at the 2010 Winter Olympics. One wrong turn and it could go downhill very quickly.
The problem, as with most things in life, is a lack of cash.
Having no decent mountains clearly doesn't help, though Amy Williams's gold medal in the skeleton proves you don't need a domestic track to triumph.
But what you do need is sufficient coffers to finance a world-class structure which can then pay for training, travel, coaching and support. And British skiing has neither.
Britain's top skier Chemmy Alcott did not do as well as she had hoped in Vancouver
The much-publicised collapse of skiing's governing body before the Games left the likes of British number one Chemmy Alcott to fund herself, with coaches working without pay.
The British Olympic Association stepped in for the Games, and wrangling will soon begin over a new body. But it will still only be able to dish out the lottery funds it gets from UK Sport.
And in the four years up to Vancouver, skiing received a grand total of £372,000. That's less than beach volleyball will get for London 2012 (£395,000) and compares to £2.11m for skeleton.
Against this background, Alcott, who also relies on private sponsors, matched her best Olympic result with 11th in the combined event at Whistler. She added a 13th in the downhill, alongside 20th in super-G and 27th in giant slalom. The best result from the British men was a 27th by Dave Ryding in slalom.
The 27-year-old Alcott, who was skiing in her third Games, is blessed by good looks and has been the face of British skiing in recent years. But this has been held against her by some, who claim that she is more style than substance.
In terms of absolute results, she may not have improved on Turin, but since then she has lost her mother, suffered a debilitating foot injury and broken her ankle, not to mention the financial struggles which are causing her to doubt her future in the sport.
The men's team of Ryding, 23, Ed Drake, 24 and Andrew Noble, 25, were all making their Olympic debuts in Vancouver to gain experience for Sochi in 2014.
The BOA has been keen to point out in Canada that most medal wins come at an athlete's second Games. (It's taken American speed queen Lindsey Vonn three Olympics now to earn her first medals, while Swiss veteran Didier Cuche has only won one despite an otherwise glittering career.)
The question is, will the money men deem Britain's skiers - based on results and future potential - worth ploughing more cash into?
"Overall, performances were good and we can be satisfied, but we know we are capable of a lot more," said British ski team chief Mark Tilston.
"We can ski better, but it's a constant battle. We're competing on such a skeleton programme and the support and resources are so far behind all the other nations.
"Until we're in a different climate we can't really expect to compete much better than we are now."
Britain's five-time Olympic ski racer Graham Bell added: "Chemmy can certainly take a lot of credit from her downhill performance. That was impressive, although she could have done a bit better after that.
"There are no fundamental flaws in her technique, otherwise she wouldn't have been scoring top 10s in World Cup. It's the small things that count and they all add up.
"I always wonder what would have happened if she had been on, say, the US team - whether it would have been a different story.
"But it's a chicken-and-egg scenario. If you don't fund people, they won't perform."
Britain's lack of mountains means it's never going to have a deep talent pool compared with alpine countries where, in some areas, skiing is on the school curriculum. According to Bell, it takes "15-20" years to develop a ski racer to Olympic standard. That's a lot of funding for no immediate reward. And the level of international competition is phenomenal.
"Just in Austria there are thousands of kids between 11 and 14 racing at a very high level," said Bell.
"But that doesn't mean with the one or two skiers we have coming through we shouldn't be able to support them well enough to compete.
"Even teams like France and Italy, who haven't performed so well here, have 10 times as much funding per head than Britain."
And Bell is concerned that skiing will get overlooked in the clamour for cash by sports which offer a "quicker fix".
"If you can bung a bit of money into sliding sports and you can get someone across from another sport and within six months they're world champions, UK Sport thinks this is a 'no-brainer'," he added.
"It's absolutely no surprise to me that the sport where we won a medal is the one we get the most money in. It's the same thing with Canada's 'Own the Podium'."
The evidence from sports such as cycling, rowing and sailing does seem to suggest that the more money you pump in, the better the results.
But the chief executive of UK Sport, John Steele, insists there is more to it than simply throwing around cash, and insists his body wil continue to make hard-nosed funding decisions.
"It's too easy to say 'if we had more money we could do better'," he said. "If it was that easy we'd just write cheques and stand back.
"We have always been true to our 'no compromise' principle in investing only in athletes and sports who we believe have a genuine opportunity of winning medals.
"The fantastic performances by the members of the British Bob Skeleton team shows this strategy does work and medals can be won if the right programmes and athletes are in place to benefit from our support and investment."
Britain's best Olympic skiing result remains Georgina Hathorn's fourth place in the slalom in Grenoble in 1968. For the men, the benchmark is still Martin Bell's (Graham Bell's brother) eighth in the downhill at Calgary in 1988, barring Alain Baxter's slalom third in Salt Lake City before he was stripped of a bronze medal for failing a drugs test. (He was later cleared of any wrongdoing but was not allowed his medal back).
At this point you might be thinking, "So what? All this is irrelevant. Skiing is just an elitist sport."
Well, 1.27m people went on a winter sports holiday in 2008/2009, according to data from the Ski Club of Great Britain, and there will be plenty of other fans of the sport who didn't make it that year. That's compared to the handful of sliders in the UK. And beach volleyball players, for that matter. As for accusations of being a "posh" sport, you only have to go to any ski resort across the Alps and you'll find Britons from all walks of life.
"There are nearly two million skiers in the UK and they need to be represented by a top level ski and snowboard team," said Bell.
One way to tap into this market in the search for Olympic success could be to target the exciting new Games discipline of ski cross, which saw peak viewing figures of four million on BBC TV last week. It's been suggested that this could appeal more to British youngsters who do not have a national affinity with ski racing and for whom the traditional alpine disciplines may look staid.
But Bell is not convinced and reckons the ski cross in Sochi will be "way more competitive" than it is now.
"Effectively, it will be another alpine discipline," he said. "It's the same group of skiers that are coming through now on junior alpine programmes."
So British ski racing will wait on tenterhooks as its organisational and financial future hangs in the balance.
The crossroads are here. The wrong turn now could see skiing fall off Britain's Olympic radar for good.
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