Does Team GB still have a diversity problem?

Yet another summer of sport to get excited about and inevitably disappointed by. The Euros, cricket, tennis, golf – the list of grey hair-inducing anxiety goes on for fans of British athletic prowess. Despite Mark Cavendish rewriting cycling history and Lewis Hamilton getting his groove back in Formula 1, we’re left predictably disillusioned by Britain’s abilities on the international stage. The once-great nation continues to weigh its hopes on a few individuals willing to carry the burdensome ambition of the millions intent on ruling the waves and never being slaves, only to be scuppered at the last hurdle. The pressure must be unbearable.

Arguably, the greatest moment to direct our patriotic pride is reserved for a certain fortnight in Paris, where a chosen few get the chance to stand for king and country on the podium of champions: the Olympic Games. It stirs the blood – the pinnacle of human performance laid out in a battle of operatic scale, where heroes are created, and once-victors are swept aside for the ultimate Greek tragedy.

Yet, if we look at the well-sculpted humans from the UK stepping off the Eurostar at Gare du Nord, we notice that, outside of a few select sports, the team feels worlds away from representative of our home nations’ diverse makeup. With medal hopes gripping Great Britain, now is the time to examine how much progress Team GB has made on diversity – and how much work still needs to be done.

A quick search reveals that medals don’t come cheap. The centrally funded allocation for sport in the UK for the 2021-2025 period sits at a whopping £1.6 billion. The largest chunk goes towards general participation, community, and school sports programmes, big sporting events, and increasingly, initiatives targeting specific demographics around disability, age, and diverse ethnic communities.

About a quarter of the budget goes to UK Sport, the body responsible for elite performance – £310 million for the Olympics and Paralympics and £42 million for talent development. For the 2020 Games and Paralympics, this worked out at an average of just under £2 million per medal won. That sum could go a long way funding schools and hospitals but many would argue that an Olympic medal in making a horse walk sideways is better value.

Great British athletes competing at the Olympic level – known as Team GB – punch way above their weight in terms of success, having landed in the top four nations of the medal table during the last four summer Olympics. They are the only team to have won a gold in every modern games since 1896 and are on the podium of most medals won over combined Summer Olympics (950), currently ranking 3rd in the table.

We’ve taken 327 athletes to Paris with an expectation of securing between 50 and 70 medals, a third of them gold, and a finish in the top five. The question often raised is who gets to represent Team GB, and which sports are most deserving of funding?

Tokyo 2020 results reveal that 35% of Team GB medal winners went through some form of private education, although less than 7% of the population is privately educated. That leads us to assume that we have a two-tier system that offers imbalanced opportunities for talent to succeed, with access to equipment, funding, teaching, and facilities allowing only some young people to flourish. Some sports need very specific resources and have a very specific – if not historically prejudicial – on-ramp for participation. Many sports that Team GB funds and excels in and are simply off-limits to the masses.

Sally Munday, Chief Executive of UK Sport, has acknowledged the uncomfortable optics in funding for some of the so-called ‘posh’ sports, which show little or no diversity across ethnicity or class. She has vowed to make changes. While acknowledgment is a start, and the Progression Funding plan gives sports like skateboarding, climbing, and surfing an extra boost for the future, real change seems a long way off.

The funding criteria for various sporting disciplines are based on the likelihood of getting a podium. This is perhaps why the Modern Pentathlon – a sport that tests an athlete in all the skills needed to be a soldier in the 1912 Balkan war: swimming, horse riding, cross-country running, shooting, and fencing – had its funding bumped up by half a million pounds to £5,681,906 after a double gold in Tokyo. What seems slightly unfathomable is that after winning just one silver and a bronze in Tokyo, rowing was awarded an extra £111,000, topping it up to £23,794,482 of taxpayer and lottery money.

Education aside, there’s another glaring problem with Team GB. Take a look at the swimming squad – they have one person of colour, Eva Okaro. She’s remarkable not only for her ethnicity and age (just 17) but also because she even had the opportunity to learn to swim and access a nearby pool that hasn’t been shut down. Luckily, if she wants to wear her hair naturally, she now benefits from a 2022 FINA rule change that allows her to wear a swim cap that fits – lucky her.

The question is whether any of this is a problem. If we can bag some medals and keep the populace distracted, isn’t that a good thing? We know the power of sport to galvanise national pride and lift spirits. What higher honour or prestige can possibly be bestowed on a human being’s physical ability than that of Olympic champion? Personally, I love it.

So, does it matter if elite sport keeps the social and racial divide alive and kicking? Should we not optimise our opportunity to medal by bringing even more prejudice into sport? Or, through the lens of fairness, should we defund some of the ‘sit down’ sports and put that money into sports more people can access? Even better, should we use some of that money to make the ‘off-limits’ activities more appealing and affordable to the many?

It’s a complicated issue and may not lie so much in the immediate Olympics but further down the line: past Los Angeles 2028, onto Brisbane 2032 and beyond. The reliance on homogeneous teams pulled from public schools and universities, the armed services, or overseas has served us well in the past, but we must wonder how sustainable the model will be in the future.

China looks set to stay in the top tier along with America and Russia (if they’re let back in). But let’s look at other countries that could turn it on with catastrophic consequences for Great Britain. India, with almost 1.4 billion people, could easily follow China if they implement the necessary programmes. You’d think that if cultural constraints were circumvented, the oil-rich Arab countries of the Middle East could throw cash at a project to give potential athletes state-of-the-art facilities and top-tier staff, leading to world-dominating performances.

Let’s not overlook the African countries – they may not be a threat yet, but what could the continent look like in a generation? With European birth rates in decline, Africa’s population is set to double in the next 25 years. Who knows whether African states will have negotiated ownership of their considerable natural wealth by then, but the sheer pool of 16-25 year-olds to choose from will definitely make things interesting.

The average age of an Olympian is 26, and you should have started your sport by age 7 or 8 if you want a chance with the big dogs in later life. If we go back 20 years to see what today’s Olympians were doing as kids, we find ourselves in a pre-TikTok and Instagram age. Even Myspace didn’t exist – but there was Ceefax. Compare that bygone media landscape to today, when digital distractions via mobile phone apps are specifically designed to infiltrate developing minds and suck up free time. It’s not a huge leap (or maybe a hop, skip, and jump – sorry) to predict that the focus needed to become a dedicated sportsperson could be fast evaporating.

For Team GB, this poses a problem. Although 47% of young people currently meet the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines for physical activity, the overall percentage of sporting participation has dropped since the London 2012 Games, despite funding increases. As a nation, our young are more sedentary and more likely to engage in online interaction over physical pursuits, pressing their thumbs on screens rather than spikes into race tracks. The pool of potential future stars we are currently choosing from is draining.

We see a split along traditional lines in the sports where non-whites in the UK perform at an elite level – mostly in more accessible and culturally accepted sports like track and field, basketball and boxing. However, this doesn’t tell the whole story. Classist barriers are evident too. None of the paddle or racket sports, sailing, shooting, archery, equestrian, rugby, or hockey feature significant diversity.

If we want to keep our athletic standing on the world stage, it’s crucial not just to give ethnic communities the opportunity to compete but also to provide a cultural environment where they can express themselves honestly and be nurtured, like their white counterparts. While programmes like the UK Sport Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan sound promising, holding national governing bodies accountable is challenging if they continue to win medals in the short term. Sporting leaders will eagerly sign up to diversity targets if that secures funding for the next Olympic cycle, but if the ‘old boys’ network of technical staff isn’t fostering diverse talent or creating an environment where they can thrive, we must question if anything will change.

I’m writing this mid-way through the Olympics, a time when difficult questions don’t have easy or forthcoming answers. It’s just a couple of clicks to find stats on the number of mothers in Team GB (10), returning Olympic medallists (74), teenagers (14), male and female split (155/172), even the most popular first names (Anna and Tom). But diversity figures? They’re conspicuously absent, which is troubling.

I truly believe that change can happen – it must if Britain wants to remain a top-tier sporting player. But for us to see and feel it, those at the top need to be brave. What’s more important: medals in sports for Anna and Tom or people who can redefine what a sport can look like, turn heads and inspire a new wave of athleticism? A bright new generation of talent that represents the nation can only emerge if there is diversity and equality of opportunity throughout the system; staff who can spot talent outside the usual channels; and support for leaders with the courage to stick it out long enough for their vision to unfold.

We also need to reframe what People of Colour are capable of by challenging the normalisation of whiteness in certain elite sports. POC must be seen as not just able to run fast or punch hard but also as intelligent, intellectual and capable in technical and tactical disciplines. Only then can we hope to see more athletes like climber Molly Thompson Smith, diver Kyle Kothari, gymnasts Jake Jarman and Becky Downie, or BMXer Kye Whyte.

Diversifying our elite sporting landscape is about more than just fairness. It’s about enriching the very fabric of our athletic community. Let’s take a step back from the multifaceted prism of sport and approach it from a new angle. The light refracted through it will be just as bright, and its unexpected vibrancy may surprise us all.

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