* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Liz King is a journalist, triathlete and event organiser, who is director of the triathlon website www.TriSpiritEvents.com. She has more than 25 years’ experience in the sport, and has raced seven Ironman events to date. You can follow her on Twitter at @liztrispirit. The opinions expressed are her own. Thomson Reuters is hosting a live blog on March 8, 2011 to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day.
Encouraging girls into sport is still a big issue in the UK. Grassroots funding is just one aspect of it, but there are other barriers to be overcome too.
For example, I was at a lecture last year where I was talking to an organisation responsible for encouraging young women into cycling. They had the money, they had the training, they had the bikes – but the girls were still reluctant to take part. Why? Because they did not want to have their hair “messed up” by a cycle helmet. I kid you not. The result was that they had to provide hair straighteners in the changing rooms to get girls on bikes. So perhaps we should look at getting Babyliss to sponsor grassroots cycling if we want to encourage young girls into it.
I am joking, sort of. You see, they have enough high profile role models to emulate – Victoria Pendleton, Rebecca Romero, and Lizzie Armistead to name but a few. Yet despite this, there remains a sense that, for young girls at least, being good at sport is not ‘cool’.
The real shame is that in so many avenues now, young people aspire to mediocrity in a bid to ‘fit in’. An achievement can so often be met by sneering from peers who are either jealous or desperate to put someone down to make themselves feel better about an inadequacy. That needs to change.
Hope is on the horizon. Sport England is backing 20 projects with an injection of £10 million for Active Women campaign, only last week £992,159 was awarded to British Cycling for a programme to encourage 80,000 women back into the saddle.
But try getting involved in a running event, or a triathlon in the UK, and while there are a number of people who are supportive of athletes’ efforts, plenty of people find the minor disruption to traffic that is necessary for these events to happen is too much to bear. Remember the Etape Caledonian in Perthshire where tacks were thrown on the road to cause multiple punctures? It is an extreme example, but being regularly involved in these events myself, I know it is certainly indicative of an attitude that some members of the public hold.
How amazing, then, would it be if the London Olympics in 2012 could be the start of a real sea-change in the attitude of the UK towards sport in general. Yes, football, rugby and cricket are all well established in the national psyche. But we all need to get behind our athletes at the home Games to show them the support they really deserve, and that means proper funding too.
The Beijing Games took women’s participation in the Olympics to record levels – there were 11,196 athletes in total and 4,746 of those were women, amounting to 42 per cent of the total field. As yet, I have not been able to find the breakdown of figures for the 2012 Olympic Games – aside from an estimate that there will be 10,500 athletes – less than Beijing.
The triathlon – my main sport - is being held in Hyde Park with the swim leg in the Serenptine. This is a free public event and will attract a huge crowd and will be a blue ribbon event for the Games. This will showcase our athletes at their best – and we have some incredible names in this event that are not yet household names. Surprising really, since this sport is one that we have had perhaps more world champions than almost any other.
Yet the total funding for the triathletes who carry the weight of expectation on their shoulders is remarkably small – just under £5.3m between 2009 and 2013 – and that has to pay for 23 athletes in all (eight podium athletes and 15 development athletes). When you consider that Chelsea paid £50m for Fernando Torres – one player – it puts the level of funding to support the development of our triathletes into sharp focus.
Of course, there are many more events than the triathlon in the Games, 300 in total, and that should give our British sportswomen a vital chance to fulfil their potential, and create strong role models for the future generations in all sports. Let’s make sure we give them all of our support next year.
