Sean Ingle raises a fair question about the impact of our investment in Olympic and Paralympic sports (How much will Team GB’s ‘medal moments’ in Pyeongchang really matter?, 5 February). It is a debate we continually have among ourselves at UK Sport. We were therefore pleased last week to be able to announce support for more sports and disciplines including badminton, BMX freestyle, archery and karate. With karate, as Sean suggests, we are making our money go further by sharing facilities with taekwondo. It is also a discussion we will be engaging the public in through a consultation on our future investment principles later this year.
But he should not dismiss the inspirational impact that our athletes already have, through 27,000 volunteering appearances since 2012, reaching around 1.5 million young people across the UK. We also know that 35% of the public said they felt inspired to do more activity as a result of the Rio Games. And while some sports are sometimes less accessible than others, we do provide pathways into them for any talented athlete, and we know that all sports can inspire activity through events such as last year’s #TeamParkrun.
In looking at different funding models we should also be careful not to discard all that we have built up in the past 20 years of national lottery funding. There are no easy choices and no easy answers to what constitutes a “socially important” sport. One of the benefits of valuing all sports equally is that we have clear criteria that do not discriminate between Olympic and Paralympic, or summer and winter sports. The strength of that is seen in our inspirational Paralympic success. Other approaches will inevitably involve more subjective choices and still create winners and losers. But it is a debate we look forward to having.
Liz Nicholl
Chief executive officer, UK Sport
• Thank you for your piece about the Munich disaster, in particular references to Donny Davies, Neville Cardus and John Arlott (Sport, 6 February). I attended a grammar school in Derby in the 1950s where the English master urged us all to read the Manchester Guardian notably Davies, Cardus and Arlott. Yes, Cardus described Donny Davies as “something of a poet” – but then weren’t they all?
Dennis Ruston
Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire
• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com
• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters
