British Basketball Funding at Risk After Unrealistic Targets Announced

By Sam Neter on June 29, 2013

British Basketball’s funding could well be cut by the end of this year after UK Sport has announced 2013 performance targets of qualification for both the men and women’s World Championships.

British Basketball was awarded a 1-year funding repreive in February, after originally losing all their funding post-2012; the following three years of investment through toward the 2016 Olympics in Rio was reliant on fulfilment of strict performance criteria – targets they were made aware of earlier in the year, but only made public on Friday.

The announcement means the women have essentially already failed, despite achieving their best ever finish at Eurobasket Women, they remained two places out of the top seven they would have needed to gain World Championship qualification (top six qualify, but Turkey are on place for a top six finish and already have automatic qualification as the hosts).

Meanwhile, the men will require a top six finish at Eurobasket 2013 in Slovenia, a task that is unlikely based on previous performances and made all the more difficult with a number of the core of the team, including Luol Deng, not expected to be in attendance.

“The targets revealed today show business as usual in the high performance system with all funded sports striving for success on the international stage,” Liz Nicholl, CEO of UK Sport, said.

“We have, of course, been through some recalibration post-London, but I have not detected any sense of complacency or loss of momentum within the sports.

“We invest more than just money in our sports and in order to realise our aim of winning more medals in Rio, while building a stronger more sustainable system, we must continue to assess our system and innovate to remain cutting edge.”

“British athletes achieved great success at London 2012 and we want to keep that momentum going in the four years to Rio,” added Hugh Robertson, Minister for Sport. “We are setting ambitious targets with our sports as we want to ensure that our athletes are the best prepared in the world.”

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