UK Sport Deny British Basketball Tokyo Cycle Funding Bid

The British Basketball Federation has once again been denied funding by UK Sport in the Tokyo 2020 cycle, following the high performance sport agency’s investment figures announced today.

Following on from a UK Sport Investment review last year, ‘Category 5’ was created for sports still in development who needed longer term funding for a chance of medal success. British Basketball submitted an application under this category but it has proved to make little difference to their funding situation from UK Sport which has been cut to zero since 2014.

British Basketball has now teamed up with British Handball and British Volleyball to lobby UK Sport to allocate a maximum of 10% of their budget for team sports across winter and summer Olympics and Paralympics, in acknowledgement that team sports face different challenges to other Olympic sport programmes.

In a damning statement released by British Basketball in response to rejection of their funding application, the national federation said:

“Following last year’s review, a special category (Category 5) was created by UK Sport with the objective of enabling sports “unable to target a medal at the next Games” to build “performance pathways for future success”. However, it now appears that no funding has been allocated to this area and many British sports bodies inside the bidding process will feel that identifying the category and insisting those sports bodies spend time, resources and money going through the bidding process, was a complete waste of time.

“It appears that UK Sport has no interest in team sports and in particular refuses to take responsibility for the need to fund their performance development, which was identified in its own review.

“With UK Sport’s investment budget approaching £350 million, it borders on intransigence to pass responsibility to Government and other funding bodies who are not set up to fund the development of high performance sport.”

Liz Nicholl, CEO of UK Sport, said: “We would like to invest in every sport but the reality is that we have to prioritise within agreed resources to protect and enhance the medal potential within the system; if we underinvest across the board then the British teams will ultimately underperform at the Games and medal success will be put at risk.

“We know what it takes to win and what it costs to win and believe these investments will deliver medal winning success to inspire the nation once again in Tokyo.

“We have not taken these decisions lightly and we know that this impacts on the hopes and dreams of athletes, coaches and support teams that miss out. We are committed to managing this with appropriate care and will be working with those affected by these decisions to help them in their transition.”

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