EXCLUSIVE: New government agency to oversee athlete welfare
PLUS: My five most overrated sports stadia, and a couple of heartwarming stories from football and rugby, and a lovely Andrew Symonds retrospective.
The Government will announce the establishment of an independent sports integrity bureau in response to another dismal report into the culture of high-performance sport in New Zealand.
Multiple sources have told The Bounce that the details are being finalised on what would represent a quantum shift in the way sport responded to athlete welfare issues.
Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson, who holds the sport portfolio, hinted at the sea change in his Tuesday press call when he said the elite sports system must achieve wellbeing and high performance.
“There is no tradeoff. There must be both… So change is coming.”
It is understood the proposed Crown entity would also administer prescriptive integrity issues such as anti-doping and match-fixing, as well as the harder-to-define athlete welfare issues.
As part of the revamp, the existing Drug Free Sport New Zealand would be folded into the new organisation, requiring a change of legislation to the Sports Anti-Doping Act.
It would in some ways mirror what has happened in Australia, with Sport Integrity Australia being set up as an executive agency of the government in 2020.
A source said the most significant aspect of the newly formed agency would be that it remained totally independent of Sport New Zealand and its wholly owned subsidiary High Performance Sport New Zealand, both of which are helmed by Raelene Castle (CEO) and Bill Moran (chair).
David Howman, former director-general of the World Anti-Doping Agency and chairman of the advisory group for last year’s Governance and Organisational Review of the Sport NZ Group, said autonomy and trust were the keys to the success of any new entity.
“The issue of independence is crucial to this, as is trust. It’s one thing to have processes in place but you’ve got to have people in key roles who are trusted by athletes,” he said.
“I hope some of our current athletes and athletes groups, particularly the outspoken ones, have been part of the consultation process because you don’t want athletes to feel disenfranchised from the outset.”
The move comes off the back of recommendations filed to the Sport New Zealand board by a Sports Integrity Working Group chaired by Don Mackinnon of City Chambers, who has authored several reviews into sporting organisations. It is understood two recommendations were tabled: the creation of a separate entity, or the extension of the powers of the Complaints and Mediation Service.
The latest report into cycling indicated athletes did not fully trust the existing service, which may have swayed the board to forward the more far-reaching and, by extension, expensive recommendation to sport’s minister Grant Robertson.
Mackinnon was contacted but said he was not in a position to comment at this point.
There is growing anger in the sports community that another report, the second one into cycling in four years, has restated problems highlighted in several preceding reports. Those reports into sports ranging from rowing, triathlon, hockey and, most glaringly, the Cottrell Report (2018) that took an overarching view of high-performance sport, determined the elite sport programmes did not put enough effort into athlete welfare.
Attempts by NSOs and HPSNZ to rectify the situation have been described as window dressing and box-ticking exercises, and there is continuing dismay at what is seen as a jobs-for-the-boys appointment processes that tend to recycle long-time “suboptimal” administrators.
The new entity will be faced with several challenges.
One of the wrinkles could potentially be whether the Sports Tribunal still ruled on issues around transparency of selection or whether an integrity bureau would effectively have judicial powers as well.
A significant welfare concern to emerge recently is athletes believing the Tribunal, although independent, is effectively a proxy of the sports administrations, particularly when it comes to selection disputes. While this is more a function of the opaque selection criteria set out between national sporting organisations and the New Zealand Olympic Committee, some athletes have declined to take cases to the Tribunal because they don’t believe they will get a fair hearing1.
It is understood there could be an announcement on the sports integrity entity as early as next month.
Last week I breathlessly announced my five favourite arenas that I had watched sport at. This week I promised the five most overrated so here they are. To re-emphasise, this is based on personal preferences and experience, it is not a commentary on design or cost effectiveness.
Sky Stadium: I know I’ll get a bit of grief for this because I could have picked worse New Zealand sporting boils, but there’s the thing: history and an Act of Parliament that protects the trustees - Auckland Cricket and Auckland Rugby - has forced Eden Park into that silly shape. Wellington had the chance, particularly with the awesome Basin Reserve just down the road, to make a legacy football stadium. They went with a circle and it doesn’t work for anything except Beervana.
Stadium Australia: I just don’t like it. I don’t like the trip out to Homebush, I don’t like the featureless precinct around the stadium, I don’t like how big and lifeless it feels. Nothing about it has ever said to me: that was a good night.
International Stadium Yokohama (Nissan Stadium): I might as well have watched the Brave Blossoms take on the Wallabies from a different postcode, so far was my seat from the action. Despite it being only half full, the queues for beer were ludicrous and they ran out frighteningly early, leaving me no “choice” but to drink pre-mixed cans of whisky and soda. Probably didn’t end well. There wasn’t a whole lot of life around the stadium either.
Twickenham: I have been there as a working journalist and it was fine, albeit a horrendous commute from central London. In 2014, I went as a spectator and it was awful: a toxic pre- and post-match atmosphere in the bar areas and while the seats were fine, there was always someone crawling over you to get to the toilets.
Stade de France: Some love this ground but I’ve never gained any affection for it. It’s in Saint-Denis, which is niggly; it’s alcohol-free, which is quite good except when the rugby’s really boring; but it’s all a bit meh to me. I’m showing off here but these are stadia I’ve been to in France that I preferred: Parc de Princes (Paris), Stade Velodrome (Marseilles) and Stade Gerland (Lyon).
Jake Daniels is 17, a professional footballer and gay. As Barney Ronay says, the first part of that is not remarkable, the second part is.
To those unfamiliar with football’s internal workings it might seen genuinely loopy that this should even be news, that a trailblazer is required, and indeed that this should turn out to be a teenager who made his debut for Blackpool two weeks ago. But make no mistake this is both a remarkable moment for men’s professional football and a sterling show of courage from a 17‑year‑old, yet to establish himself in his industry; but unwilling, as he says, “to pretend”.
On a similar topic, Lyndon Bray on living as a gay man within rugby’s macho world, by Paul Cully.
As he has grown older, he says he has also become conscious of the fact that genuine acceptance in rugby is still lacking – given only to those who fit the traditional ‘rugby bloke mould’ but not to others.
“I have a lot of rugby people who accept me very easily,” he said. “The comment I sometimes get is, ‘But you’re just a rugby guy’.
“The problem with that, of course, is that that’s not necessarily really embracing who I am. And, I think that’s the area where, certainly for my generation, that’s where we’re not at a point where our sport has been completely open and welcoming.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this look back at what made Andrew Symonds, the human, unique. Interesting, too, that it came from the Cricket Australia website.
Then there was the oft-cited encounter with an unnamed seller of lottery tickets in an Adelaide shopping precinct who responded to Symonds’ query as to the drawing date of the raffle by informing him it would be "the 31st of this month".
To which he reputedly flashed back: “Well I guess I’ll be expecting a phone call on the 32nd then”.
Lovely.
