Ed Warner: Sport England data shows activity is falling. We need to make it easier
As Sport England’s latest Active Lives survey shows that we are exercising less, Ed Warner argues that we need to make participation easier.
An elite athlete cadges a lift to skip a couple of kilometres of an ultra race. Tough Mudder turns Finsbury Park into a swamp and is barred from using the venue next year. The London Marathon race director cycles to a key love-in with fossil-fuel hating activists ahead of the event, which is then won by men and women in prototype super-shoes.
There has been no shortage of publicity, but the hard data shows running is in gradual decline as the British population shifts shape. And it’s not the only sport struggling for numbers.
Sport England has trumpeted its latest annual Active Lives survey as showing overall activity recovering to roughly the same level as before the pandemic.
Some 63 per cent of the population is said to meet the Chief Medical Officer’s guidance of at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity a week. Enjoyment in the process is not simply taken as read; Sport England provides survey evidence on mental wellbeing to back this up.
Look back beyond Covid and activity is essentially flatlining, though. It is tempting to use this as a stick to beat Sport England, which acts as the government’s distributor of funding to grassroots sport.
But its data showing lower activity levels among disadvantaged minority groups highlights the challenge of reversing the societal barriers to physical fitness.
Sport England can often appear overly prone to fads and spin, but without the funding it dispenses I suspect that the nation’s infrastructure of organised grassroots sport would crumble – with obvious consequences for health.
Running and cycling were clear beneficiaries of Covid, outdoor pursuits that could be undertaken solo or in small groups. Swimmers were stymied by pool closures. Outdoor team sports were struck down by social distance restrictions, indoor ones by locked venues as well.
Each of these trends is reversing (see chart), although swimming is still 10 per cent down on pre-pandemic numbers. Most alarming for athletics bodies is that 1m people have stopped running regularly over the past five years. And for all cycling’s hype, it’s just freewheeling.
I wrote a couple of weeks back about the bureaucracy weighing down clubs. Volunteers organising team sports suffer the double whammy of governance requirements and the fragmentation of leisure time under the weight of competing opportunities. People are less likely to make the commitment to be part of a team than they were in the pre-digital age.
It is encouraging then to see team sports in aggregate recover their pandemic losses, although they are still down in numbers over the longer term. The collective masks divergent experiences, though.
Rugby union participation is 14 per cent lower than in 2018-19; netball 10 per cent down. By contrast, the figure for cricket is a positive 12 per cent. Whether a sport is up or down doesn’t mean its volunteers’ complaints about red tape are groundless gripes, however. I hear these woes from across sports, including those expanding.
Sport England flags the enhanced mental benefits of team sports compared to more solitary physical activity. All the more reason for a high-level project to alleviate the burden on those who make up the backbone of Britain’s grassroots club networks.
Commercial obstacle race organisers are part of the future – their controversial muddy footprints notwithstanding – but just a very small part.
Quang-no!
Sport England hates being described as a quango, even though it fits the definition perfectly: a semi-autonomous, taxpayer-funded organisation with powers devolved from government.
The word has only been around since 1967 but I admit it is out of fashion today – too pejorative? I’ll drop it to the subs bench for now.
After the deluge
Last week’s column on the financial shambles at UK Athletics was by far the most read of any edition and prompted easily the most sign-ups to my newsletter in any single week. There’s been a flood of feedback, all positive.
I had to cut an important tie to be able to publish last week. If I had any prior doubts about the wisdom of doing that, your subsequent responses put them to bed.
What the reaction demonstrated is both the depth of concern of those within the sport, and a sense of frustration that past leadership was almost wilfully unwilling to build on the experiences of those steeped in athletics.
It’s not too late though for UKA to gather together a cross section of people who care about and understand track and field to help fashion a vibrant future for it.
Soft shoe shuffle
I was taken by this article about super-shoes in the Guardian on the eve of the London Marathon. In particular, the suggestion that around half of the runners in the race would be wearing them.
Regular readers may know that my own unscientific experiment with Nike Vaporfly shows that a gain of up to 4 per cent is possible. I’m currently deluding myself that I’m as good a runner now as I was 15+ years ago. But running in my super-shoes has felt an oddly unnatural experience.
This weekend I tried out a pair of ASICS Metaspeed Edge+ for the first time (this is not an ad – many other brands are available!). They felt no different to running in regular, if lightweight, trainers. And yet I was a few seconds quicker in a 5k ParkRun than in my Vaporfly in similar conditions two weeks earlier.
Now that a shoe with a carbon plate can feel like any other, but still propel you 4 per cent quicker, the future has arrived. A mate who ran London in super-shoes thinks they shouldn’t be legal. But then he’d have all golfers forced to revert to using wooden drivers. Which would be like insisting we all run in Dunlop Green Flash.
Celebrate or relegate
Rugby league clubs have voted to end automatic promotion to and from the Super League from the end of the 2024 season. Instead, a variety of factors – more heavily weighted to off-the-field than on-field performance – will be used to select clubs to form the top flight.
While this flies in the face of the British love of mobility between leagues in all sports, this may be the future for all bar football. In effect, it’s already the case in rugby union.
I’d love to understand how this change is perceived by hardcore rugby league fans. If that describes you, please do email your thoughts to me at [email protected]
Spursy Donetsk
To this year’s SportsPro Live event at The Oval. More next week. Just to relay that the CEO of Shakhtar Donetsk gave a moving account of the club’s experiences of the war in Ukraine. A standing ovation no less.
The third question from the audience (below) did raise a tension-relieving laugh, however. Serhii Palkin wisely chose not to answer…
Ed Warner is chair of GB Wheelchair Rugby and writes at sportinc.substack.com