He wears a suit rather than shorts, but Matthew Crawcour is one of the key back room figures in the astonishing transformation of the Great Britain team at the Olympics from the plucky, perpetual losers of the 1980s and 1990s to 21st century sporting superpower. Firing off the key points without hesitation and displaying the supreme confidence in which the British sporting establishment is now bathed, he knew immediately how a small, wealthy country such as the United Arab Emirates could become a contender at the Games. The contrast between the two nations in Beijing could not be greater. While Great Britain has its biggest medal haul in nearly a century, the UAE failed to repeat the success of Athens and 2004 when trap shooter Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum captured the nation's first ever gold. The disappointment of Beijing prompted a call last week from Ibrahim Abdul Malik, the secretary general of the UAE's Olympic Committee, for the country's youth to cast aside their "easy living culture" in the pursuit of sporting excellence. For Mr Crawcour, head of performance communications at Sport UK, the government organisation that is the umbrella for Olympic and Para Olympic sport, the UAE starts with one essential component in creating sporting winners: money, and plenty of it. Sport UK distributes the hundreds of millions of pounds to individual sport, partly from the National Lottery, partly from the taxpayer, without which Team GB would almost certainly have flopped once again in Beijing. Without money Team GB, he said, would still have done better than the UAE, whose eight athletes failed to get near a medal, for obvious reasons - such as population and tradition. But there would have been a few golds, at most, and the Games would have been followed by the kind of hand-wringing inquest that always follows England's failure to win the football World Cup. "Money pays for equipment, the best coaches and the support staff you need in elite sport. Money means athletes can train full time and not worry about the mortgage. To compete at this level you have to be totally committed," he said. But money was only the start, he cautioned. If a wealthy country like the UAE thought it could buy gold medal glory at the London Games in 2012 by, for example, poaching the key members of the 50-strong support team that produced the breathtaking British cycling squad, then it was mistaken. Before going on a shopping spree in search of the coaches, psychologists, physiotherapists, doctors, nutritionists, fitness experts and the rest, who comprise today's elite sport organisation, the UAE had to think hard, he said. Which sport is part of the country's tradition and culture? Shooting? Equestrianism? Sailing? Archery? Sports that are already embedded in a country's culture - martial arts in Japan, weightlifting in Bulgaria, baseball in the United States - are always ideal for development. But there are other possibilities. The UAE should find sports where the gap between also-rans and medal winners was not vast. It should target sports which were not that popular: better to invest in a sport which attracted entries from a couple of dozen countries than the giants of the Olympics, such as track and field and swimming. That often meant, he said, sports that required expensive equipment and facilities beyond the reach of developing nations. Track cycling, contested by only 36 countries (though, strictly, national Olympic associations, not countries, take part in the Games) was one example. Equestrianism, 42 nations, sailing, 62, and rowing, 60, were others. Archery, with only 49 countries, was both expensive and of little interest in many regions of the world. Another consideration, Mr Crawcour said, was that the sport should not require technical expertise. "Take cycling. You sit on a bike and pedal. For that you need athletes with what coaches call good engines. There's no magic about pedalling a bike. There's a lot of nonsense being talked about the hi-tech bikes and kit worn by our guys in China. These are just great athletes who were brilliantly prepared." The British, he said, had decided that they should develop a handball team. Since this was a simple sport that any good athlete could master, Sport UK had recruited "tall and fit guys" and shipped them off to learn the game in Denmark, where handball is popular. "We will bring them back to the UK two years before London. They might not win a medal but they will be competitive." The UAE should think, he continued, about investing in sports which offered "lots of" medals. These included canoeing, weightlifting and wrestling, he said. More than 100 countries failed to win a single medal at the Games and many others, which were once super powers, such as Russia and Germany, failed to perform as expected. Sport is unpredictable and cyclical. Expectations vary enormously. So Australia was anguished that it had won 'only' 14 golds, 14 silvers and 17 bronze medals as the Olympics neared its close. Many other countries - including Japan, Italy, France and Spain - were also disappointed. Sometimes one medal - such as Rashid Ramzi's gold for Bahrain in the men's 1500 metres ? sent a nation into ecstasy. (It did not matter that he was born in Morocco.) Population size was no guarantee of success. India had picked up just three medals by last night and Pakistan none. None of this consoled UAE sport administrators. They made it clear before the Games had even finished that they do not want a repeat of the embarrassment of Beijing in London in four years' time. The UAE, said Mr Malik, had the money to become a serious sporting power; what it had lacked was the will and the organisation to do so. But, first, he said, a radical culture change required; young Emiratis, who preferred shopping to exercise, had become 'soft'. Sport, he said, had to become part of the national life, something that was integral to every child's education, as much as learning to read and write. Investment was vital, he continued. But it was also important, he said, echoing Mr Crawcour, to understand physical, social and political realities. West Indians were world class sprinters because their muscles could explode with such power; East Africa produced superb distance runners because of altitude and necessity; Britain was good at sports that had always been featured at expensive public schools. Social divides are shrinking around the world and diets are improving (in 1966 at the World Cup in England the North Korean players were dwarfed by other teams; now North Koreans are as likely to be weightlifters and wrestlers). Even so, sports administrators in the UK agree that Mr Malik was right, at least in the medium term, to say that there was little point in the UAE focusing on sports like basketball, sprinting or wrestling because local people simply did not have physical attributes. Instead, Mr Malik said, the country should work on sports such as shooting, cycling and sailing. Others, such as Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum, the UAE's double trap gold medallist, thought that the UAE needed to rethink, fundamentally, its approach to sport. Too much money, he said, was spent on football while other sport struggled on almost nothing. There are no quick fixes. According to Mr Crawcour, and officials involved with British cycling, rowing and sailing, the UK's great successes in China, it takes from six to eight years to build a sport into a potential medal winner. Which brings everything back to the basic building block of money. Before money from the National Lottery began to pump into British sport in the late 1990s, boosted by unprecedented government grants, British sport was virtually bankrupt. Gold medals were won, despite, not because of, the way sport was organised. The amounts involved are not, by international standards, large. In total, British sport received abound £250 million (Dh 1.72 billion) in the run-up to Beijing. Cycling received only £22 million. The star riders, who have mesmerised the entire country with their power and speed, are full-time athletes but probably earn only £20,000 to £30,000 a year from the sport, unless they have contracts with road racing teams or deals with sponsors. The sailors are full-time, too, but, again, do not earn big salaries. Few British gold medallists will ever become rich through their exploits. Only a handful from minority interest sports, such as Sir Steve Redgrave, the rowing legend, become highly paid celebrities; the rest tend to disappear when their careers end. Mr Crawcour said that the UAE had to start with the young: it had to make sport available to every child. That took money - funding clubs, training and paying coaches, and building facilities. After identifying potential elite sports - such as shooting or sailing - it had to construct a system that nurtured promising competitors into stars. The organisations running each sport had to develop a win-win mentality. Each had to adapt to the demands of its own sport. Thus, British cycling had 'deconstructed' the sport - taking apart and rebuilding every element, from bike to rider, to ensure everything was operating at its maximum efficiency. But the core of its operation was the care lavished on the riders: "Nothing is left to chance," he said. Rowing, on the other hand, was about getting big, strong men and women and training them hard. The boats used by crews were identical; what separated them was the quality of training and support. Sailors also received quality support, but the sport had also recognised that preparation was vital, in a way that was not the case in cycling, where every track is similar. "The sailing people track every venue for years before an event, charting the weather and tides. They know every possibility before an event and have prepared for it," said Mr Crawcour. Karenza Morton, a spokesman for the Royal Yachting Association, which runs sailing in the UK, said: "It is simple. You identify talented sailors when they are young and you develop them. You create a system where you feed these people into an elite programme." As the sport became more successful at major events, like the Olympics, more young people wanted to participate. In turn that means the sport can ask for more money from the government. "We are moving into state schools now. Not everyone in sailing now comes from a wealthy home. We have the money now to give people a chance to take part." The cyclists' governing body, British Cycling, also provides important lessons for the UAE. "A lot of these guys would have won medals whatever bike they rode," said Richard Truman, a spokesman for the organisation. Their success, he said, was not based on fancy technology but was the culmination of many years' hard work by the sport, as it built a pyramid. At the base were 1,300 clubs, which motivated the children who could become champions. Rowing in the UK had a stronger foundation, because public schools such as Eton and Harrow had always been able to afford the best facilities and coaches. But, said Caroline Searle, a spokesman for British rowing, the sport now had the money to build facilities, such as a national training centre for elite rowers, so that it could draw on talented, ambitious youngsters who did not come from wealthy homes. Thus, the pool of talent had been enlarged. There are no certainties. British fencers won nothing in China, despite solid funding. Nor did the British archers. Tipped to win a couple of medals, the three men and three women archers sent to Beijing flopped. Peter Jones, of the sport's governing body in the UK, said that despite employing a top coach, from South Korea, and a first class support staff, the team had simply not performed. It was not, he sighed, lack of money or laziness; it was just the way of sport. "You can't ever know for sure in sport," he said. "You can have as much money as you need and work really hard. But sometimes it's not your day." sfreeman@thenational.ae
Golden advice for the UAE
After the disappointments of Beijing, the Emirates' Olympics bosses are determined to do better in 2012.
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