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Like many other delegates, I
was delayed in England by gales and only arrived on Monday lunchtime.
Then the conference was held in beautiful autumnal weather in
birch and willow woodland at the National Sports Centre in Papendal
on the edge of the Hoge Veluwe National Park.
Some 450 delegates from 95 countries
attended. Unlike academic conferences, most people (75%) were
there to discuss policy and practice; 10% each were from government
and academic life and the remainder from media and commercial
organisations. Two fifths were from the host nation and a third
from the rest of Europe, but over 60 came from both Latin America
and Asia. Fewer than ten came from the UK. There were six plenary
sessions, each with three speakers, generally interesting and
of good quality.
The broad theme was whether sport
for all and elite sport were part of a single system and an issue
of internal priorities, or whether they had drifted so far that
they were separate systems, competing for resources and political
attention. Roland Renson (Leuven) argued the latter case,
even likening them to twin towers with few or no bridges; Ruud
Vreeman (Netherlands Sports Federation/Dutch Olympic Committee,
now a single organisation) contested this with his organisation's
experience, though he had to admit that commercial support and
sponsorship for Sport for All was not yet common and often small
scale. In a later session, Bert van Lingen (Dutch Football
Association) said that his FA had determined that it would "protect
the pyramid' of SFA, though it had not committed a sum of money
from the elite for the grass roots, like the 5% urged on professional
sports by DCMS in England. As one might expect, the majority
of keynotes urged the wisdom and necessity of keeping the full
span of the activity together. Irena Szewinska (Poland) spoke
of the hero/model role of elite performer like her, and their
social responsibility to give back to the sports that had promoted
them; Johan Koss (Canada) had been demonstrating this
through the work of his Olympic Challenge organisation in the
refugee camps of the world.
Joseph Hackforth (Munich) argued simply that sport for
all has to explain its work more graphically and gain more allies
in all forms of the media; besides Koss, Bob Munro (Mathare
Youth Sports Association)and Kip Keino (Kenyan OC) both
movingly described work, respectively in the huge Mathare slum
of Nairobi, and amongst the elite Kenyan athletic squad, each
of whom was expected to give 15 hours a week of community service
to sport.
In relation to the voluntary
sector, Anita White (consultant, UK) used case studies
of female volunteers as a local club officer and a chairperson
of a national federation to illustrate the commitments required
of volunteers. John Boultbee (consultant and former Director,
Australian Institute of Sport) claimed that programmes to promote
participation sometimes could be helped by volunteers who had
succeeded in sport and sometimes needed professional workers;
he illustrated is argument with examples from swimming, cricket
and rugby. Paul de Knop strongly proposed that amateur
sport needed total quality management, to be credible with funders,
and with parents increasingly in need of reassurance about the
safety of their children and the competence of both the sports
staff and organisations looking after them. Later his colleagues
Jo van Hoecke and Cathy van der Bergh outlined
their work on quality in clubs in Belgium and Holland and Paul
Wylleman spoke of the challenges facing Higher Education
Institutes with both large numbers of recreational and elite
clients.
The crucial role of activity in combating the disastrous growth
of non-communicable ('lifestyle') diseases was outlined by Pekka
Puska (World Health Organisation) who described the new emphasis
on exercise and sport in its World Health Day and other programmes;
this was reinforced by Willem van Mechelen (Amsterdam),
who argued that the great rise in obesity and diabetes mellitus
since 1980 had more to do with lack of exercise than poor, over-
rich diet, quoting Prentice and Jebb in the British Medical Journal,
and that obesity showed a greater response to exercise than to
either pills or placebos.
Other interesting papers were
by Ase Tornheim (Norway/US) on the growth of the Special
Olympics programme, Valerie Oprisan (Rumania) on the need
for improved human resource management programmes, and Diane
le May (Quebec) on a primary school sports programme with
some of the same features as the British TOPs.
My own paper (Mike Collins)
sought to demonstrate the limitations introduced by three factors
on the earlier aspirations for Sport for All in the UK (Collins,
2002). First, the social gradients which mean that exclusion
affects certainly a third of the population (Collins, 2003);
second, the need for perhaps £400m a year to replace the
1970s pools and sports halls now wearing out from age, use and
budget building; and third, the high priority and resource allocation
to elite sport; copies available on request to M.F.Collins@lboro.ac.uk.
The organisation at Papendal
was as immaculate as one would expect; Monday evening was spent
in the visitor centre of the Netherlands Open Air Museum with
its rotating auditorium showing 200 years of Holland, and its
great collection of floodlit buildings and windmills, where we
were regaled by an incredibly enthusiastic Director and knowledgeable
amateur guides from the Friends Organisation. The following evening
dinner was held in the 30,000 seat Gelde Dome arena, home of
Vitesse FC and with its removeable turf and sliding roof.
TAFISA's SFA congresses are different
from academic conferences, but they allow a wide view of developments
around the globe. Having not attended since the 3rd conference
in Tampere in 1990, I was stuck by the pace of development and
the growth of awareness of the findings of scientific research,
and the role of IOC's Olympic solidarity fund in contributing
to this must be acknowledged. England/UK does not even have an
entry in the TAFISA 2001 almanac (TAFISA,2002).
Can I encourage UK colleagues
to come to the next one in Rome in 2004?
I am grateful to the UK Sport
International committee for a grant towards the cost of attendance.
References:
M.F. Collins (2002) Sport for
All in England as a multifaceted product of domestic and international
influences in da Costa, L. and Miragaya, A-M (eds) World wide
trends in Sport for All TAFISA/UNESCO, Aachen/Oxford: Meyer
and Meyer Sport.
M.F. Collins (January, 2003)
Sport and Social Exclusion. London: Routledge
TAFISA (2002) TAFISA World
2001: an almanac. Tokyo: Sasakawa Sports Foundation
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